“Where there is power, there is resistance.” Michel Foucault
Rhythm 0, Marina Abramovich
No one knows where we would be if people didn’t resist. The history of resistance is as old as the history of mankind. Man has resisted one way or the other and artist is no exception. From the Botticelli’s first non-religious nude and David’s Death of Marat to Courbet’s realistic stone breakers, from Allan Kaprow’s happenings and Chris Burden’s shoot to Banksy’s wall art and Turkish Standing man’s protest, artists have resisted one way or the other through their art. But what about the acts those were never created in the name of art yet are as radical and sublime as any work of art, and sometimes even more. Boris Groys states, that no matter how political, anything created for the art institution loses its status as political. This paper will investigate the political acts of resilience looking at the case studies of Sabeen Mehmood’s assassination and the protests after that, Farkhunda’s Burial, and Qandeel Baloch’s facebook videos. This essay will look at these acts as performances and dissect, in detail, their aesthetics from choreography to agency and the resonance, as well as compare them to the performances of the postmodern artists such as Marina Abramovich’s Rhythm 0, Allan Kaprow’s happenings and Yoko Ono’s cut piece.
On March 22nd 2015, a group of 30 women, clad in black scarves and black outfits carrying a wooden coffin on their shoulders are chanting “We are all Farkhunda”. They walk 30 minutes through the streets of Kabul to the cemetery and finally reach a place where they rest the coffin and say the prayer. The scene that I just described is Farkhunda’s burial. These women were shouldering a coffin with the remains of Farkhunda, a 27 year old girl brutally lynched by an angry mob due to false accusations of burning the Quran. This was the first time when Afghan women got together to defy the tradition, patriarchy and clerics, and this was only the beginning. This protest started a chain of protests by thousands of men and women to demand justice for Farkhunda’s family. This act is as poetic and sublime as one of the happenings where Allan Kaprow instructs the participants making the happening to hold a sheet together and collect rainwater on it, then carry the sheet together and walk to a river, and pour the rain water into the river.
Women carrying Farkhunda’s Coffin
“Fear is just a line in your head” said Sabeen Mahmood, the director of the Second Floor T2F who was gunned down in her car on April 24th, 2015 for living on the other side of this very same line. That evening Mahmud was hosting a discussion about the situation in Balochistan.” For the last decade, Balochistan has been home to a separatist uprising, the third the province has seen since the nineteen-sixties, and Baloch nationalists have been going missing. Although the numbers are difficult to confirm, as many as twenty-one thousand people may have disappeared. In October of 2013, Mama Qadeer, an activist in his seventies and one of the participants in Mahmud’s event, began marching from Quetta to Islamabad, a distance of five hundred and sixty miles, in order to draw attention to the victims, many of whom, have been “killed and dumped.” His own son’s corpse was found in 2011, two years after he vanished. But whatever is happening there is a controversial subject and nobody in Pakistan feels safe talking about it because they are aware of the consequences. But Sabeen wanted to draw attention to the subject and the struggle of the people connected to this cause she named her event “Unsilencing Balochistan”. She very well knew about the risk she was taking and she even expressed it to her friends. Sabeen was determined to take this risk as she wrote to another friend, “I just want to leave everything and join the Baloch march for the rights of their missing. What else is life for?” I am sure most of you are familiar with Marina Abramovich’s performance from 1974, Rhythm 0, where she presented her body as an object for the visitors. The visitors were invited to use any of the 72 objects that the artist placed on the table including feather, flower, and cotton to kitchen knife, scissors, bullet and a gun. During this 6 hour performance people cut her, put rose thorns inside her body and one person even put a gun on her head. The artist stated that “‘the experience I drew from this work was that in your own performances you can go very far, but if you leave decisions to the public, you can be killed’(quoted in Ward 2009, p.132). Well Sabeen, just like Abramovich, put herself out there knowing how vulnerable she was but she still decided to test the limits of people as well as her own. Sabeen’s performance, just like Abramovich’s, was highly discussed among the media and she afterall did succeed in drawing attention to the issue. People did not just mourn her death but also very loudly spoke about the circumstances that led to this incident.
Sabeen Mahmud, Photo by Tonje Thilesen
Qandeel Baloch, a small town girl who had big dreams, ran away from an abusive marriage and started a page on facebook that gained popularity due to its sexual and provocative content and soon became an internet sensation, a celebrity both loved and hated by people for the very same reason. And she kept on shocking the Pakistani society by her erotic videos, promises and teasers of strip dance performances and her unsusal selfies with a reputed cleric. But all of this was short lived, On July 15th, 2016, she was drugged and strangled by her own brother in the name of honor. People called her Pakistani Kim Kardashian, her videos and selfies remind me of the pin up girls or the picture of Marilyn Monroe in white dress. She was a sex symbol, an embodiment of people’s desires and young women’s aspirations too, as she defied all the norms and values and mocked the duality and hypocrisy of Pakistani society. She even declared herself as a modern day feminist who believed in equality. “Baloch simultaneously attracted Pakistani men with her sexuality and enraged them with her unwillingness to conform. She challenged the rigid structure of Pakistani society, where women are expected to defer to men.” While in an interview, she said “I will continue to unveil this hypocrite face of religious clerics who are defaming our religion and country,” I think Qandeel very well knew the power of her sexuality and she enjoyed it, recognizing its power over men. This was her way to fight misogyny.
Qandeel Baloch
Baloch’s performances did to us what Yoko Ono’s Cut Piece 1964 did to its audience, which showed them their true self while they were objectifying female body and exposing her body. This was Ono’s way of making a statement about the representation of female body in art and its relationship to the viewer. While Baloch tried to unveil and challenge that relationship of the viewer and female body that she decidedly sometimes presented as an object which made the viewers uncomfortable because of the constant mixing up of the roles of the viewer and the object (her body).
Yoko Ono, Cut Piece
I would like to dissect these performances in order to understand their aesthetics, choreography and agency. Farkhunda’s burial is perhaps the most radical piece of performance as it very intelligently responded to the long discourse of religious politics and extremism in Afghanistan, patriarchy and almost nonexistent presence of women in everyday Afghan life. They did not let any man touch Farkhunda’s coffin and performed the whole ritual themselves. Women, according to Islam, are not allowed to go to a cemetery and be part of burial ritual, but in this case the whole ritual was performed only by women, although men were present there too. One of the most reputed Cleric of Kabul even came to tell them to get out or else they will be subjected to punishment as this is haram in Islam but instead of going away, they made a ring by holding hands around Farkhunda’s coffin and stayed in that position until the cleric went away. The choreography of this performance, although simple, is very powerful. Every action that they did together was something that was not expected of them. Thus every action becomes a political action of resilience and takes one, to a step closer to living their imagined realities only briefly but surely. To me, anything that evokes any emotion is sublime and theses acts certainly evoke very powerful emotions. Imagine the sound of 30 women and more chanting “We are all Farkhunda” can do to its audience.
Similarly in case of Sabeen, it was her performance her political action led to a chain of protests and people also took to social media expressing their strong opinions about the causes such as state’s oppression and its role in silencing people. She made her point strongly that Ideas outlive individuals.
Baloch Missing Person March, 2013
After Qandeel’s death I, being a female from Pakistan, couldn’t comprehend the fact that she was killed, sad and angry I knew this could happen to anyone. I discussed her social media posts as case studies in my class of poetics of resistance and I remember while in discussion, most of the male students were appalled and one of them clearly said that “I would never allow my sister to watch her videos let alone behave like her, I don’t understand why we are even discussing her”. But girls on the other hand admired her for her being such a rebel, disobedient and free soul. I think what she started on her Facebook was carefully curated and original erotic content. She made all the aesthetics decisions and designed her videos from makeup and clothing to music, camera angles etc. She was an artist.
One can argue why should we look at these acts as art? In Pakistan’s context art needs to be liberated from itself. The existing definitions of art in Pakistan limit art to a mere aesthetic experience in a gallery or one can also say that art here is still not completely transformed from object of contemplation to political action. But this does not mean that all art produced in Pakistan is A-political; however, anything that is produced in the name of art no matter how political can be considered useless, and already has a status quo when its merely reduced to an aesthetic experience to be more precise aestheticization of politics in case of activist art which distracts the viewer from its original meaning and purpose.
The acts which are not created in the name of art but are radical, sublime and respond to the urgency of their time and space can easily qualify as art. Well we are all familiar with the concept of social performance that can range from a simple hand shake to a wedding ritual and much more, so if we take in the definition of Goffman, these acts already qualify as performances. But one can argue if these social performances can gain the status of art? Let’s look at some most common definitions of art such as art as expression of an individual as well as collective, art as an aesthetic experience. Art is sublime, and after Fluxus, art is transformed from an object of aesthetic contemplation to a gesture of political action. And in my definition art is the negotiation of an individual between his physical and imagined reality. So applying all the above definitions, one can say that these acts are art. They are consciously designed performances that respond to the urgency of their context and are more relevant than any art piece created in Pakistan. Studying, documenting and talking about these acts as art is important as it will challenge the existing definition of art as well as the high art aesthetic. I think before we create more activist art in the galleries we should first study such acts as art where common people become celebrated heroes by showing us that there is another world possible. By saying that, I do not mean to merely aestheticize such acts as art or simply accumulate the remains of these actions in Museums as it will only lead to the death of these political actions. But these acts should be talked about, shared and passed on to the people as stories and images. Images form identities and it is foremost that we disseminate such images among people to deconstruct and construct new identities. These performances of resilience urge us to negotiate. These performances are infrastructure of resonance for democracy and freedom in Pakistan.
In the past decade, just like the rest of the world protests and such political actions have become a very popular form of expression and if we archive them, we can have a whole discourse of political sublime. There were, and there always will be people who will keep rejecting, keep dreaming and keep negotiating. There were, are, and will always be people who would say ‘NO’ and we must celebrate that, because saying NO at the right time in the right place is perhaps the most sublime and radical act of art.
This Research Paper was written and presented in 2016 at IAFOR conference in Brighton UK. I am presently archiving and theorizing such acts as performances.
The images used are taken from various sources on the internet