Sophia Al-Maria's Blog, page 2

Foreign Respondent

The below is an audio piece I wrote in response to Karen Mirza and Brad Butler’s film meditation on the 2008 Mumbai Terror Attacks, The Unreliable Narrator.

It was performed by my dear friend and collaborator Sangeeta Realspeak at Whitechapel Gallery in London last Thursday night.

I wanted to be able to share this with you, dear internet. In hopes you’d go see the film should you get the chance and that these words might chime even if you hadn’t.

This response��is an audio work you can experience at home if you have a Mac operating system with speech capability. All you have to do is follow my instructions. (If you are a non mac user, I am sure you know how to make your computer read aloud to you��anyway)

1. copy and paste the text in appendix a. into a sticky note.

2. go to systems preferences > dictation & speech > customise > choose the English (India) voice (in this case it’s Veena) > press OK

3. go back to sticky note with text. go to edit > speech > start speaking

Appendix A (the text):

Since you can���t turn me off,

Leave me on so I can listen.

Listen. These are the rules. No level ups. No power perks. No extra lives. No bosses. There is no deus in this mackina. There is only me.

Me. A voice coming out of a phone. Me. Making strange your understanding. This is me hailing you from a distance. I say, hey! Hey! over here. Hear what I have to tell.

We just watched a story in which the characters know they are in the story. In which the tellers know you are listening, watching – with them. This is A. definition of metta-fiction. And what is fiction if not the opposite of fact?

Some possible facts:

1. Narrative is a tool for constructing history.

2. History is built on a plot full of holes.

3. Mobiles have spoiled our stories.

Just like video killed the radio star. Mobile phones have killed movies���or at least – killed their plots.

It renders the old plots impossible, irrelevant, unbelievable. We no longer meet by chance. We don���t get lost. We don���t disappear. All we have to do is google mack guffin.

We have traded plot device for handheld device.

Yes, the mobile has become the protagonist of a new kind of story.

Still one of binaries, only without good or evil – just ones and zeros.

It is the avatar of an invisible inceptor. A simulant. A stimulant.

Al Shabab operatives receive their orders direct via text message. A bleep heard between two identical phrases can launch a missile, an SMS can detonate a bomb, SIM cards, those little notched chips of gold and plastic are the target of million-dollar drone attacks by the J.S.O.C.- Joint Special Operations Command – Is that real? Sounds just like a game. It is a game.

It���s called. Call of Duty: Black Ops.

One unnamed JSOC officer says this of Taliban targets.

���They. often ���go to meetings, take all their SIM cards out, put them in a bag, mix them up, and everybody gets a different SIM card when they leave.���

Sounds like some twisted swinger���s key party. Using mobile phones to track enemies has led to many civilian deaths by drone.�� These wing ed things are all seeing but blind.

Your eyes are vestigial. You need sensors. Embedded. Like me. All solid state technology.

Who are these unseen narrators, these systems builders, or As the Pakistani President Asif Ali Zardari called them on Larry King. stateless actors.

Who are these ones who draw the dark, who have identified the devices that control the plot?

David Coleman Headley is one. Player B in the Mumbai attacks.

Multiple Choice!

Which of these statements about him is untrue?

A. He owned a video and game rental store in New York City.

B. He was diagnosed with multiple personality disorder in 1992.

C. He enjoyed games such as first person shooter Call of Duty.

On November 26th 2008, Shazia – his wife – wrote this coded email:

���Congrats on your graduation. Graduation ceremony is really great. Watched the movie the whole day.���

���

Why do people say this?���

It felt like a movie.

I think – ���it looked more like a game���.

Now, to look on through the footage,�� they appear in the familiar format of a scrolling third�� person shooter.

A formal example of the danmaku genre – a thing called ���bullet curtain”.�� Here we had a multiplayer event with views facilitated by media coverage – all those red recording lights hovering at the edge of the event, like the glimmering eyes of bats hanging from the mouth of darkness.

Full media coverage and surveillance allowed players to view their avatars in the over-the-shoulder shot – perhaps an unplanned bonus but afterwards it was clear:

Omnipotence is the ultimate tactical cover.

The controllers operated their in sitchu incarnations via mobile devices. Phones and GPS units secreting blue light in the pockets of their boys.�� flickering like fire flower booster packs. Urging. On. In distant monotone. ���Finish.��� And then later, in tender voice command. Words of comfort. Steadying the moral gyroscopes of young men. The younglings stepping over the threshold into their final freefall. One last inshaAllah spoken in a whisper sounds the chilly dissonance of your.

role.

Reflections in an Avian Eye

Confession:

My earliest memory of abject fear is from a Beatrix Potter story.

Yes. I’m a wuss.

The name of my fear is Old Brown.

He is the owl villain of Squirrel Nutkin. The terrifying, music-hating, tail-snipping ancient one…and his eyes. In particular in this picture.

In which Old Brown’s eye is black and peering.

I misunderstood (and misremembered) this image until I looked it up just now. I always assumed it was the owl curled downwards, looking up over its left wing with its left eyes.

When they are wide it is in the opposite of surprise: that is deep focus, it is intention, it is power, it is knowing.

Many birds have this effect on me.

Gannets, Shoebills…the more dinosaur of the types. The carnivorous bad omens.

Knowing what we don’t know: the primeval and dark fact that an owl is an owl is an owl. And you’re just a you are a you.

 

 

Virtual Tour of Virgin With A Memory

My dear internets, I invite you on a picture tour of my now nearly over exhibition Virgin With A Memory.  It closes November 2. Apart from about ten very quality people, most of the humans I know don’t live in Manchester. Which means going to see the show will be either very inconvenient or prohibitively expensive or if you wait until tomorrow, impossible. So the next best thing is to see it in pictures below. X S.A.M.

human power elite shopping destination art industrial complex

This week. Should you desire to pay an exorbitant amount of ¥ to enter the human power elite shopping destination and industrial art complex called the Frieze Art Fair you can take a tour with Tsagalalal or She Who Watches, a super intelligent entity from our ravaged future world who has an urgent warning for us.

She Who Watches, Knows from Sophia Al-Maria on Vimeo.

The Iconoclast

I came across the work of Canadian artist and angry person Richard Slye because of the book Sign Crimes/Road Kill. I think more people should know about his work. Great documentary below called The Iconoclast, do view.

http://vimeo.com/80035459″>The Iconoclast: The Images of Richard Slye from http://vimeo.com/michaelconnolly”>Michael Connolly on https://vimeo.com”>Vimeo;.

The Great Unmade: Two New Books For You

Omar Kholief and I have both written new books.

He a novella called Jeddah Childhood circa 1994 and myself, an exhibition tie-in called Virgin With a Memory inspired by cheap novelisations of films (ahem) and John Boorman’s classic production diary Money Into Light.

The two tomes are being paired together at Cornerhouse Manchester for 7 Quids and 95 Pences. Also buyable on Amazon but if you can avoid, buy direct from Cornerhouse or your more discerning art book store.

I’ve included below some preview pages for your mulling.

And for context, I republish the foreword.

The Great Unmade

There is something you need to know before reading this book: i am not a reliable narrator.

The lines of my old diary entries are muddled with the thoughts of this story’s mute heroine, Suad. Even i can hardly tell the difference any more.

We were like sisters, bound back-to-back, locked in states of struggle with our respective realities. Where Suad let misandry drive her to violence in the libretto of this project (Beretta), somewhere during the three-year march towards getting the film made i also allowed anger at the system to usurp my objectives.

So i hope you take this for what it is: a small act of de-mystification, a window on to the occulted world of creative production with a view to exposing the complex panopticon of economics and politics that a person must exist in (and in spite of) to make work at a certain scale today.

Like watching a double-feature of les Blank’s Burden of Dreams and Werner herzog’s Fitzcarraldo, Virgin With A Memory: The Exhibition Tie-In is a miasma of mendacity.

i say this because i believe that telling the truth is impossible and that all cinema, especially documentary, is fiction.

From the moment you frame-up, it is one worm’s-eye view. And this is mine.

Sophia al-Maria

Odessa, Ukraine 10 July 2014

Gazing Gazeless Stare

“Whose Gaze Is It Anyway?” is on at the ICA this month during Safar: Festival of Popular Arab Cinema (19 – 25 Sep 2014). It includes work by Raed Yassin, Maha Maamoun, Mounira Al-Solh and excerpts from the archive of Abboudi Bou Jaoudeh.

It also includes the below works which are related to the Sisyphean flow of molten rock called Beretta I’ve been wading up hill through (with the help of many) since 2011.

Now this show is about the gaze… excuse me, “The Gaze”, as in the proper noun, hashtag Laura Mulvey meaning, the meaning that inverts the way you think about your ocular habits. And although I think Beretta suffers from a bad case of someone giving it the evil eye (the ultimate ‘Gaze’ mebbe?), there couldn’t be a more appropriate venue to test out some of the visual language of the unmade film than this show.

You will note, there is a fake poster for the film. This stars a Photobucket photo mod-elle. Getting her hijab to work was a bit of a challenge for the brilliant Sam Ashby as we were sending images back and forth over email with scribbles and arrows over them. Trying to explain how petal-like folds which split over the top of the head would be physically impossible IRL was…a hilarious correspondence.

Also, this Friday I’ll be at the ICA speaking with Omar Kholeif about the project. If you are in London > Star. If not, hope you enjoy these images and get a feeling of the space and the works.

Footnote:

Lulu (of Rocky Horror Picture Show fame) covered The Man Who Sold the World. Talk about Gazing a Gazeless Stare…those are some dead eyes.

X Ray Spex

Cleaning up old hard drive and found this fine portraiture of 90s 5’aleeji intelligentsia in their finest facial wear. If you recognise any of these men from their visual aids. LMK. I can positively identify only one, Ahmad Yousef.

I SWEAR TO KURT

 

Last week, Shumon Basar asked me to write an open letter to Kurt Cobain and to my younger self in the 2nd person for an edition of his ongoing Live Magazine, FORMAT at the AA this week.

It is exciting to be asked to write something about America instead of Qatar for a change!

SEE THE LARGER FORMAT WITHIN WHICH THIS TEXT FIT HERE. Tamara Barnett-Herrin sang “Been a Son” and that was very good.

Kurt,

There’s a picture of you in the window of a shop next to Liverpool Street.

They’re selling it for 500 Quid.

You’re sleeping on a tiny bench at a show somewhere. You’re passed out in the fetal position, grasping the slab of wood like it’s a piece of floatsam from a shipwreck.

There’s beer swill all around you. Who the hell took this picture? Leering over your passed-out body. Tryna steal your soul while you’re sleeping.

I realise, I don’t actually remember when you died.

But it was like you were always there, like you’d always been dead. 

You’re tired in this picture. Maybe you are feeling sick in this picture.

You’re younger in this picture than I am now.

Wow.

*

Sophia,

You were too young to have known the hype but old enough to know the legend.

And that was really important.

You went straight into mourning in the summer of ’94 and joined the cult of Kurt as a novice supplicant. You turn up to Junior High fronting as if you’d been ‘into’ Nirvana since before they were popular (which would make you about six years old). 

Huddled in the rain under the monkey tail tree, raggedy sop-bottom jeans soaked up to the knees in puddlewater, permanently runny nose, constantly growling stomach, beauty bark splinters everywhere, you write 1967-1994 in white-out all over your backpack and pepper your conversation with, “I swear to Kurt.” 

You start a riot grrl band called Blue Cancer with your best friends B and P so you can be like Bikini Kill and Bratmobile but never do anything other than collage scraps from the phone book and Xerox them in the library. No one has a garage. You all live in apartments. There’s no where to practice. Every day you save lunch money by sharing a tray of ‘food’ in the cafeteria. You’re lucky enough to be growing up in a Kathleen Hanna part of the world and yet here you are starving yourselves like teen witch tools, tattooing each other with ball point pens and burnt safety pins. They’re blonde so Manic Panic works on their hair but not yours. Together you’re saving up for Tag Sales at Value Village where you can buy a bag of dismembered doll parts or a polyester pantsuit for 50 cents. Value Village is probably the same place Kurt shopped. There’s one in Aberdeen and there’s one in Olympia and lots in Seattle. All pit stains and cracked leather, mom jeans and math teacher sweaters and yes, lots of flannel.

B hears 1/3 of Kurt’s ashes are going to be thrown into the Wishka river in Aberdeen. You hatch a plan to get a bus to the coast. But somebody’s ratted you out because mother turns up in the El Camino and drags you by the nape of your neck into the car.

Your ‘phone priveledges’ are revoked, you’re on house arrest, B and P grow up faster than you they get illegal over-aged boyfriends.  

You stay at home learning about music by taping Bauhaus and Cibo Matto and Fugazi and whatever else off KAOS 89.3, Evergreen State’s College radio station.

You experiment alone, pouring your personal pussy riot into a mosh pit of one, pogo sticking your headphones off in the closet where no one could see or hear you. And when you finally tried your repertoire in public in a crowd of boys (at a straight edge all ages show of some Christian band at the Elks club)

That’s so cool of you. 

You end up getting the wind knocked out of you by a Samoan kid called K who body slams you so hard when he jumps off a chair that you puke into your own mouth.

And so that was the end of that.

Anyway, whatever, nevermind. You were always more academically punk than for really.

*

Now, the Junior High version of you may not believe it, but one day you are finally going to make it to Aberdeen. You’ll be twenty seven. And you’ll have lived all over the world. The place will seem strange and hollow, like the world seemed without Kurt. You’ll find an ultimate fighting ring in an old carpet warehouse and the largest star wars horde in the world but you won’t find any temple to Kurt, this place just keeps shriveling up on itself as if You never happened. Aberdeen, cut off at the end of an esturary of its own making, all silt streams and muddy water to the Pacific. Both Highway 101 and the Wishkaw River bottom out here. So clogged up from logger runoff that something is seriously in the way. And this river is where you came from, a troll, a prophet, huddled slouching – underneath the bridge.

*

You were doomed the moment you arrived, too true to lie like they wanted you to.

You taught me about David Bowie and Leadbelly and The Vaselines and what they did to Francis Farmer and the dangers of born-again Christians.

Jesus definitely doesn’t want me for a sunbeam. 

You taught me lots of new vocabulary that required learning to use the dictionary.

Incest.

Fecal Matter.

Blackmail.

And underneath the bridge where there is something in the way you taught me the word “semen”.

But you also, and maybe most important of all, you taught me the comfort in being sad.

*

Way later you are in Tokyo and you find Rape Me in the karaoke catalogue of a random Tokyo spot.

The barmen are wearing bow ties and waistcoats.

“Fuck it.” You decide and cue up “Rape Me”. The employees get into it and sing with you in a call and response. “Rape me!” “Layp me!” “Rape me!” Layp me!” That’s funny for a second. Language is funny. You think to yourself, no one understands the lyrics, so this is ok. But then you think, nobody understands the lyrics, including you. You never really thought about them before. You haven’t listened to this song since you were about 14. What did you mean? In all those songs? Polly and all the girls who disappeared and died. All the teen and preteen girls disappeared, being forever leered over, in the dark, alone, being photographed. For the first time I listen to what you were saying.

What you were warning us about. We can’t help it. We’ve all sold out. Given up. Grown to love our captors. 

They’re selling your picture for 500 quids in a shop next to Liverpool Street.

 

Everything is Awesome

 

Hey guys, so this The Future of the Future event in Vancouver was last week.

I was too nervous/superstitious to post about it before.

Due to the laws of alphabetisation, I really felt the pressure was on.

You see, I’m still figuring out how to metabolise blind panic and abject terror into a casual, Ted talk sort of stage presence.

I totally bummed everyone out with my, “I’m an eco-pessimist millennial in a techno-optimist boomer world.” Sorry, Vancouver. Just saying.

If you are in YVR or will be. You MUST go to see the Douglas Coupland exhibition (which this event was celebrating). In particular his works in Lego.

Which should give you a clue as to the title of this post…

It is easily one of the best retrospectives I’ve seen of a living artist (or dead come to think of it). Plus, midnight-at-the-museum tour with he and our fellow panelists: not to be forgot.

The video of the event will be available on the Vancouver Art Gallery’s Vimeo (here) soon.

PS This sums up how I felt about hanging out with Mr. Gibson.