An interview with Farah Allibhai
It all begins with an idea.
An interview with Farah Allibhai, Curatorial Assistant at Artes Mundi, on her work on the Interpretation Space at the National Museum Cardiff by Kit Edwards
What is the interpretation space?
The Interpretation Space is a collection of objects, images, and texts situated between the work of Carrie Mae Weems and Firelei Báez in the National Museum Cardiff, as well as in our Online Interpretation Space. It is an invitation to engage with, and give context to, the themes and ideas present in the work on display in Artes Mundi 9.
How did you carry out your research?
The process was carried out in collaboration with my colleague Melissa Hinkin (Curator at Artes Mundi). Initially, we started with looking at the artists, their work, and at the exhibition itself drawing out broad themes. From themes found within each artist’s work, we collated words which sprung to mind. Things like ship-ledgers, prism, cosmology – general but relevant words. Out of these, I narrowed down those that piqued my interest, healing for example. From there it spiralled. Google is a good research tool and place to start word searching. I also looked at the museum catalogue, using these terms to see what came up in their archive.
At the same time, I used my pre-existing knowledge of artistic practices like Kintsugi and the Japanese aesthetic known as Wabi Sabi (1), that takes things that are broken and mends them, not to disguise the damage but to restore them to a thing of beauty – it’s spiritual. And for me, a metaphor for healing.
In this way it was a really intuitive process. For example, I knew for some inexplicable reason that rum would be of interest. The idea of rum came into my head, and I just followed my nose. I thought there might be a connection to Firelei, and Dineo’s work. When I started to research rum, I discovered its strong link to the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade. Enslaved people on plantations in the Caribbean, discovered molasses and the process of fermenting it, which makes rum (2). A Canadian company, Seagram, then produced rum and gave it the name of Captain Morgan – who was a 17th century privateer and Lieutenant Governor of Jamaica, and a slave owner. He also happened to be from Llanrumney in Wales. The connections came about quite naturally.
What was the intention in carrying out this research and curating this space?
From the off, I thought - this (the exhibition) is really heavy. I knew that these works were coming out of histories and lived experience of deep trauma, pain, injustice, a lot of which is still unresolved. And I didn’t want to replicate those traumas. I asked myself how healing could be brought to this, how hope might be brought to this work. And how could this interpretation space be a thing of beauty as well as raising awareness? I wanted to broaden the dialogue and bring in elements of interest and hope around these stories of pain and suffering, that are rich in culture – rich in life.
Healing seems to be a big theme in the exhibition and in your research, can you tell us a bit about that?
There were so many elements already existing within the exhibition and within my own psyche where things just started to align. I know this territory really well. For example, with the rose quartz that features in the Interpretation Space, (inspired by the one sent over with Dineo’s work, (Nder brick)…in process (Harmonic Conversions), 2020) I have experience of crystal healing, so I recognised what that meant. It wasn’t just curiosity, it resonated with me and with my healing practice. Such objects are used to transmit healing energies, some people use crystals, some use prayer beads.
And that relates to Firelei’s use of Eleke beads as a motif in her work the soft afternoon air as you hold us all in a single death (To breathe full and Free: a declaration, a re-visioning, a correction), 2021. Eleke beads are used in the spiritual practices of the Yoruba-speaking tribes of Nigeria and Benin in West Africa, particularly in the worship of the Orisha’s (spirits) (3): different colour beads have different meanings. And if you trace that, there’s also a connection with voodoo and its practice in New Orleans (4).
I think that when any artist of colour is dealing with these issues, we experience them in our lives, and working with trauma is not an easy process.
These objects are different access points to information, as well as healing. But of course, there’s an element of resistance as well. The Eleke beads and their incorporation into the Christian religion, meant that people maintained their own cultural and religious practices, and that is a form of resistance, I feel.
Are there any other objects of resitance that feature in the interpretation space?
The poster for the campaign for justice for Mohamud Mohamed Hassan. He was a 24-year old father to be, who died in Cardiff after being arrested by South Wales Police in January this year (5). The campaign is a refusal for his death to go without further investigation. In Carrie May Weem’s exhibition, the work Repeating the Obvious, 2019, features a young black hooded man and we immediately recall all the stereotypes given to black men, who suffer as a result. There is a catalogue of injustices, but one of the most recent in South Wales had been Mohamud Hassan’s death, within 24 hours of being in contact with 51 police officers. So, if we go back to what Artes Mundi is in part about, bringing the international to the local, this highlights the fact that these injustices, that systemic racism, is not just an American thing.
Can you tell us about the references to environmental justice and movements towards global solidarity that feature in the interpretation space?
In Prabhakar’s work, a major theme is mining, but primarily for me his work is talking about the environment and the ways that human bodies and the land are exploited in pursuit of consumerism and wealth. So, Melissa and I felt that this was a global issue that affects us all. The fact that farmers in India are suffering right now, is connected to our acceptance of land exploitation and capitalist consumerism. Farmers are being told by the Indian government to buy pesticides and grains that they can’t afford which is indicative of current global farming methods. Ultimately, it will affect us all, whether that’s through climate change, food shortages, land infertility, pesticide toxicity contaminating water, health related issues (6).
When you see Beatriz’s work and you see the devestation of the hurricane in Gosila, 2018 – yes it’s indicative of the fragility of that part of the world, but it’s occurrence can’t be separated from our global climate crisis. There are massive impacts being seen and felt all over the world right now.
How did this research relate to your own practice?
My practice has always involved a lot of research, I have a knowledge base relating to the themes I work with that has developed over time. These methodologies of research are always happening as an artist, the difference has been in taking my research methods and presenting them in a more formal frame, more curatorial. The research needed to be thorough, structured, accessible. The process was confirmation that the more research one does, the greater ones knowledge base, the more interesting things become.
Notes on Farah Allibhai’s Sunday Service
It all begins with an idea.
During my recovery from a brain injury in 2015, I was offered 4 sessions on mindfulness, as a way to cope with the fatigue I was now living with. I went into it sceptical, unsure whether I would be able to silence the chattering monkey inside my head, and it never worked.
Farah Allibhai’s Sunday Service offered a similar experience, it seemed more approachable and another chance to find silence within myself. The event was on the same day as the World Cup final and I went into it with the news of Mary Earps penalty save in the World Cup final, England down 1-0 and chasing the game.
With the England anthem ‘Sweet Caroline’ constantly playing in my head, I went in with an open mind, giving myself the space to reflect, if I could forget the football..
I took my seat next to my silent host who was holding the space and tried to be present. I watched a cabbage butterfly fly across the community gardens, I followed birds as they flew across the (currently clear) sky, I tried to locate their calls and just sit and be. A large sunflower was bobbing in the wind and I gave it a character, its large bulbous face gave it a cheery demeanour.
With two coffees vibrating inside of me and the constant though of the football score, I struggled to stop thinking.
‘Sweet Caroline bah bah, bah! Good times never felt so good! So good! So good!’
I’ve always been an overthinker.
My eyes kept drifting towards the large Chapter lightbox with Rosa Johan Uddoh’s artwork Ye Olde Group Chat displayed on it. I’ve always liked the work but never had a chance to just sit and take it all in, many depictions of Balthazar taken from classic European paintings multiplied within the frame, offering a vessel, animal at his feet, meeting my gaze. Some dominating the frame, some smaller depictions in the corner but each with the same agency, in dialogue with each other.
I was able to pay more attention to the work than I normally would, often a fleeting glance up between the bike lock up and the front doors, I note what an impressive structure the lightbox is..
Perhaps in this moment I am able to be still, to have a moment away from everything. My mind drifts back to the mindfulness sessions I undertook in 2015, in the class they tried to take us away to a lavender garden through soft calming descriptions, it didn’t work for me and they asked ‘where do you find peaceful?’
‘In a contemporary art gallery’ I answered.
Farah’s Sunday Service allowed me to connect to an artwork I haven’t fully appreciated until that moment, thoughts of The World Cup score dissipated as Balthazar offered a vessel to me.
My bladder soon took over my thoughts as raindrops began to fall and the experience was over.
Text by Dylan Huw
It all begins with an idea.
Farah Allibhai’s work rehearses an ethic of stillness, slowness, quiet: not in retreat from the phenomenal world but as a practice of moving intentionally within it. To develop a praxis rooted in the anti-spectacular is to work in resistance of that world’s demands of constant obedience. Is to imagine and create and live in anti-materialist, anti-war, anti-fascist ways. To work against the reduction of complexity into commodifiable or reducible formats.
In the silence Farah Allibhai builds, every action has gravitas and intentionality, and every image contains within it a glimmer of potential for more ethically sustainable ways of relating to each other, to our surroundings, and perhaps above all to the self. An ethics of the anti-spectacular prompts consideration anew of what it might (could, should) mean to be a sensing person, here, now. Of how to confront a question asked by Farah, repeatedly, in conversation: How do we not become oppressors – not only of others, but of ourselves? In an atmosphere thick with exhaustion, heavy with demands of uniformity and compliance: what’s an artist to do?
What’s a person to do? What’s a body to do? What’s a soul to do?
A consistent emphasis across her peripatetic practice is on putting experiential form to the long-tail traces left by personal encounters – on the body, on the psyche, on their architectural and geographical hosts, and of spiritual, political and material kinds. Her work interrogates that which we carry most intimately, so as to illuminate the stuff of life: the exploitative structures which scaffold the present, which so often constrict the scope of life lived with meaning and integrity. These constructs that we take as inevitable, until we decide not to. Without condescending to didactic logics of naming or “educating”, her work models the possibilities of circumventing the degrading mechanisms that condition our everyday ways of being, informed by her perspective as a brown woman operating in predominantly white spaces. But it refuses to be trapped by negation, by critique for its own sake. The work is outward-looking, inquiring of its audiences, and inquiring of the artist who makes it. Farah Allibhai asks, of herself and of us, who get to encounter her work: What is it that we live for?
The question is posed in such a way as to provide tools for rehearsing – in our actions, in our interactions, in the ways we move among the world in all its sickness and also its beauty – ways of sustaining that aren’t in particular deference to patriarchy, materialism, traditional notions of “value,” or any other fetishes of white-Western power;
how an artist might tap into her own vulnerability, in such a way as to invite other people to tap into theirs;
how we might sit with silence.
Farah’s work provokes us to investigate such eternal queries differently: slowly, softly, with an open curiosity and lightness of being. Her early practice was compelled by a drive to translate her own experiences of pain and solace-seeking into material form, and to say that the subsequent work has become both more introspective and more relational is not the paradox it might initially seem. Personal and ancestral practices of ritual, prayer and meditation are frequently woven into her interventions and installations, modest gestures elevated to the status of ceremony; the most tenderly everyday becomes an encounter which demands the closest kind of attention. But even as the themes at hand are heavy – the possibilities of spirituality in an unspiritual time; personal emancipation in the face of societal claustrophobias; how deep grief and profound refuge can have near-identical roots – the tonality of the work is characterised by closeness and humility. Its vulnerability is one that wholeheartedly refutes hopelessness, which contains a capacity to combat the deep sense of alienation which conditions our environment. The “stuff of life” is just out of frame, just off-stage. She is not an artist whose work will tell you what to think or do. But she will build a silence into which we might read the ordinary anew.
Yng ngwaith Farah Allibhai, mae llonyddwch, arafwch a distawrwydd yn ffurfiau ac hefyd yn egwyddorion. Nid strategaethau o gilio rhag y byd, ond ffyrdd o osod bwriad i symud yn bwrpasol trwyddo. Mae datblygu pracsis wedi’i wreiddio yn y gwrth-spectacular yn golygu gweithio mewn gwrthwynebiad i ofynion llethol y byd hwnnw i ni gydymffurfio. Mae’n golygu dychmygu a chreu a byw mewn ffyrdd gwrth-faterol, gwrth-ryfel, gwrth-ffasgaidd. Yn golygu hefyd gweithio’n erbyn y moddau caiff cymhlethdodau o bob math eu cyfieithu, yn awtomatig bron, mewn i fformats hawdd eu gwerthu a’u prynu. Yn y tawelwch mae Farah Allibhai yn ei adeiladu, mae gan bob gweithred gravitas a bwriadoldeb, ac ym mhob delwedd mae egin botensial am ffyrdd mwy moesegol gynaliadwy o ymwneud â’n gilydd, â’n amgylchfydoedd, ac yn fwy na dim â’n hunain. Dyma ethic o’r gwrth-spectacular, sydd yn gwahodd ystyriaeth o’r hyn gallai olygu i fod yn berson sy’n teimlo a synhwyro, fan hyn, nawr. Ystyriaeth o gwestiwn a ofynnir gan Farah, sawl gwaith, wrth i ni sgwrsio: Sut mae peidio dod yn ormeswr – o rai eraill, ac o’n hunain? Mewn amgylchedd mor drwm â blinder, mor drwchus ei orchmynion am ufudd-dod ac unffurfiaeth: Beth sydd ‘na i artist wneud?
Beth sydd ‘na i berson wneud? I gorff wneud? I enaid?
Un pwyslais cyson trwy ei phractis peripatetig ydy i roi ffurf ar yr olion hir-dymor a adawyd gan brofiadau personol – ar y corff a’r meddwl, ar y pensaernïaeth a’r tirweddau sy’n eu cynnal, ac o fathau ysbrydol, gwleidyddol a materol. Mae ei gwaith yn ymholi’n ddwfn i’r pethau mwyaf agos-atom ry’n ni’n cario gyda ni bob dydd, fel ffordd o ddod â stwff bywyd i’r golau: y strwythurau rheiny sy’n sgaffaldio’r presennol, a sydd mor aml yn cyfyngu’r sgôp am allu byw gydag ystyr ac uniondeb. Y lluniadau ry’n ni’n cymryd yn ganiataol, nes ein bod ni’n penderfynu peidio. Heb fyth ostwng i ymagwedd ddidactig o “addysgu” neu bregethu, mae ei gwaith yn modelu posibiliadau o fyw fel-arall i’r mecanweithiau diraddiol sy'n cyflyru ein ffyrdd beunyddiol o gyd-fod, dan ddylanwad penodol ei safbwynt fel dynes frown sy’n gweithredu ran amlaf mewn gofodau gwyn. Ond mae’n bractis sy’n gwrthod cael ei gaethiwo gan negyddiaeth, na gan feirniadaeth un-ffordd. Mae ei gwaith yn edrych am allan, yn ymholgar o’i gynulleidfa, ac yn ymholgar o’r artist sy’n ei greu. Mae Farah Allibhai yn gofyn, i’w hunan ac i ni, sy’n cael bod yng nghwmni ei gwaith: Beth ydyn ni’n byw drosto?
Gofynnir y cwestiwn mewn ffordd sy’n cynnig rhai offerynnau i ymarfer – yn ein gweithredau, ein cyfarfyddiadau, ein ffyrdd o symud ymysg y byd yn ei holl salwch a harddwch – ffyrdd o gynnal ein hunain a’n gilydd nad sy’n cael eu siapio gan batriarchaeth, materoldeb, dealltwriaeth draddodiadol o “werth,” na ddim un ffetish arall o bwer gwyn-orllewinol;
sut mae modd i artist dapio mewn i’w bregusrwydd ei hunan, er mwyn gwahodd pobl eraill i dapio mewn i’w rhai nhw;
sut mae eistedd gyda thawelwch.
Mae gwaith Farah yn ein procio i dreiddio’n wahanol i’r fath gwestiynau oesol: yn araf, yn feddal, ag ysgafnder a chwilfrydedd agored. Gyrrwyd ei gwaith cynnar gan alwad i gyfieithu mewn i ffurf materol ei phrofiadau o boen a mynnu lloches. Nid paradocs o gwbwl yw honni bod ei gwaith ers hynny wedi dod yn fwy mewnblyg ac yn ehangach ei ragolwg ar yr un pryd. Yn gweu trwy ei ymyrriadau a’i gosodweithiau mae arferion personol a llinachol o ddefod, gweddi a myfyrio, ystumiau syml wedi’i chwyddu fyny i statws y seremoniol. Daw’r hyn ry’n ni’n ei ystyried fel y gweithredau mwyaf bob-dydd yn fomentau i dalu’r math agosaf o sylw atynt. Ond hyd yn oed pan mae’r themâu’n drwm – capasiti’r ysbrydol mewn oes anysbrydol; bodlonrwydd personol yn wyneb clawstroffobia cymdeithasol; sut y gall gwreiddiau galar dwfn a rhyddhad edrych yn debyg iawn i’w gilydd – yr hyn sy’n nodweddu tôn ei gwaith yn fwy na dim yw ymdeimlad o agosatrwydd a symlrwydd. Mae’r bregusrwydd mae Farah’n ymarfer gyda’i gwaith yn un sy’n ymwrthod ag anobaith. Mae’n fregusrwydd sy’n cynnwys ynddo rhyw gapasiti i oresgyn y dieithrwch dwfn sy’n lliwio’r presennol; mae stwff bywyd yma, ond rhywle jyst allan o’n golwg. Nid yw hi’n artist y bydd ei gwaith yn dweud wrthoch sut i feddwl nac ymddwyn. Ond fe wneith adeiladu’r math o dawelwch sy’n datgan bod darllen yr arferol o’r newydd ddim yn rôl i’r artist yn unig, ond yn anghenrhaid i bawb.