Lina Hashim: Heaven is the Back Seat of My Cadillac!

I interviewed Lina Hashim about her projects, Unlawful Meetings, Suicide Bombers and No Hair Hijab earlier this year for the BJP. The article was published in February and then released online in July.

There were quite a few responses to the online publication. You can see a selection somewhere on Facebook on the BJP page, but for the life of me I can't find them anymore.

The quality of the responses varied. Some had me drenching the kitchen in expletive laden sarcasm, most were more nuanced.

The interesting points which were made which can be summed up into a series of categories - Hashim's work exoticises sex, is deeming, is voyeuristic, is platitudinous, is disgusting.

In the meantime you can see her work this weekend at Unseen in Amsterdam.



Exoticisation 




Odalisque with a slave, Ingres, 1842

Kohl-heavy come-hither eyes, paradise and 72 virgins, sex with the breasts of a bedouin prostitute in a tented brothel, anything in the desert, or going back a bit, the harem, anything involving turbans, hookahs, magic lamps, flying carpets, pointed shoes, scimitars and sheep's eyeballs yes, that's exoticisation.

But blurry pictures of sex in a car parked near the sea.

Not even a fancy car, not even a heaven is the back seat of my cadillac (Listen to Heaven is the back seat of my cadillac here), but a crappy car in a Danish car park.

Exotic?

Or unexotic?

And if it is unexotic, is it wrong?

Or is any depiction of sex exotic (possibly) - or just 'disgusting' as some people said.

Sex isn't the most disgusting thing. 

Showing young people having sex is a bit creepy. But it's not porn. In fact, I find it quite touching. It's sweet lust and affection.

Some things are far more creepy than showing people not having sex. Like showing controlling fathers with their daughters who don't have sex. Imagine if Hashim had done that. That would have been creepy. Have a look at David Magnusson's work. It's a great project! Welcome to CreepyVille.



It's Porn

There's loads of porn on the internet. Google it and compare. It doesn't look like Lina Hashim's work.


Monolithic idea of a religion

Hashim is addressing the idea that is there one monolithic idea of Islam, the one where everyone is virtuous, wears the right dress, eats halal food and nothing but and only does things in the name of Allah.

It's the idea of the real Islam, the real Muslim and it's as stupid, unrepresentative and unrealistic as the Real Christian or the Real Jew or the Real Hindu. As though one form of behaviour and belief can sum up these belief systems and those who believe in them.

Behind the idea of the Real Muslim is the idea of the Not-Real (They do this so they're not a Real Muslim...., they come from that sect so they're not a kReal Muslim....etc, etc), and behind that idea lies dehumanisation, violence and war. It's the kind of stupid stereotype that both muslims and non-muslims have and it's not really healthy.

Hashim is saying that you can be young, wear hijab, pray, be religious and have sex outside marriage - and still be muslim. You can be old, not wear hijab, not pray, not be religious, not have sex outside marriage - and still be muslim.

In the way that she engages with imams and the Koran, she is also presenting a looser version of Islam than some people expect (one Facebook correspondent suggested her work was fake because no true muslim father wouldn't let her out on her own - I'm not sure what faith the correspondent was but I suspect they are not talking from a position of great experience ).

To say you can be muslim and not be terribly religious is a platitude of course, but if you've never met anyone who has challenged that platitude in what they say, what they think, what they try to get other people to say, think and do, then you are luckier than me.

Hashim is saying that you can be muslim and seek pleasure from life. And it might be a good thing. It might help young people have happier lives. She's pointing out that there are people who are muslim and gay who seek out sex.  And maybe we should get used to it. It might make for a better world.


How does she know these people are muslims

If people read the article, she explains how this is the case. She says that she used to visit similar sites when she was younger, she's got friends who visited them. She asks around.  However, I'm guessing (and she does mention this in the article) that the popularity of the place (through word of mouth and observation), will also help.

She also has eyes. Most people who live in a city will be able to identify different nationalities, religions, social classes, subcultures, gangs and so on. I'm guessing Denmark is no different. The clues on the cars combined with the type of music coming out is a bit of a giveaway. If it's rockabilly playing and an American flag hanging from the rear view mirror, fair chance it's Rockabilly Betty and Bob makiing out. And that isn't who she's looking for. If it's death metal, move on. If it's the Hawaii Ukulele Band, I guess not.

Muslims have sex, duh!

Well yes, we all know that, but the whole point of the exercise is to confront the denial both of parts of her community and to create a more rounded view of what happens beneath the rhetoric of religion. It's very simple and very good. It's Family of Man.

In all the comments made only one person (who gave a positive comment) noted this. It's almost as if people are being selectively blind to this key point. Hashim  says this:

“When I was a teenager, I wasn’t allowed to have boyfriends or intimacy with anyone before getting married, and it was the same thing with my sisters and my brothers and everyone in the community,” says Hashim. “But my friends told me about places where they could go to meet their boyfriends, and they said I could go there with them, just to join them, and then I could maybe meet somebody there. It was always in parking lots, or by the sea, or the forest, or the kind of places where you take a dog for a walk. That’s actually how the project started.”

Hashim says these meetings are an open secret in Denmark and elsewhere, but denied – whether consciously or unconsciously – to uphold an unrealistic ideal of modest behaviour. “Everyone knows about it, but I don’t think the imams and the older people and parents believe it could be true,” she says. “My parents, for example, really don’t believe it. They say, ‘No, they can’t be Muslims.’ They think it’s more because of Danish society that people do these things.”

Denial is allied to secrecy and shame.

I live in the UK. In the UK, secrecy and shame are allied to prejudice and abuse. It's the idea that 'this couldn't possibly happen here, with our leaders/in our community/in our church/our school/our council home/our social services.'

But of course, any time, ANY TIME, anyone says this, you can be sure that IT is happening here, in our community, our church, our school, our social services, our BBC - or our temple, our madrassah, our synagogue, our monastery, our chapel.

Opening up channels of communication, respecting the voices of the less powerful and less 'respectable', removing shame and secrecy are a step to creating a more just society that serves all the people in the community and respects freedom of expression, belief, sexuality and much more. There have been huge revelations of abuse in churches, in schools, in the BBC in the UK.

I know people who have experienced the same forms of abuse in similar institutions in other countries, But they cannot talk about it because there is the idea that  'it would never happen in our community', because the abusers are religious leaders, or senior members of the community. So people are silent and the abused are doubly betrayed, both by their abusers and by the silence of the community around them. Just ask the victims of Jimmy Saville or the Catholic Church or the Christian Brothers or...

One of the most obnoxious men I have ever met was a father who would not let his daughters go on school trips because of the sexual dangers they would face from a corrupt British society. In 2012 he was jailed for 14 years for raping his daughter. He used secrecy, shame and religion to cover up his evil doing. Religion really had nothing to do with it, the same as the raping of boys by priests has nothing to do with religion. It's to do with corruption and power (male power on the whole). So actually, religion does have something to do with it. And denial, shame, secrecy and a refusal to confront authority go to serve that power and its abuse.

Hashim questions denial of the obvious.  And the great thing is she does it within her own community. That's something that is honest and revealing. We should all do that, shouldn't we. But we don't.

I'm guessing if Hashim was another religion or nationality (Christian, Hindu, Jewish, American, Israeli, German, English, Australian, Chinese, Japanese, Congolese....), she would be questioning the denial happening in those religions, those countries, those communities. It's an admirable thing and I wish more photographers had that strength of vision and purpose. Sadly, we don't.

Identification 

You can't see who the men and women are. If you could, it would be questionable. Would it put the subject's lives at risk as one writer suggested? In Denmark? I hope not, though it's possible there was a projection of values from a place where religious tolerance is less well-grounded. Again, Hashim's work is a positive reflection on the community of which she is part. I guess a lot of people don't like it. But it doesn't mean they have to kill her. Why would they?

But if it would put lives at risk, then it is even more important to challenge the values that would have people killed for having sex with a lover in a car. Challenging those values is a matter of life and death and the work becomes even more important. This might not be the right way, but at least it's a way.

It's not empty photography. It's not cowardly photography. It's brave and I wish there was more of it.

But you can't see the faces in full so I don't think it applies.

It's Voyeuristic.

You can't say it's not. It is difficult to argue against Unlawful Meetings being voyeuristic. It is voyeuristic. It is difficult to argue about there being consent given. And if this is where your ethical boundaries lie, then I accept that the pictures are not acceptable.

But I don't mind contentious and even voyeuristic photography. I quite like it even. Kohei Yoshiyuki, Merry Alpern, Txema Salvans, Mishka Henner, Donald Weber, Tony Fouhse, Sally Mann, Timothy Archibald. It's all good, though some of it is dubious; sometimes I get the feeling it's only ethical because the people who make it are so good at defending their work. They punch back in other words. If you don't like Hashim's work, then do be consistent and rule out all of the above and much, much more.

They wouldn't show this if it was Japanese.

One word. Two words. Kohei Yoshiyuki.

No that's wrong. Nobody said that. Let's try again...

They wouldn't show this if it was Christian

No, you have David Magnusson's Work instead.

Which is a bit different. If you're not familiar with the shock of images of Christ in art, here's an introduction to Piss Christ by Andres Serrano. .



And if you're interested in religious imagery in porn, particularly of women, there's all sorts of things you can google. Just make sure you include nuns.

But ultimately, humour is the best way to deal with these things. So if you want to know more about representations of christianity, I suggest you watch Father Ted, an |Irish comedy based on 3 priests living on Craggy Island. This deals with all the contemporary problems facing the catholic church including addiction, corruption, inbreeding, sexual misconduct and the seven deadly sins.

And if you want a muslim equivalent (but only if you accept that shia are real muslims - if you don't, oh well, off the blog please) there is the Iranian masterpiece, The Lizard, a comedy where an escaped convict steals a mullah's clothes and identity and shows up the corruption, venality and lack of charity of the established religious forces.

THE END

Another Cadillac Song just because...

The Most Important Decision of the Day: When to Have a Nap.

Up Around the Bend by Christian Lagata is a book about an Aero-Naval Base in the municipality of Rota near Cadiz. This is where Lagata grew up, living in a region overshadowed by this huge military base.

And so he photographed it, in a variety of ways The most striking pictures are the landscapes; grey images of non-places where the ground is scorched and the trees mishapen. It's a place where dead cats lie on the roadside and the barbed wire fences have ribbons of cloth hanging from them. It's a little corner of Spain that lies beyond the liminal; a sub-liminal (is that where that comes from? And what does it mean?), the fourth dimension of the liminal, a noumenal liminal where even the possibility of something going on is quite inconceivable.

It's a divided land where walls and chains mark one space off from another, where the earth is dry and the vegetation dusty. Planes fly over and there are signs of American life (a Mustang, a man called Brown, a church). There are locals too - sleepy locals who have sleepwalked into this sleepy backwater where when you have your siesta might just constitute the most important decision you make in the day.




There are also colour images - these are American in tone and they look to be screengrabs. There's another world in there and though sometimes the pictures might be from the base, sometimes you get the feeling that they are not. America travels in mysterious ways.

Up Around the Bend is a smart and austere book; quiet pictures for a quiet place. I warmed to it.

Buy Up Around the Bend here.

Anecdotal by David Fathi

Anecdotal by David Fathi is a book of stories about nuclear bombs. Since 1945, there have been over 2,000 atomic detonations around the world (you can see a great time-lapse here). Military, religious and ideological types around the world have them, leaders of some of the most dysfunctional and self-righteous countries you care to imagine. The US, the UK, France, Russia, Pakistan, Israel, North Korea and China.

So what could possibly go wrong? Apart from the 2,000 plus times some fool actually decides to let one of the devices off?

That's where Anecdotal steps in; with a series of stories of what happens in a culture of nuclear deterrence. There are bomb-viewing parties in Las Vegas, bombs in cars in Algiers, taste-testing of radiation tainted beer and repeated 'accidental' exposure of local populations and military personnel to atomic fallout.

The test on Bikini Atoll gets a namecheck as does the swimsuit that was launched four days later. And so do the islanders who agreed to be evacuated from their homes 'in the name of the greater good' - but then found that the greater good had poisoned not only their islands but those of neighbouring atolls.

The only surprising thing about the stories is that Homer Simpson doesn't appear in them. The stories of nuclear mishaps, nuclear rationalisations and nuclear philosophy make the goings-on at the Springfield Nuclear Power Station seem like a sober documentary in comparison.

So there you have it. That's Anecdotal! Oh, and there's pictures too, a mix of the fictional, the archival and the documentary; stills from films sit next to pictures of fall-out shelters for the home. There are toxic tuna and bomb craters; some of these get folded up into origami objects. Fathi degrades pictures with flare and fungus-like interventions; the paranoia of the Cold War coming alive through these roughly interlinked images.



And they are roughly interlinked. They are great pictures that have a touch of the Sultan and Mandel about them, with the foldings and the overlays adding another element. At times, this takes away from the beautiful simplicity and makes the book less obvious and literal - for me at least. Which is a shame because the pictures are literal and obvious (in a good way) And so are the stories - and the closer the pictures are to the stories, the better in this case. The stories are a hammer blow against the madness of the mythology of the nuclear deterrent. Forget Mutually Assured Destruction, Anecdotal reveals it to be Self-Assured Destruction. You play with nuclear bombs and you're in a long game - and if it hasn't gone really badly wrong already, it will do one day. That's what the books about and that's why it's called Anecdotal!


Buy the Book Here.

Gazebook in Pictures

On the way home 1: Yesterday's bus trip to Catania Airport, Sicily.

It was very sad to leave Punta Secca and Gazebook 2015 yesterday.What a place to have a festival! It was really lovely. I will do my best to be more Italian. A few more days and I would have got there.

Thank you everybody for organising, talking, showing, and being there! 

A talk (Tony Gentile talking about his brilliant book, A Sicilian War - more on this later).

An exhibition by #Dysturb. Read about what they do in Foam Magazine 41

The second most famous balcony in Italy.

One-to-ones at a Mark Power workshop.

An Alex Bochetto workshop lunchbreak.

Photographers, publishers, writers, teachers and curators.

Portfolio reviews.

A dinner.

A shower.

A palm tree.



On the way home 2: Yesterday's bus trip from Bristol Airport to Bath.

Gazebook Sicily this weekend 11th - 13th September

The blog shuts down for a week as I'm off to Sicily for this weekend's  Gazebook Festival.

I'll be looking forward to talking on the Photobook, Fiction and my German Family Album and seeing Max Pinckers (see above), Tony Gentile, Seba Bruno, Federico Clavarino, Marta Giaccone Mark Power, Dysturb, Guy Martin, Lua Ribeira and many others there.

Also looking forward to joining Alex Bochetto (of Akina - that's him below) for the Friday Photobook Workshop (details and sign up is here).

Oh go on, one last time....

 

End This Horror!

One picture that keeps on coming up in discussions connected to the Aylan Kurdi pictures is Nick Ut's 1972 picture of Kim Phuc screaming in pain after being burnt by napalm.

You read it again and again; how the Nick Ut picture helped end the Vietnam War, or contributed to the mood that ended the Vietnam War (and you can read that in the Sun front page from 1972). But perhaps we exaggerate the power of the media, and of photography.

Flicking through my History of Vietnam book, I see that in 1972 (when the picture was taken) the US only had 6,000 combat troops in the country, and that Richard Nixon was getting 60% approval ratings and that later in the year, the US mounted heavy bombing raids on North Vietnam. How does the effect of the image weigh up against that, or against the ending of the draft, or the Watergate trials or the 1974 cease fire?

I keep on looking for things that tell me of the effect that pictures have on policy but I can't find anything. I also wonder if  the TV footage which appeared on news programmes around the world (the Vietnam War was the 'Living Room War' after all) more influential than Ut's photograph in some ways? The picture has become iconic and is a great picture but was Ut's photograph  a kind of index to the newsreel.

This happens quite a lot. We remember old television through photographs and then a new memory overtakes us and the photograph takes on a life of its own and serves different narratives ( of reconciliation and forgivness in the case of Kim Phuc, and the upholding of the American conscience).

I wonder if that isn't what is happening with Aylan, but rather than being an index to the newsreel, he's the index to the social media storm. The pictures of Aylan were published at the end of a week in which a contemporary Trail of Tears from Turkey up to Germany became very visible on our TV screens. And Aylan became the symbol of this trail. A terribly sad symbol, one of childhood and innocence, that we can all sympathise with. It's not really an accident that a child became a symbol. His death is truly tragic, but so are the deaths of all those who have died and drowned, and been beaten, raped and tortured on their pathways from Syria, Eritrea, Afghanistan, Somalia and beyond.


The outpourings of emotions and statements of intent are really welcome and will result in some change or crystallise some form of policy, but we'll see. People can say thing and, full in the knowledge that we are a fickle public with short attention spans, do another.

For the past 5 years, in Britain at least, we have had cuts to education, welfare, health, and housing for asylum-seekers and refugees. People who have already reached these shores have been forcibly repatriated to face torture and abuse. All the major political parties have engaged in anti-immigrant and refugee rhetoric.

So perhaps a first step in having change in the UK is to restore those things that have been cut. But I don't think that's going to happen. I don't think that the sudden pro-refugee sentiments will last either. New pictures will come along, new stories, new outrages, the racist undercurrents will return and the Daily Mail and all the rest will click back to default mode. Aylan will become just another flicker on the social media landscape, the Kony 2012 or #bringbackourgirls for 2015.

I hope it doesn't end up that way but let's wait and see how things stand in two weeks', two months', two years' time. Time. Yes.

End This Horror!


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Weston-Super-Mare: The Pleasures of English Seaside Towns Part 3 of 3

So we come to the last English seaside town; Weston-Super-Mare. This is a town just outside the mouth of the Severn Estuary, an estuary with one of the highest tides in the world. So when the sea goes out, you are faced with a sea of mud (Weston-Super-Mud); it's not the mouth of the Severn so much as the spot just below the Severn where the drool of the river dribbles out into the sea.

But it's kind of beautiful in a run-down sort of way, and that is what attracted Banksy to build his Dismaland there. That and the fact that he used to go there as a kid to face the kinds of disappointments you experience in every English seaside town. But even more so at Weston. It's seaside with extra disappointment, where you take pleasure in the lack of consolations available to alleviate the pain of the rain, the wind and the mud.

For our final English seaside adventure (see Number 1: West Kirby and Number 2: Blackpool here) we bought our tickets for Dismaland. At £5 they were £3.50 cheaper than it cost us to see 12 Canalettos at the Holbourne Museum and almost a full £10 cheaper than seeing a major  show at Tate Modern or the like. So bargain there.

And we started queuing. The queues were massive but once you got in the fun started with the security installation/performance piece. My daughter was cordoned off from the rest of the queue and had to wait 5 minutes till she had 'calmed down' before she was let in.

Once through the door, we saw the ramshackle castle, a shabby range of stalls and a bunch of morose looking helpers. These are performers too and they're great, all dead-eyed and grim, slotting you right into that off-key theme park mode. If you've never been to a theme park before, never taken some kind of pleasure in either their thrills or absurdity, then I guess it's all a bit puzzling. But I loved them.

The best attendants for us were the ones on the fishing stall. Here the idea is you catch a duck from the oily-looking water (complete with oil-slicked pelican) and you win a prize that is beyond crap. Except the sarcastic attendants would move your rod, throw things at the duck, tell you what you're doing wrong and generally look miserable and pissed off. It was great, and recognisably connects to that role playing element of pretending to have fun and then actually having fun that you get in a regular theme park. And the hooks were bigger than the eyes they were supposed to hook into.

There were little installations and deck chairs from which you could watch short films which were sharp and funny (watch Santiago Grasso/Patricia Plaza's El Empleo here and Teddy has an Operation here). Before going, I found that one of the irritating things about Dismaland was the idea that he was making it deliberately bad so that he was covered whichever way it turned out. Good he wins, bad he wins. But it wasn't bad at all and in places it was quite brilliant.

So we watched and as we watched the sun went down, the blue sky darkened and the lights came on and Dismaland became beautiful.

So the park came beautiful, and it became alive, it clicked into that night time funfair vibe. Banksy might pretend that this is all dismal (and the dismal is referring more to how dismal England is as to the dismalness of theme parks), but it looked great lit up and it was meant to

And because it was evening and there was no rain, most everyone was cheerful. The everyone was pretty mixed; this wasn't your usual art crowd, there was little silent chin-stroking going on and there wasn't too much self-consciousness . Dismaland felt like fun and it was fun, especially if you understand what the point of it is. It was enjoyable just to be there, even if it meant standing in a queue  (not in the rain).

So we queued for the castle to see the dead princess and have our picture taken. This is the main event (if you want one) of Dismaland and it's all to do with photography and how we live it. We looked at the crashed carriage, we took pictures of it (the whole site is a massive photo opportunity) and then we had our own picture taken and queued up to buy a copy of us in front of the carriage.

The placing selling the prints was staffed by sarcasm who wouldn't necessarily sell you a print even if you could find it; the computers they had weren't really designed to make it easy to spot your tiny figures in a mass of other tiny-figure peopled pictures. "Don't bother. You want a picture, go outside and come in again," the elbowing crowds were told.

But we got our picture; of us standing in front of a crashed carriage with a dead princess hanging out who was Diana, no matter what they say. Except of course it wasn't Diana, in the same way a camel is not a horse. Very different. We are all rubber-necking voyeurs at the end of the day.

Yes, it's predictable, but the thing is Dismaland has somehow got an audience (and a diverse audience as far as art goes) for his predictability. He's successful! He's accessible! He gets a big audience! He's easy to understand! People like him! How dare he!

In that respect, Banksy is a bit like the Jamie Oliver of the street art world. He's massively influential, people understand him, he's effective, and he's direct and simple, True, Jamie Oliver is a bit annoying at times, he's everywhere, he's far too rich, and he likes having it both ways. Just like Banksy.

But Oliver's heart's in the right place (Oliver has just started a new anti-sugar campaign) , his recipes work and if you try them you're not going to spend three hours wandering round town looking for the right ingredients (sorry Yottam - I never did find those pomegranate molasses and nigella seeds. And I live in Bath!).

And that was that, except for the galleries and the political corner, both of which I enjoyed up to a point, but believe me the gallery is not the best part of Dismaland.

So that is Dismaland; a performance, a participation, a screening, an installation, a photo-opportunity, an art gallery all wrapped up in the conventions of the funfair and the English seaside holiday, Dismaland takes on the disappointments of the English seaside holiday, and makes them entertaining and fun. 

And quite brilliant. 

I wonder if it would be quite the same in the driving rain though.