We Have Met The Enemy and He Is Us

In the press release for this group exhibition, the curator, Shezad Dawood offers a scattergun polemic. ‘From ethno-religious group shows, to coalitions of the willing. Exclusion, rather than inclusion seems to be the new diversity, borne out by cultural institutions as much by the World Bank’. In a thinly veiled attack on artists and institutions who collude with a culture of what Dawood terms ‘guilt-funding’, Dawood implies that artists are their own worst enemies, prostituting their cultural identities in exchange for the rewards of visibility and funding, whilst  ‘…those artists on the threshold of these hybrid spaces, those artists who are able to reflect the fluid spaces that are slowly collapsing the old social order, are out in the cold.’ Diddums.

Given the histrionics which framed the show, one might possibly have expected to see a more in your face exhibition, but asone entered the space, the overall affect of the sparsely arranged objects, sculptures, and wall based works was quite underwhelming. In the centre of the gallery three empty platforms were all that remained of Reza Aramesh’s contribution to this exhibition, which as a one off event was staged during the show’s opening night. Aramesh’s Serving Sculpture involved three smartly dressed men. Each of the men were positioned on a separate platform, and made no attempt to communicate with the private view audience, but stood motionless holding a tray of drinks for those brave enough to accept. Serving Sculpture created an uneasy relationship between subversion and subservience, collapsing the distinctions between the work and the viewer.

Whilst the exploration of the artistic, cultural, social realm was a thread running through the show, Aramesh’s style of intervention,namely, the visualising of the ’ other’ was the exception, rather than the rule. As recent initiatives such as the Arts Council’s Decibel project illustrate, the drive towards inclusion is heavily weighted in favour of the spectacle of cultural difference, and as such inhibits any scrutiny of that which diverges from this spectacle. Given the polemical framing of the show, the frequent appearance of the white subject could be construed as a visible interloper which sought to question perceptions of normality and difference.

Also included in the exhibition was Mustafa Hulusi’s photo-text work Possession, which offered an ironic reworking of Victor Burgin’s conceptual work from the 1970s, What does possession mean to you? In Burgin’s version, this question is countered by both the statistic, ‘7% of our population own 84% of our wealth’ and an image of a white male and female embracing. With minimal fuss, but maximum aplomb, Hulusi substitutes the ‘you’ for ‘Mustafa Hulusi’, simultaneously disrupting and updating Burgin’s assumptions about what constitutes the normative subject/viewer. Where Hulusi’s piece was a witty retort to current obsessions with cultural difference, Rasheed Araeen’s mixed media work was typically more irreverent.Arareen’s 3 Graces comprised an enlarged image taken from one of those sex calling cards commonly found in telephone boxes. Placed within a pseudo gilt frame, the image portrayed three skimpy clad women in provocative poses, their private parts barely covered by images of roses. Such a garish work was tempered by more esoteric contributions such as Runa Islam’s Prop, a glowing green neon ‘motel’ sign installed at the exhibition’s entrance, further down from which was the work Staged, a series of black and white photographs taken by Islam of actors rehearsing Sam Sheppard’s play Fool for Love on a theatre stage…

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