Making New Visions
A close reading of the works of Indian-African-Turkish artist Amina Ahmed and Italian artist Stefania Galegati Shine from the exhibition, Visions in the Making, reflecting the changing dialogues of the East and West.
While the Covid-19 pandemic has darkened the borderlines between countries creating an oasis of self-preservation within local scenarios, it brings to the fore shared vulnerabilities and interdependence in a global sense.
Within the rubric of the East and West, and the hybridity of Indian culture, the global can’t impose completely upon the local and the sense of interdependence may challenge Western hierarchy.
If one were to examine a certain ‘sharing’ in works of two artists within the group exhibition Visions In the Making, curated by Myna Mukherjee and Davide Quadrio at the Italian Embassy Cultural Centre, we could excavate some inversions and new findings that emerge from within.
The exhibition features the works of artists Amina Ahmed, Natascia Fenoglio, Stefania Galegati Shines, Marta Roberti, Shilo Suleiman, and Gopa Trivedi. A close reading of Indian/East African/Kutchi-Turkish artist Amina Ahmed and Italian artist Stefania Galegati Shine is an interesting place to start a conversation about the conceptual nature of their works. These works address mainstream concepts of faith, land, body, country, or nation through the paradigms of geometry and architecture. In a world grappling with a pandemic, their feminist perspective alters patriarchal identities.
“A thousand fibers connect us women in the arts. While conceptualizing Visions both Davide and me wanted to create a space that embraced these connections even if it required a meticulous unpacking or delicate navigation of complexities, ideas, communities, geo-politics, or social norms,” says the New York and New Delhi based curator Myna Mukherjee.
“We envisioned Visions almost like the histories of the future, a telescoping of the aesthetics, politics, pedagogic lineages where women artists navigate pasts and journey futures that construct hidden histories and offer compelling discoveries for viewers both within and outside the geographic limits of South Asia,” says Mukherjee who worked hands-on despite a traumatic accident and the challenges of organizing a politically aware exhibition during communal tensions in Delhi.
“Almost as a keyhole perspective into art historical references, the extraordinary dense heritages of both formal court techniques and indigenous folk practices that simmer and churn in ubiquitous tension with contemporary concerns, global stimuli and the geopolitics of this sub-continent,” says Mukherjee.
Stefania Galegati Shine:
Land and Country
The work I’m showing at Vision in the Making comes from the name of a small island off the coast of Palermo, Sicily, named Isola Delle Femmine (Female Island). With my practice, through paintings, videos, and installations, I take around the world the collective idea of ‘buying the island.’ We are looking for about 350,000 women to buy the island with a contribution of only 10 euros each. Only women can participate and buy it. We’ll transform it into a foundation, managed by women with rights and duties assigned.
The obvious link between the virus and pollution leads us to switch attitudes toward the exploitation of territory and letting it breathe. One of the first questions we are usually asked when we talk about the purchase of the island is: “What are you going to do with it?” as if it’s normal to exploit it for profit. It is always a great satisfaction to answer: “Nothing”. We intend to leave the island as it is with no transformations or constructions.
Body/Feminine Power
Buying an island is utopic: an island is a dream space where you can rethink everything differently. It is Heterotopia. We have the opportunity to study in deep new ways to manage common goods and to practice a collective experiment. This island is a toponym, its name becomes the artwork.
The name was a mistaken translation from Arab to Sicilian to Italian. In some countries, women cannot be landowners. To buy a Female Island is an action of women’s empowerment and emancipation while addressing issues of domestic violence. In traditional families, women are often not safe. The idea is to create an international network where women stay connected. As I’ve heard somewhere, we are human beings, not human doings.
Myna Mukherjee:
“Both Amina and Stefania’s work is highly conceptual. Stefania’s work is directly a heterotypic re-imagining of ‘land’ and by extension reversing an often co-opted vision of women’s roles as stakeholders in borders or their appropriation. As a Muslim diasporic woman, Amina’s work contrastingly poses the metaphorical question – does country and faith determine the homeland? What role do borders play in the agency of representation? What constitutes roots or community – nation or home? (Both artist’s works address differently how gender and/or sexuality affect normative understandings of land and body. How history has prioritized men’s authority and rights in nation-building, imperialism, and colonialism.)
And even though much of the exhibition achieves that, what unfolded during the process were these surprising intersections and parallels that connected the works in a ubiquitous geometry.”
Faith and Geometry
I am the sole proprietor of my work in that the work is a culmination of many interactions with my surroundings. To understand Islamic art, it is necessary to understand the archetypal order of nature which informs its perspectives and grants insight into that which is visible and that which is invisible. By visible and invisible, I mean geometry in nature and the ‘breath’ that permeates through all. The circle is a line, an extension of the body as limbs. Geometry primordial connection thread or breath that permeates all living beings. Geometry is earth-measure is infinite is Body…is a mother.
Land and Body:
The land is entwined with the country of birth, the body, homeland, the community, mother Umma, community nation, the kohl drawn beneath the eye, line, land. The first, second, tenth time a hand draws a map on her body, leaving its trace, carving its mark.
Country: A space with a line drawn, the thing with borders made by a man. A country without borders, is land, is mother…mother is Matha is measure is geometry. Today, we are reminded once again that this connective Thread or Breath permeates all living beings.
Text By Georgina Maddox
Images Courtesy: Engendered: Art and Human Rights Organization, and ArtHub
Find out more about the Artists and Gallery:
https://www.theshowroom.org/relationships/amina-ahmed
https://www.studios-efanyc.org/amina-ahmed
https://www.instagram.com/stefaniagalegatishines/?hl=en
https://srisa.gallery/project/humans-by-stefania-galegati-shines/
https://www.instagram.com/soulnomadforlife/
https://www.instagram.com/davide_quadrio/?hl=en
http://www.natasciafenoglio.com/
https://www.instagram.com/martinagamboni/?hl=en
https://www.instagram.com/marti.nin/
