A lot of people live their lives according to what they call the
“American way.” They champion First Amendment rights,
spit on communism and tyranny, and can’t get enough of that
life, liberty and warm apple pie.
But what if you were forced to leave your country? Or what if
you left and then came back to a country that had become completely
different from the land you once knew? Would you consider yourself
an American even if the values by which you once identified
yourself were completely obliterated?
Amy Hood ““ a master of arts candidate in the UCLA art
department ““ began exploring these ideas of national identity
when she was working on her thesis exhibition for the critical and
curatorial studies program two years ago. The culmination of her
two years of artistic exploration is an art show called
“Elsewhere: Negotiating Difference and Distance in Time-Based
Art,” which will open May 22 at 5 p.m. and continue through
July 27 at the Fowler Museum.
With the Middle East taking the global spotlight in recent
years, Hood found three Middle Eastern artists who have all moved
to Britain or the United States and at some point were unable to
return to their homelands.
Although she was just a student in a new art program, Hood was
gutsy enough to contact Mona Hatoum, Shirin Neshat and Michal
Rovner, whose work has been shown at prestigious museums around the
world ““ including the Whitney Museum, the Museum of Modern
Art in New York, the Tate Gallery in London and the Los Angeles
County Museum of Art, among others.
“It was totally intimidating, but all of the artists were
extremely gracious,” Hood said. “But I guess it would
have been more of a risk to put together a show with
unknowns.”
Though these artists have worked in various media, Hood chose
four video and video projection pieces. Unlike a painting or a
sculpture ““ things that only exist in a suspended moment of
time ““ video is “time-based art,” a medium that
spans across time and forces the viewer to react to it
alternatively as the piece plays out.
Hood felt this idea of temporality paralleled the show’s
themes ““ which examine how people migrate, how nations’
borders change throughout time, and how someone’s identity
fluctuates along with global shifts.
Hatoum expresses this identity crisis in her 15-minute video
“Measures of Distance.” In this, she layers photographs
of her mother in the shower with taped Arabic conversations with
her mother, along with letters her mother wrote to her in Arabic.
On top of this is a recording of the artist reading those letters
in English.
Hatoum was born in Lebanon but was unable to return after she
visited London in 1975. During her trip, civil war broke out, after
which she enrolled in art school and continued her life as an
artist in London. Her shadowy piece melds written and spoken
language with visual memory. And it combines her sense of longing
to be with her mother and her culture with her newly formed
identity of an English-speaking inhabitant of England.
Persian artist Neshat voluntarily left Iran in 1974 to study in
the United States. Revolution in 1979 left Iran wholly
unrecognizable to Neshat when she returned to find the Westernized
country she once knew replaced with a fundamentalist Islamic
society.
The piece Hood chose, “Rapture,” is actually two
simultaneous films that run opposite each other. Viewers stand in
the middle and shift their attention. On one wall, a hundred men
walk to an ancient fortress, while Muslim women staring eerily are
pictured on the other wall.
“This work is immersive. When you view it, you’re in
the work,” Hood said. “When you watch TV, you just sit
there and get lost. But with this, you’re always aware of the
process of watching, which allows you to relate physically as well
as intellectually.”
Hood also selected Rovner’s 48-minute film
“Border,” a fictional documentary shot at the
Israel-Lebanon border. Rovner was born in Israel. But since 1987,
she has been living in New York and traveling back and forth to
Israel and other Middle Eastern countries. During the Persian Gulf
War, she was unable to go home, and, like the other two artists,
has lived in a state of being culturally in-between, and has used
her art to articulate that identity crisis.
Although Hood may not be able to identify completely with these
women whom she calls “ex-nationals,” putting together
this exhibit has helped her to see her own cultural identity in a
new light.
“I think more critically about thinking of myself as
American,” she said. “What values am I going along with
in saying that? What am I rejecting? If I’m accused of being
un-American am I not being myself?”