Divus Unfolding the Middle East Kristen Alvanson’s Nonad

The Wayback Machine - https://web.archive.org/web/20160810163142/http://divus.cc/praha/en/article/unfolding-the-middle-east-kristen-alvanson-s-nonad Go to e-shop Search 0 Items | 0 EUR Show basket LONDON PRAHA | BERLIN UMELEC MAGAZINE PERLA F.N.A.F. ABOUT DIVUS Umělec magazine 2008/2 >> Unfolding the Middle East: Kristen Alvanson’s Nonad List of all editions. Unfolding the Middle East: Kristen Alvanson’s Nonad No Esperanto, but: SERVICES ARTISTS TELEDIVISION CONTACT Calendar Show list /-\ : Ruins of Intolerance #006 03.09.2016 - 04.04.2016 Second F.N.A.F. = Festival of Naked Forms - !extreme bareness! 09.09.2016 | 11:00 - 11.09.2016 grim cabaret Open Umělec magazine Year 2008, 2 6,50 EUR 7 USD Send the printed edition: 2/2008 Order subscription Unfolding the Middle East: Kristen Alvanson’s Nonad Umělec magazine 2008/2 01.02.2008 Robin Mackay | review | en cs de es DIVUS LIVE (blog) Azad Gallery, Tehran, May 2008 Show list 27.07.2014 19:39 In his 1998 book on Leibniz, philosopher Gilles Deleuze proposed the figure of ‘The Fold’ as a way in which a philosophy of immanence might measure the multiplicity of the universe. If Being speaks in one voice, if we invoke no transcendent plane of organisation, then how can difference be articulated? Deleuze’s vision of folds-within-folds, which he discovers to be ArtLeaks: The Assembly for Culture in Ukraine: Shaking the Foundations of Ukraine’s Ministry of Culture The Assembly for Culture in the reigning principle of the baroque, extends to labyrinthine structures Ukraine is essentially an ongoing enfolding infinite complexity (or implexity) without yielding to any form of meeting of citizens who are transcendence. Kristen Alvanson, an American artist working in Iran, concerned with how cultural suggests that we read the Middle East, in all its obscurity, inscrutability and hybridity, in terms of such a topological model, as a fabric folded and processes in Ukraine are structured and intent on transforming these structures refolded into a baffling surface where disparate elements abut and pressing the Ministry of unexpectedly and overlap each other in paradoxical fashion. Inversely, her Culture to shift the vector of recent work demonstrates how the multiple cultural codes at work in the influence on culture from region can be manifested through the folds of its fabrics. Alvanson must have been prepared, as her show Nonad opened in Tehran’s Azad Gallery, for it to be misread as a further move in an already hackneyed political ‘debate’. For nothing brings out the neurotic nature of the West’s relationship with the Middle East in the twenty-first century (beginning, let us say, on September 11, 2001) better than those garments that notorious legislation in France attempted to outlaw under the description ‘conspicuously religious’. With the debate on the hijab and the chador, the reassertion of secularism as non-negotiable principle of enlightenment clashes with the liberal commitment to tolerance; and the confused credo of multiculturalism vies with the neo-feminist exigency of government ideology to the people who are the recipients and creators of cultural products and processes.

‘liberating’ Middle-Eastern women into the alternative cruelties of consumerist subjection. Writing in Le Monde on the controversy over the banning of ‘the veil’ in schools, French philosopher Alain Badiou suggested the French protect their schoolchildren instead against those far more pernicious semiotic triggers of social antagonism, ostentatiously-displayed global consumer brands. And yet, comfortably addicted to those ciphers of abstracted desire, the West continues to find something chilling and disturbing in the sight of women uniformed in mute, black coverings whose significance and relation to their wearers’ individual and collective desire is obscure. The conflicted allegiances of feminism—do the dark folds create a protected, autonomous space, its blank surface baffling the male gaze; or are they walking prison cells, sinister instruments of ‘islamofascism’?— attest to the essential point: The West is only able to confront Islamic dress as a sign of absence, or an absence of signs. It is this tendency Star Wars, I. 01.01.2000 | Open which Alvanson’s project challenges, by engaging instead with overlooked features of their material and manufacture. Discovering that this supposedly traditional garb envelops more than its state-approved image would like to admit, Alvanson has refabricated it, making these disavowed complications explicit in a work which unfolds between the materiality of the clothing and the cultural formations that seek to capture and overcode it. Recommended book Some visitors to Nonad did inevitably misinterpret it as a feminist or post- Open colonialist gesture because of Alvanson’s employment of the chador (the traditional Islamic female garb—usually black—which covers the whole head and body). However, the work was concerned above all with encouraging a more subtle and attentive relation to these garments. It is Alvanson’s attunement to the language and the construction of textiles (in the nineties, she ran HOUSE, a New York fashion label popular with night clubbers), that enables her to avoid the obvious pitfalls facing an artist who attempts to interrogate an alien culture. The false naivety that promotes artists’ ‘personal response’ to experiences, often no more than an alibi for reproducing exoticism; and the equal danger of an overcautious respect for ‘otherness’. By adopting a hands-on relation with the fabric and patterns of the chador, rather than approaching it through already-coded political discourses or as part of a personal odyssey, Alvanson makes possible a fresh look at the socio-political relations in play in the Middle East. Rejecting the artists ‘responsibility’ to relevantly address hot topics, she chooses instead to experiment with the matter which underlies them. Described by the artist as part of an investigation into the ‘threefold’ relation of women, the Middle-East, and fabric, the main component of Nonad consists of a number of chadors which, suspended from the ceiling, form a kind of soft, diaphanous architecture through which visitors wander. Liberated from their inhabitants, draped from above, hanging like sleeping bats, the garments open up, exposing that inhabited inner space which the West invests with such anxiety. Indeed, exploring the installation, or Mike Diana - Plate #7048682-A Latest Articles DIVUS Show list DIVUS PERLA: Second F.N.A.F. = Festival of Naked Forms !extreme bareness! DIVUS PERLA: /-\ : Ruins of Intolerance #006 DIVUS PERLA: LANDSCAPE AT THE END OF TIME | The Image and the Sense of One’s Environment | exhibition seated within its confines (the Azad gallery is also a meeting-place where artists and friends meet to talk and debate, during Alvanson’s show doing so inside a ramified textile cocoon), it is no longer clear whether one is Categories of interest Show list ‘inside’ or ‘outside’ any one of the chadors. The viewer becomes a participant, embraced by materials which have ceased to be ‘conspicuously religious’, and instead unfold to reveal hidden possibilities. The most important of these hidden dimensions concerns not the relation between woman and Islam, but that between nomads and the state: a relation which Alvanson highlights through a re-engineering of the commentary art projects theme news japan performance editorial q & a artist exhibition media review public space reviews interview theory new faces new face in transition traditional chador. Banned by Reza Shah in 1936, but reinstated at the theory info war time of the revolution, the standard-issue chador favoured by the current the Western Concept art project q&a Iranian regime, with its affection for Khomeini doctrine, is made in regulation black material. By contrast, the clothing of the nomad people of the region is characterised by highly-coloured, patterned, sequined or diaphanous fabrics. In Iranian towns, the bazaar remains, true to Persian tradition, something of an interzone between these cultures, a station or intersection where women from both cultures browse at their leisure, surveying the fabrics on offer for hours at a time. Particularly in Shiraz, profile The End of focus essay comics u-sobě

where Alvanson lives with her Iranian husband, the bazaar is a place where the nomadic and the sedentary converge momentarily, only to go their own ways once again. Alvanson’s chadors, which incorporate the lively nomadic fabrics, and which adapt the regulation four-piece half-circle pattern of the Chador to incorporate elements of nomad tradition, seek to prolong this moment of co-mingling. But furthermore, they seek to make tangible the twisting, convoluted fabric of Iranian culture itself. Nomad and state are never exactly opposed; in fact they have an episodic history of informal codependency, their relation of mutual suspicion often giving way to mutual convenience. It is nomads, for instance, who stand guard around the staterun desert oil complexes. Modern Iranian culture comprises an inextricable mixture of nomad and Islamic influences. The presumption (of either the Iranian state or its Western critics) that the chador can be subtracted from such syncretism and re-presented as a sign of religious purification, is therefore nothing more than a contemporary artifice. Whilst thus laying out the implicit (in-folded) dimensions of this society, Alvanson’s creations also constitute a kind of speculative fiction, projecting forward a vision of a mongrelised culture whose dress would express rather than suppress these inherent hybridities. Rather than making an orientalist exhibition of the strangeness of the chador or the nomadic garb, therefore, Alvanson uses them to make a direct intervention into the sociopolitical fabric in which they are mutually imbricated. The more obscure elements in this intervention are the ABJAD diagrams which Alvanson showed together with the chadors. ABJAD is an apocryphal and syncretic numerical system not unlike hebrew gematria. A popular vernacular numerology, surviving on the peripheries of official religion, ABJAD has been used for centuries for spell-casting, charms, protection, fortune-telling and koranic interpretation. According to Alvanson, in MiddleEastern occultism, nine is the number of ‘unceasing collectivity’: it is the number which, in ABJAD, acts as a base element to which other numbers can be transformed, thus acting as a conduit between otherwise unrelated texts. This element of the show gives the ‘nine’ of the title (‘Nonad’ being a neologism composed ‘of nines and nomads’), and can be seen reflected in the chador installation: the half-circles of Alvanson’s re-engineered chadors are composed of nine textile panels sewn together, rather than the four which make up state chadors. Three outer panels employ the black fabric of the state chador, framing the selections of nomadic fabrics in the remaining panels: the nomadic elements, ironically, finding themselves inside the frameworks and the boundary of the state; whilst the state simultaneously embraces an internal heterogeneity. Meanwhile, in the ABJAD diagrams, the nine-panel pattern of the chadors is echoed, repeated and multiplied, in a sort of dance or other social interaction, with a number of whirling and sweeping garments seen as if from above. The drawn chadors are filled with markings which from a distance seem to be arabic writings, but close-up reveal themselves to be a mixture of arabic, numerical ciphers, and incantations in English repeated across several drawings (‘speed’, ‘inside’, ‘fire’). The drawings suggest that the collectivity of chadors is not that of a rigid, victimised mass, but harbours stranger connections and potentials, its undulating black waves carrying information in encrypted form. The drawings are freely adapted from the elaborate spell-casting diagrams of ABJAD. Alvanson takes up the calligraphic pen, as she did her dressmaker’s scissors, without any compunction with regard to ‘authenticity’. Since ABJAD is already a syncretic, mongrelised system, she allows herself a free hand in its contemporary re-creation. Returning from these mystifying and charged diagrams, one appreciates how Alvanson’s nomadic chadors themselves act as ‘diagrams’ or political maps, where state and different nomad groups meet in strange alliances. The inevitable difficulties of sewing together the various materials involved means that each chador displays idiosyncrasies and ‘flaws’, effectively emphasising the materiality of what is usually a heavily coded and standardised garment: the formerly quiescent materiality of the thing reasserts itself against the abstract (uni)form, and where the black of the

state is married with nomad influences, the seams and sutures show and tell. Yet as Alvanson argues, the same applies as soon as any chador is worn, transformed from a standard-issue garment into a living, social form: the chador cannot therefore be reduced to the empty, blank cipher of subjugation. Neither curtain nor shield, the internal logic of these textile entities, the artist demonstrates, deserves to be properly explicated. Amirali Ghasemi, one of the originators of a ‘Tehran Roaming Biennial’ designed to counteract the isolation of the Islamic Republic from the international art scene, has declared that, in order to take this touring show designed to promote Iranian artists worldwide, the organisers together with their suitcases of artworks ‘will travel like nomads’ – making Alvanson’s participation in the upcoming event highly appropriate. But how much more strange and compelling would it be if the political pariah and ‘rogue state’ she has made her home were to return to the fold of the art world, from which it absented itself after Ahmedenijad’s rise to power, by sending to the next Venice Biennale this American artist, with her passionate demonstration that the reviled chador cannot be understood in the terms of readymade political ‘debates’ that serve only to reconfirm comfortable dogma … Such a possibility is only one of the baroque twists suggested by Alvanson’s work, in its involved examination of the complex spaces of the Middle East. ABJAD diagrams from Nonad ABJAD diagrams from Nonad ABJAD diagrams from Nonad ABJAD diagrams from Nonad View of Nonad Chador Installation at Azad Gallery, Tehran (May 2008) View of Nonad Chador Installation at Azad Gallery, Tehran (May 2008) 01.02.2008 Send to e-mail Print Comments There are currently no comments. Add new comment Jméno Doplň Email @ Napište Váš názor 3 krát 5 Doplň Odeslat Recommended articles African Vampires in the Age of Globalisation "In Cameroon, rumours abound of zombie-labourers toiling on invisible plantations in an obscure night-time economy." My Career in Poetry or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Institution An American poet was invited to the White House in order to read his controversial plagiarized poetry. All tricked out and ready to do it his way, he comes to the “scandalous” realization that nothing bothers anyone anymore, and instead of banging your head against the wall it is better to build you own walls or at least little fences.

Le Dernier Cri and the black penis of Marseille We’re constantly hearing that someone would like to do some joint project, organize something together, some event, but… damn, how to put it... we really like what you’re doing but it might piss someone off back home. Sure, it’s true that every now and then someone gets kicked out of this institution or that institute for organizing something with Divus, but weren’t they actually terribly self… Magda Tóthová Borrowing heavily from fairy tales, fables and science fiction, the art of Magda Tóthová revolves around modern utopias and social models and their failures. Her works address personal and social issues, both the private and the political. The stylistic device of personification is central to the social criticism emblematic of her work and to the negotiation of concepts used to construct norms.… Where to go next? albania symposium reportáž muscles Red, Yellow And Blue In The Middle Of Nowhere Grave Diggers´ Laboratory Under The Shadow Of Heroes Adventures In Musculature Jiří Surůvka Jiří Ptáček IIn the vestibule of a large Alena Boika Read more... Read more... hotel in Tirana where, in the Jan Suk “Instead of interpreting art, we must love art.” Susan SontagTwo years ago I saw a end, we did not stay, I noticed work by a Balkan artist, a poster on a tourist board whose name I eventually with the attractive slogan forgot, a recording of his “Albania: The Last Secret.” It performance in a gallery accosted us because we had where he lifted and pulled no desire to see the sights of weights as a professional for a country that had weathered a body-building session. The the ravages of Enver Hoxha. confrontation of him toning up We were here to find out what his overly developed muscles was happening at Tirana’s in the space of the second biennale. The patron intellectually charged gallery of the first biennale… made me think… Read more... Read more... Books, video, editions and artworks that might interest you Go to e-shop Art & Editions / Autopsia Art & Editions / Autopsia Art & Editions / Comics Art & Editions / Art & Editions Autopsia poster from Autopsia poster from Mike Diana - Massacre Stu Mead: The Gun Weltuntergang Show: 20th Weltuntergang Show: i d of d (10. ) Size 100 x Limited edition k ij ( )Size 100 x Limited edition of i10. 2001, 35 x 42 cm (2 Pages, Pen The Gun, sketch - inkwash, 70 cm. Black print on durable 70 cm. Black print on durable & Ink Comic 2011, 33 x 25 cm white foil. white foil. More info... More info... More info... More info...

75 EUR 75 EUR 1 pieces 83 USD 1 pieces 83 USD 672 EUR 1 pieces 744 USD 460 EUR 1 pieces 510 USD Studio Divus and its services Studio Divus designs and develops your ideas for projects, presentations or entire PR packages using all sorts of visual means and media. We offer our clients complete solutions as well as all the individual steps along the way. In our work we bring together the most up-to-date and classic technologies, enabling us to produce a wide range of products. But we do more than just prints and digital projects, ad materials, posters, catalogues, books, the production of screen and space presentations in interiors or exteriors, digital work and image publication on the internet; we also produce digital films —including the editing, sound and 3-D effects—and we use this technology for web pages and for company presentations. We specialize in ... Citation of the day. Publisher is not liable for any mental and physical states which may arise after reading the quote. “ Enlightenment is always late. The entire editorial staff contacts CONTACTS AND VISITOR INFORMATION DIVUS PERLA Former papermill area Nádražní 101 DIVUS LONDON Arch 8, Resolution Way, Deptford 252 46 Vrané nad Vltavou London SE8 4NT, United Kingdom news@divus.org.uk, +44 (0) 7526 Gallery and Cafe open from Wednesday to Sunday between 11am to 10pm and on appointment at shop@divus.cz, +420 606 606 425 902 082 Contact us... 4x3 Send Open Wednesday to Saturday 12 – 6 pm. Divus Perla DIVUS BERLIN Gábina Náhlíková, gabina@divus.cz, +420 604 254 994 Divus Publishing Potsdamer Str. 161, 10783 Berlin, Germany berlin@divus.cz, +49 (0)151 2908 Ivan Mečl, ivan@divus.cz, +420 602 269 888 8150 Open Wednesday to Sunday Studio Divus Helena Jirákový, studio@divus.cz between 1 pm and 7 pm DIVUS WIEN Magazine Umělec Palo Fabuš, umelec@divus.cz wien@divus.cz DIVUS MEXICO CITY mexico@divus.cz Cafe Perla Lucie Palečková, shop@divus.cz, +420 606 606 425 DIVUS BARCELONA barcelona@divus.cz DIVUS MOSCOW & MINSK alena@divus.cz NEWSLETTER COPYRIGHT DIVUS 2016 ALL RIGHTS RESERVED DIVUS NEWSLETTER SUBSCRIPTION @ Subscribe to