My Sister Who Travels Curated by Martina Caruso — Noor Abed Jananne Al-Ani Halida Boughriet Ursula Schulz-Dornburg Corinne

My Sister Who Travels Curated by Martina Caruso — Noor Abed Jananne Al-Ani Halida Boughriet Ursula Schulz-Dornburg Corinne Silva Esther Boise Van Deman Paola Yacoub Foreword A path is a prior interpretation of the best way to traverse a landscape. Rebecca Solnit, Wanderlust: A History of Walking, 2006 In the summer of 2013 The Mosaic Rooms launched an open call for exhibition proposals from independent curators. From the submissions received, we are delighted to have selected My Sister Who Travels by Martina Caruso. Landscape art is often considered in Romantic terms. Human analogies between the concrete world and the inner world are frequently drawn, and the open space of the land can be seen as a space for imagining, for thinking freely. But these public spaces are also contested sites, layered with histories and the implicit legacies of control, power, occupation and exclusion. This exhibition offers the viewer new perspectives on this genre, through the landscapes in the work of six women artists. At a time when life’s spatial experiences are increasingly bound up within interior spaces or virtual screens, it is easy to feel removed from these wider plains, to forget the depth of horizons and the politics of place they contain. Perhaps it is time to discover new paths in order to best imagine new ways of travelling forward. For this The Mosaic Rooms would like to thank Martina Caruso and all the participating artists. Rachael Jarvis Head Curator 3 travel through space, but travel through time. They are either explicitly or implicitly connected to My Sister Who Travels a history of layers of civilisation and empire, to the ghosts of the victors and the oppressed. The choice of the Mediterranean as a confined geographical area through which to express ideas of empire and colonisation complicates the narrative of the exhibition, creating points of contact between art practices that use lens-based media within postcolonial visions. The Mediterranean To travel is not to think, but to see things in succession, with one’s life sensed in the measure of space. remains a contentious term for that which it represents and signifies. While it has been dismissed Isabelle Eberhardt, In the Shadow of Islam, 1920 as a ‘mere geographical expression’ by some scholars, others have followed in the steps of Must we be forever condemned to study territories rather than networks? Fernand Braudel’s pioneering study The Mediterranean (1923-1949 and 1949-1966), exploring its Bruno Latour, Why We Have Never Been Modern, 1992 ambiguous potential as a region rather than an empty term for a random grouping of neighbouring countries around a sea.4 The risk inherent in an all-women’s art exhibition is to (re)create a marginalised category, only In an increasingly archaic, yet still prevalent Orientalist framework regarding the able to exist in terms of its binary relationship to the dominant category of implicitly male artists. Mediterranean, the cardinal points ‘South’ and ‘East’ have implications of ‘exotic’, poor and ‘Other’, Most contemporary women artists prefer their work not to be identified according to their gender. while ‘North’ and ‘West’ have connotations of developed, rich and ‘European’. Embodying its most And yet, one of the aims of My Sister Who Travels is to explore potential connections between Romantic (Western) concept, termed by Edward Said ‘imaginative geography’, the Mediterranean sexuality and contemporary representations of landscape. Antecedents to this idea have existed is nearly metonymous for blue seas and umbrella pine trees, hot deserts and pleasant coastal towns. since the mid-1980s, with the publication of photographer and scholar Deborah Bright’s seminal In short, holiday destinations. On the other hand, as a political space, it has become an arena in essay Of Mother Nature and Marlboro Men: An Inquiry into the Cultural Meanings of Landscape which tensions have escalated, a symbol for the political and economic inequalities inherent in Photography (1980). Bright was writing thirty years ago, suggesting that it was necessary to the division between the Global North and the Global South. The invisible line which separates question the assumptions about nature and culture that landscape photography has traditionally the Mediterranean into two polar areas has been reinforced through a scalar political practice served. Since then, the number of celebrated women artists working as land artists or using theorised by political scientists and philosophers like Etienne Balibar. International policy- video and photography to represent landscape has increased, as have their methods to interrogate makers work hegemonically to keep capitalism afloat while the circulation of human bodies for or subvert the gaze. Where W.J.T. Mitchell was struggling with the question of ‘ownership’ of labour from North Africa and the Middle East to Southern Europe rises. landscape in his seminal book Landscape and Power (1996), My Sister Who Travels circumvents Taking historian David Abulafia’s concept of the Mediterranean as ‘the most vigorous place of this patrician preoccupation, diverting from the idea of landscape as pleasing vista.1 interaction between different societies on the face of this planet’ and the unsurpassed role it Pleasure connected to viewing landscape was first explored in a politics of vision in the early has played ‘in the history of human civilization’, the exhibition brings together six artists from 1990s by the feminist geographer Gillian Rose, who argued that cultural geography needs to different regions and countries who work in the Mediterranean.5 By placing a historical figure, remain aware of the accepted ‘encoding of nature as feminine’ implicit in landscape.2 The visual Esther Boise Van Deman, in their midst, the exhibition does not imagine an easy alliance or pleasure that is derived from looking at a landscape, in Rose’s view, is ‘specifically sexual’ and solidarity between their heterogeneous visions, but explores the artistic and political boundaries needs further exploring. My Sister Who Travels brings together those who have created views with which each of their practices contends. of landscapes in which an expected aesthetic is curtailed, undermined or ignored in favour of The figure of Van Deman, an archaeologist active during the early twentieth century, whose alternative systems of viewing. The exhibition explores a ‘psychology of landscape’ where the extensive body of photographs has come to define her position in the field, places the exhibition artists have contended with the Romanticism implicit in the idea and history of [a Mediterranean] within a colonial framework. During her career, the British and French empires ruled most of landscape, exploring questions that might prefer to remain unearthed.3 The idea of digging North Africa and the Middle East, although large areas of the Mediterranean were also dominated through the actual layers of earth as well as the layers of meaning that form a landscape connect by the Ottoman Empire, including Turkey, the Balkans and Libya. the works in the exhibition to a form of archaeology; the landscapes are not just the subject of 4 5 This was a period when the Grand Tour, while in decline, was still a tradition among the wealthier Hogenberg. Using a lens she made herself and attached to a Lomography camera, Yacoub went to strata of society from the United Kingdom and the United States of America, as immortalised by Southern Lebanon to experience the geography of a region that had been forbidden to civilians E.M. Forster’s novel A Room with a View (1908). While the Suffragette Movement had achieved throughout the bitter protracted Lebanese Civil War (1975-1990). The sites Yacoub visited, where voting rights for women in a number of countries by then, it was still a time when women who you could see ‘only clumps of grass, a few rocks...’ corresponded to places of massacre where major chose an ‘alternative’ lifestyle tended to be considered as admirable yet reprehensible eccentrics Israeli operations left hundreds dead in 1978, 1982 and 1996.7 Mediterranean cypresses, symbols of or outsiders. Many of these, like Countess Markievicz who led the Easter Rising in Ireland in 1916 mourning since Classical Antiquity, dot the land, nearly invisibly. or Isabelle Eberhardt, the well-known author of her adventures in Algeria in the 1900s, were from Walter Benjamin’s words on the stories that lie within buried layers of civilisation echo within privileged, powerful or aristocratic backgrounds. Elegiac Landscapes: ‘There is no document of civilization which is not at the same time a document Esther Van Deman, however, was from a hardworking family of pioneers that had settled in South of barbarism.’8 Yacoub’s images embody an amnesia, a psychological trauma that cannot be Salem, Ohio and moved to Sterling, Kansas in the 1870s. A committed scholar, she became the expressed save through the unseen and the unsaid, through that which has (been) disappeared. first woman to gain a PhD at the University of Chicago in 1898. Arriving in Rome at the age of 39 Yacoub’s work tells a story of perception and can be read as an investigation of the gaze. As in her in 1901, Van Deman had rather uniquely begun using photography as part of her archaeological lecture-performance ‘What do I do?’ the artist asks whether you see a ‘battlefield’ or an ‘elegiac research on Classical Roman ruins. Her focus on photography as a method of research was landscape’, leaving the answer up to the viewer.9 uncharacteristic in the discipline at the time, which relied predominantly on drawing. She On the surface, Corinne Silva’s Imported Landscapes (2010) seem remote from Yacoub’s verdant developed an ‘unconventional and “not-feminine” topic’, focusing on Ancient Roman building valley: her terrains vagues show unloved, dystopian spaces in which the depthless surface of techniques.6 Combined with her aesthetic sensibility and her desire for very precise images (she a billboard dominates.

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