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Abstract
Where are you going? and where are you coming from? are two guiding questions in the artwork From Where to Where (2010) by Annabel Daou. The questions are imbued with contextual meanings and asked in both English and Arabic. The multilingual answers are presented through two segments: an audio piece that includes people's responses to the questions asked by the artist and a large-scale drawing composed of handwriting on paper. The work documents a variegated series of cross-cultural exchanges and encounters built on layers of translatability through intermedial translation (from audio to handwriting), from one expression to another denoting various meanings to the work's title, and the very foundation of exploring movement and the possibilities of multiple identities. The work was initially shown at the Cairo Biennale in 2010 as part of a group show for the United States' representation of Arab-American artists which sparked a heated debate and raised the question regarding what happens when artworks move from one context to another and what gets translated? This paper shows that focusing on cross-cultural encounters through the medium of the artwork challenges viewers to think about what art signifies and how various encounters and interpretations impacts the work's translatability.
Acknowledgements
This paper was written with the support of a fellowship from the Mellon Foundation’s research project Decolonization, the Disciplines and the University. I am grateful to the participants from the Mellon History workshop in October 2020 who read a shorter version of this paper and provided helpful feedback. I am also grateful to Sarah Jaber and Giulia Nazzaro for reading several versions of this essay and offering constructive responses. Many thanks to Rosinka Chaudhuri, Prachi Deshpande, and Elizabeth Saleh for their helpful ideas and suggestions that enriched this paper. Finally, many thanks to Annabel Daou for her input and for the many inspiring conversations about this work. Any errors remain my own.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
Notes
1 Arab American National Museum Select Artists for the 12th International Cairo Biennale. Accessed 5 October 2020. https://museumpublicity.com/2010/12/20/arab-american-national-museum-select-artists-for-the-12th-international-cairo-biennale/.
2 For more information about this artwork and to listen to the audio recitation, see the gallery’s website. Accessed 5 March 2021. https://tanjawagner.com/page/annabel-daou-adieu-you-whom-i-love-a-thousand-times-2014/.
3 Daou left Lebanon at the age of eighteen in order to study visual arts, with a focus on art history, at Barnard College in New York City.
4 However, such a stance suggests the important role of a diasporic space (Bayeh Citation2015).
5 Translatability, however, cannot be seen as uni-directional, a flow that Lawrence Venuti ([Citation1993] Citation2010) warns against.
6 More information can be found here: https://annabeldaou.com/FORTUNE-1.
7 For more information about the artist and her work, visit the Galerie Tanja Wagner website: https://tanjawagner.com/artists/annabel-daou/.
8 Initially working as a painter, Daou eventually decided to abandon painting and begin working with language, to question and interrogate the political language being used during the time period after 9/11 and during the insurgent attack in Iraq in 2003.
9 It should be noted that the exhibition was supposed to be a solo show only for Daou. The U.S. State Department had chosen the proposal presented by the AANM, which was Daou’s project to document people’s movements within and between two cities (New York and Beirut). However, rather than focusing on one work, the AANM organizers decided to create a group show pitting artists together based on a common ‘Arab-American’ identity.
10 Arab American National Museum website (about section). Accessed 5 March 2021. https://arabamericanmuseum.org/about/.
11 In fact, marginalization in the art world is often embedded in the title of various exhibitions that have been held such as DisORIENTation (2003), a group art show presenting ‘[c]ontemporary Arab art production from the Middle East’ in Berlin (Binder and Haupt Citation2003). Other examples include the biennial festival of contemporary Arab art in the U.K. titled Shubbak (which is Arabic for ‘window’). In Shubbak the ‘window’ appears to be used as a metaphor that suggests audiences will be able to get a glimpse into ‘the Arab world.’ After the 2006 war in Lebanon, the Victoria and Albert Museum in London hosted a festival titled Arabize Me (2006), serving as another ‘window’ for looking at contemporary culture from the Arab world, and an invitation for audiences to partake in cultural festivities and activities. Other terms often used in exhibition titles reference the act of revealing, revelation, or taking something out of obscurity.
12 During the discussion, Daou highlighted the mixed identity of Townhouse Gallery as the place ‘every visitor goes when they come to Egypt. It’s as much an extension of the international art community as it is a local institution’ (Bidoun Citation2012). William Wells, a curator from Canada, founded the gallery in 1998 (Marks Citation2015). According to Laura U. Marks (Citation2015, 35) the gallery receives funding from Ford Foundation and Pro-Helvetia (Switzerland), amongst other international organizations. The gallery hosts talks, symposia, and presents current contemporary art trends to audiences who often involve foreigners. There are other forms of exclusions regarding language, as Jessica Winegar (Citation2006a,Citationb) describes in the contemporary art scene in Cairo. For instance, events that are only in English exclude a majority of Arabic-speaking artists.
13 The show Here and Elsewhere (2014), was exhibited at the New Museum in New York in 2014 and featured 45 artists from fifteen countries under the umbrella theme of ‘contemporary art from the Arab world.’ This show emphasized contemporary ‘Arab art’ as an established category that unified the participating artists as coming from the same region, although most of them did not live in the Middle East (Bailey Citation2014).
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Rania Jaber
Rania Jaber is a postdoctoral fellow at the Center for Arab and Middle Eastern Studies (CAMES) at the American University of Beirut. She works across anthropology and art history methods to research the movements of people and objects, with a focus on contemporary art from the Middle East. She is interested in the history of migration, multicultural identities, cross-cultural dialogue, the persistence of memory, and reciprocal exchanges.