Article by Brigid Noone
Home
is the place you left
The space Elyas Alavi has created
with Derakht-e
bi rishe (THE UPROOTED TREE) at the CACSA Project Space is a
deeply personal one, housing artworks informed by stories and memories of the
homeland he was forced to leave. Incorporating paintings on canvas and found
newspapers, photographic imagery, a hand written letter and a frozen sculptural
element containing his grandmother’s scarf, the exhibition as a whole operates
as an expanded field of painting.
Memories of his younger years – of
‘leaving home’ as a refugee because of political upheaval in his homeland
Afghanistan and the consequences of this move – inform a majority of Alavi’s
work. It was a recent trip home to his village of origin in the Daikundi province that provided the specific focus for Derakht-e bi rishe. The opportunity to experience
‘home’ by walking on his land for the first time in so long provided Alavi a
vast library of emotional and environmental fodder, and traces of this journey
are throughout the show in both its literal and metaphoric content.
Found newspapers presented as a
collection of clippings are adorned with thickly painted portions of meat,
evoking both the open-air meat markets of Afghanistan and the values imposed by
civil unrest, which can see people treated as little more than meat. Oil paint
stains have seeped through and around these strangely tender works, serving as
a sharp reminder of the violence of this created landscape, intimately
referencing Afghanistan in all its brutality and beauty. Derakht-e bi rishe is not simply about Alavi’s physical
home in Afghanistan; it is also about home – and homelessness – as an idea, a
feeling, a principle. It is the artist’s ability to oscillate between these two
realms, between the idea and the reality, that gives the show its emotional
resonance.
In Political Emotions Martha C
Nussbaum discusses the significance of personal narrative in apprehending
abstract principles like that of ‘home’.
Real people are sometimes moved by the
love of just principles presented just as such, abstractly; but the human mind
is quirky and particularistic, more able to conceive a strong attachment if
these principles are connected to a particular set of perceptions, memories and
symbols that have deep roots in the personality and in people’s sense of their
own history.
The strength of Alavi’s work lies it
its ability to connect us to the abstract idea of home through the personal
memories and lived experiences informing this body of work. “If the sources of memory are securely
tethered to political ideas, however, such problems can be transcended, and the
symbols may acquire a motivational power that bare abstraction could not
possess”, Nussbaum writes. The embedded visual language Alavi brings to his
work confers an instinctual understanding – Nussbaum’s ‘motivational power’ –
of its emotional origin.
We cannot ignore that political
weight and stark reality of the stories Alavi connects us to. Its emotional
currency isn’t a device or a fashionable trope; it provides an entry point into
the complex emotional worlds of human attachment and longing that displaced
people negotiate daily. For many visitors to this exhibition, home may be a
concept taken for granted. For second or beyond generation Australians, home
traditionally alludes to family, local context and nationality, to structures
which are designated at birth and often disconnected to an individuals desires
or current status or placement in the world. For Alavi and those denied this
experience of home, however, it is a more complex issue. Emotional homelessness
can be felt anywhere.
To evoke this emotional homelessness
Alavi activates processes
that play on obscurity and multivalency, utilising figurative and dream
landscapes to articulate the instinctive and the intuitive whilst maintaining
the poetry of lived experience. In spite of their often challenging subject
matter, the works in Derakht-e
bi rishe are undeniably pleasing to the eye – beautiful and poetic. In his book The Bridge John
Hutchens, director of the Douglas Hyde Gallery in Dublin, writes:
Why do we long for beauty? Buddhist
and Sufis might tell us that the world of harmony is our real home and that we
are born with love for it. Until we realize that this home is inseparable from
our deepest being, we suffer from longing and yearning – which, in effect, are
a kind of homesickness.
This longing and yearning – Alavi’s
homesickness – fills the gallery, asking the audience to share in it, however
briefly. When entering an exhibition space we bring our own stories, mood and
willingness to feel and process what is displayed in front of us. Creating work
that cuts through or influences these emotional states and histories is surely
one of an artists’ greatest challenges, one that Derakht-e bi rishe takes up willingly.
There has been a developing strength
and confidence building in a group of painters that could be termed ‘contemporary
figurative painters of emotion’ — notable amongst them are Marlene Dumas, Luc
Tuymans, Elizabeth Peyton, Karin Mamma Andersson and Peter Doig. These artists
are all aware of the historical background of painting, but have developed
individual processes and styles based on the communication of emotional states,
extending the impact of their work beyond a traditional skill base. Alavi’s work embraces the depths of
the emotional painted surfaces, which through their loosely painted layers
offer insight into the tension between the internal and external worlds we all
negotiate.
Eric
Fischl, in his essay A Meditation on the Death of Painting, explains:
There are certain qualities found in
materials that can be imbued with the illusion that they embody consciousness,
and paint is one of them. Painting is the investment of feeling, thought,
vision, need, and desire into an object made by an artist who has done whatever
was necessary to initiate identification with the object and the transformation
that naturally occurs in the audience from this exchange. This is why art
became synonymous with magic.
For Alavi, this identification and
transformation of audience – this special magic – is woven into the idea
of home. Artworks that tackle the deeply personal yet political experiences of
the displaced person force us to imagine a reality of not being able to access
one’s home, something so many of us take for granted. Alavi’s work bridges the gap between emotion
and the conceptual, and shows how painting and installation draw on the past
with an active personal-political position that can be entirely contemporary
and engaging.
The economic style and paint
application that Alavi employs in his painting varies, yet there remains an
awareness of creating surfaces that ‘let the viewer in’. Smooth perfect
surfaces in painting relate to the photographic, and can often be experienced as
cool, creating a sense of distance. In contrast, Alavi creates controlled yet
loosely constructed surfaces with confidence and an element of transparency.
This style is more penetrable, the controlled looseness allowing for a sense of
‘handwriting’ and human error and giving us a tangible link into the realms of
memory and imagination. Alavi’s remembered (faded) faces and familiar
landscapes are not perfect, but this makes them all the more engaging.
Walking through Derakht-e bi rishe,
we are reminded that we enter an
exhibition space as if it is a created land; as the story of the work grows so
do the bounds of the gallery walls. In creating this installation, which
includes objects and an intentional atmosphere created in collaboration with
the paintings on offer, Alavi invites us into a world where…. home is where you are.
photographer: Emiliano Fernandez
