Katrina Maguire

Viewpoint

24/03/07 -10/08/07

Sarah Greavu, 2007

Katrina Maguire’s Viewpoint in Prehen House explores various perspectives on life in the Kingdoms of Saudi Arabia and Bahrain. It is work which can be read not just against its immediate surroundings in an Irish ‘big house’ but, moving out, in the wider local and national sociopolitical context and, further, against a Western history of orientalism and against the geopolitical backdrop of the seemingly endless war in the Middle East. In some ways, each of the works shown by the four artists in this ambitious project by Context Gallery cannot fail to be animated by their placement within the faded opulence of Prehen House, both architecturally/formally, in the grand but crumbling building, and in terms of social and political history: surrounded by traces of imperialism and privilege.

Maguire’s work is timely, given the current growth in interest in the West in Islam and Islamic cultures. While this fascination is by no means new, it has gained a new sense of urgency in light of the increase in politically motivated violence between what could broadly be termed a (culturally Christian) Western capitalist power bloc and the Eastern Islamic world.

The work is composed of four video pieces, a photographic work, a series of paintings, and a collection of published books and magazines.

It is clustered in two locations in the house: in the upstairs drawing room, known to the family as ‘the Bollywood room’, a nearby bedroom, and in the basement. The core of the work is a trio of video pieces. Each monitor shows a ‘talking head’ on a single looped track and there is a conversational quality to the testimonies of the subjects. The figure is roughly life-sized on the screen and the effect is of participating in a fairly intimate (albeit one-way) face-to-face chat with the subject. The three informants form a sort of fractured nuclear family (man, woman, child) though they are placed in different areas of the house and may not have any familial relation to one another at all, based on their testimonies.

Much of the video material in Maguire’s work would not look out of place in a documentary about the cultural challenges to a newcomer to Bahrain and Saudi Arabia. It is more nuanced than the ‘shock-horror’ tone tabloid journalism takes towards issues such as veiling or modest dressing and the particular Saudi Arabian perspectives on these issues, and yet the overall effect is of a slightly askew or distanced version of what life is like in these two states: each speaker is culturally marginalised (by choice or by chance) or in some way displaced or peripheral.

Maguire seems to have a knack for finding compelling and personable informants, and all are confident and interesting speakers.

Upstairs, the two notional ‘parents’ are shown on monitors that are at eye level when the viewer is seated in front of them.

On one screen a young mother and nursery teacher talks about her experience, as a British Muslim, of moving to Saudi Arabia and adjusting to the culture she finds there. She describes and criticises different aspects of Saudia Arabian life in a narrative disjointed by frequent edits but following a fairly coherent line of off-screen questioning. An observant and modest-dressing Muslim by British cultural standards, the nameless woman in Maguire’s work discusses degrees of covering: niqab, abaya, hijab etc.

She highlights the contradictions between the consumer paradise presented by Saudi shopping malls on the strict approach, for instance, to images of women in magazines. In western magazines in Saudi Arabia, images of models (wearing the same products available for purchase in the local shopping mall) are completely blacked out. “Everything is available,” she remarks, “but you are unable to enjoy it.”

Along the same wall in this room is a photo of the Bahrain/Saudi Arabia Causeway. Its ornate frame is in keeping with the tone of the room, but the photo itself has the feel of a 70s ‘futuristic’ cityscape; somewhere that the Jetsons or the Thunderbirds might feel at home.

The male informant is disarming in his irreverence and he is insightful and witty in his characterisation of the society in which he lives. He laments that the clothing worn there lacks belts as he is never confronted by losing a notch and noticing that he is gaining weight. He speaks of the strange symbiosis between Bahrain and Saudi Arabia, with the former acting as a safety valve to release the pressure of life under the strict codes of the latter and says that Saudi Arabia “… is not a normal place… and hasn't been for a long time.”

The child, half Saudi and half Irish, is positioned in a small room in the basement as they impulsive id. She also explains her world, which seems to be one of considerable privilege. Her observations are, naturally, less nuanced or carefully presented than those of the older subjects and they offer an oblique perspective. She calls the Qur’an “a national book for Saudi” and she recounts the story of Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves, an interesting choice in that ‘Ali Baba’ has lately become a derogatory slang term for Iraqis (particularly those engaged in ‘looting’) used by US soldiers and their allies during the occupation of Iraq.

This room also holds paintings of landscape and architectural details, place roughly at a naturalistic height. They are executed in sun bleached colors and they offer a stark contrast to the windowless and chilly room they are enclosed in.

In the room opposite is a collection of reference materials laid out on a folding table in the style of a political booksale or infoshop. Included are books on Islamic art and contemporary Arab representation as well as Arabian nights, the Qur’an and an issue of Bidoun, the influential quarterly ‘forum for international talent’ in the Middle East.

The final video piece is also placed in the basement down a hallway adjacent to the wine cellar. It shows a path lined with palm trees, reminiscent of the movie cliché of a Hollywood or Beverly Hills boulevard, but placed in an underdeveloped area: the opulent houses absent from either side, Western consumer fantasies thwarted by uneven development. The almost palpable heat in the video is juxtaposed with the dank conditions in the basement which have left the projections screen covered in mildew.

One cannot view this work without reference to the tropes of orientalism. Within the house, there are numerous examples of oriental exotica, from furniture to artefacts. The veiled ‘mother’ figure in the video work brings to mind the work of Malek Alloula on the ‘Colonial Harem’1, in which he documents and interprets early 20th century postcards produced in Algeria for the French market. They depict Algerian women, often veiled but heavily adorned and often in poses of sexual availability.

Alloula characterises these postcards as “comic strips of colonial morality” and perfect examples of the objectifying colonial gaze at the ‘Oriental’ subject. Frustrated by the veil, and fascinated by the myth of the harem and the fantasy of widespread Eastern polygyny, French photographers hired woman on the margins of Algerian society to pose, veiled and bare-breasted for instance, in a phantasmic representation of the Western dream of the orient.

One thinks also of Gillo Pontecorvo’s Battle of Algiers and the use of the veil as a political tool: as a visible repudiation of Western customs, as a method of gender disguise and a means of concealing weapons. Fadwa El Guindi writes about how, in many cultures, the veil represents liberation from colonial legacies as well as being intimately connected with notions of the self, the body and community and with the cultural construction of identity, privacy and space. One of the most powerful scenes in Pontecorvo’s film shows the group of revolutionary Algerian woman temporarily discarding the veil (and their cultural and political identity) and masquerading as Western woman in order to pass freely into areas where their bombs will do most damage to the colonial project.

In some ways, to lump such distinct peoples as Saudis, Bahrainis and Algerians together in a discussion of orientalism is to fall victim to exactly the same kind of expansive stereotyping and lack of differentiation between wildely disparate people one is trying to explore. Certainly, Saudi Arabia occupies a special position in relation to America and its allies, distinct from most other nations in the region. In another way, it is such broad strokes that are being used concretely against whole swathes of the global population in the profiling and targeting of ‘suspicious’ people by homeland securocrats.

‘Pink on the map’ imperialism has been exchanged for a new neoliberal model but the core concepts remain: global capital, unmoored to any one nation, but with its feet planted firmly in the West, sucks resources just as relentlessly and military power is brought to bear in its defense with equal brutality. The combination of fascination with, and vilification of the Oriental ‘other’ still underpins the economic and military domination of these nations.

The strength of Maguire's work is to revoke an exploration of these issues through personal testimony and juxtaposition. On one level, her work can be seen as an attempt to broker cultural exchange, to provide information. Through the placement of the work in Prehen House, though, we are reminded constantly of the critical asymmetries in power and resources found at the heart of any such cultural exchange.

1 Alloula, Malek, The Colonial Harem, 1986, University of Minnesota

2 El Guindi, Fadwa, Veil: Modesty, Privacy and Resistance, 1999, Palgrave Macmillan