Migratory Artists and National Identity

Lyubov Bugaeva

1. Emigration is in the first place alienation both from one’s native land and from the influence

of one’s native culture. However, emigration today differs from emigration in the first half of the

20th century, i.e. from either Russia or Nazi Germany. Thus at present the term exile is often

replaced with the term Diaspora, which is associated with a different description of

displacement. While exile is banishment from one’s homeland, “leaping out”, Diaspora is the

dispersal of people from their homeland (Israel 2000, 3). Diaspora is associated with such

notions as hybridity. Contemporary experience, when many people find themselves living

“between cultures, amid languages, across borders” (Egerer 1997, 22), allows us to speak about

hybridity in the sense of belonging to “both worlds”, as about the process that forms any culture.

Furthermore, the notion of the “unhomeliness of home” introduced by Homi Bhabha (1994), and

the reinterpretation of home via disconnecting the notions of home and place by Ihab Hassan

(1995), destroy the strict binary opposition of home and homelessness and make problematic the

boundary between the private and the public spaces that used to distinguish home and a foreign

land. Intellectual or artistic exile also differs from exile in general. Edward Said argued that for

the intellectual “an exilic displacement” means “living outside of the privileges, honors,

seductions, and powers of a given culture” and creates the double perspective of the perception

of the world both from “here” and from “there” (Said 2000, 378, 379).

However, if it is the case that the émigré in its literal or metaphorical meaning

demonstrates melancholy as described by Freud, i.e. the melancholy caused by the loss of the

object of love, then he or she can be viewed and described in the terms suggested for liminal

states by Arnold van Gennep (1909). According to van Gennep, in non-literate societies the

central events of human life — birth, attainment of manhood, marriage and death — are invested

with elaborate ceremonials by which the social organism marks the final exit to the afterlife.

These ceremonies celebrate an individual’s transition from one status to another within a given

society in a tripartite sequence: separation, transition and incorporation. Van Gennep offers

interpretations of the significance of these rites as forms of social regeneration, based on such

natural symbols as death and rebirth. Emigration, like the central events of human life described

by van Gennep, comes out as the series of transitions: simultaneous change of one’s place of

residence, position and social status. It appears as the search for new identity: as dying in one’s

previous image and resurrecting in a new one. Hence, the émigré who is separated from his

former place of residence and has lost his former status is none other than the liminal (marginal)

person as emigration is none other than rite de passage. Accordingly emigration is subjected to

phase categorization and consists of pre-liminal (separation), liminal (transition), and post-

liminal (incorporation) phases.

The code dividing one into the insider and the outsider at various levels of émigré

consciousness in social and personal spheres denotes directions of the émigré’s transformation

and the transition from the entity to which he used to belong to the other. Furthermore, due to the

reinterpretation of home and exile, the boundary dividing the insider and the outsider, the native

and the émigré, now can be at work not only between separate entities (as, for example, native

land and foreign land) but within a single entity — the émigré himself. However, there are

certain regularities in émigré art. In the first place, the evolution of émigré consciousness is

significantly structured by the rite de passage phases. In the second place there are specific

images and motifs that accompany the rite de passage phases. Thus, with the completion of the

pre-liminal (separation) phase the island becomes a frequent image of émigré works. The

bordered insular space either corresponds with the abandoned native land (the retrospective

vision) or, though rather rare, anticipates an ideal place of living. The island being a special place

– real and unreal all together – is itself an analogue of the intermediate stage associated with the

liminal phase of rite de passage. According to van Gennep, the situation “in between” the worlds

is at once imaginary and real. In the state of transition the emigrant, as any marginal or liminal

person, finds himself in a very unstable position: an external balance (with the world, other

human beings or living creatures) is to be achieved due to the permanent and continuous

movement. Hence, the emerging of the journey-quest-theme in émigré art is highly motivated: on

one hand, it is initiated by the “exilic displacement” and the principal questions of Valentine’s

Gnostic formula, and on the other hand by the longing for the balanced and stable position

necessary for alleviating the traumatic aftermath of displacement, disorientation, and the loss of

one’s former position and status.

It is logical to suggest then the universal character of the émigré experience, female in

particular, of the Self and the Alien. In this case émigré art follows the logic of rite de passage

without regard for the way of narration or the geopolitical correlation of an author. Furthermore,

the island- and the journey-quest-themes turn out to be characteristic features of the narrative

structure. The works of the émigré authors working or living in the US, Marina Abramovič (from

the former Republic of Yugoslavia) and Shirin Neshat (from Iran), prove the thesis.

2. Marina Abramovič (born in 1946) left her native city of Belgrade in 1975. That year at a

festival in Amsterdam she met Ulay (Uwe Laysiepen), a photographer from Germany. This

meeting set off their twelve-year period of creative cooperation. In 1976 Marina and Ulay

undertook an attempt to free themselves from any ties to a certain space; they decided to be in

constant motion, moving from one place or town to another. The first five years of their joint life

they lived in an old van touring over Europe with their project Relation Works (Relation in

space, Interruption in space, Expansion in space, Relation in movement, Relation in time).1

Strictly speaking, the tendency of Marina and Ulay to the nomadic way of life molded the

dominant role of motion in space in their Relation Works. If not the quest-theme then the

movement-theme is explicitly present in their project. However, the joint and personal character

of the project shaped the microcosmic and local character of space and movement within space.

Thus, in Relation in Space (1976) in a small hall the naked artists were approaching each other

and retreating from each other with gradually accelerated speed for two hours. In Expansion in

Space (1977) the artists widened the surrounding space, slowly knocking with their bodies the

moving columns around them. In the video Relation in Movement a black lorry in an endless

circular movement leaves a dark trace after itself. Nightsea Crossing (1981) is an attempt to

convey the journey of a soul. Taken out of the place they belong to by their decision to be

nomads, Abramovič and Ulay, on the one hand, were shaping the new space around them and

were trying to put themselves in this space. On the other hand, engrossed into the task of

1 The description of performative works of Marina Abramovič and Ulay can be found in: Abramovic, McEvilley, Stoos 1998. See also: Ulay/Abramovic 1997. The film anthology of the performances see in filmography.

localization of each other in relation to the partner, they were creating the world, limited and

focused on their personal relations.

The last joint project of Marina and Ulay, The Great Wall Walk, which was planned in

the early 1980s and realized in 1988, is a release from symbiosis and a search for a new identity

apart from each other. Hence, it is the project of transition, the liminal phase of the personal

transformation of two liminal persons, and, consequently, the grandiose realization of the

archetype of quest-plot, where the goal is a new personal identity and a new Self. The expiration

of the creative potentials of symbiotic art and, therefore, entering the first phase of rite de

passage (separation), was marked in their art in 1987 by the static compositions with the vases

representing the artists and their relations to each other. In the Great Wall Project it took 2000

kilometers by foot for each artist to say good bye and start an independent existence. The social

construing of the space, especially its boundaries, such as the beginning and the end of the

journey, comes in turn to the nomadism of their early artistic period. Marina starts her journey

along the Great Chinese Wall from the east (that is the East, e.g. Yugoslavia, the communist

system). Ulay starts his journey from the west (that is the West, Germany, the capitalist system).

Marina moves in the western direction, e.g. to the West in the geopolitical sense. Ulay makes his

way to the east, the East, demonstratively calling China and the Chinese his new and for the first

time obtained family. During the first part of the project (The Great Wall Walk consists of three

parts: walking alongside the Great Chinese Wall, the film and the exhibition The Lovers), i.e. the

90-day walk alongside the Great Wall, Marina and Ulay tried to start an independent existence

and at the same time to answer by the geography of their routes the questions of Saint

Valentine’s Gnostic formula (“Who are we?”, “Where are we going?”, “Where are we from?”).

Underneath the quite obvious geopolitical symbolism of the answers to these questions,

however, there is one less obvious subtext: the movement to final separation from each other

through participating in the bodily, social and political experience of the partner. In one of their

early joint projects, Communist Body – Capitalist Body, Marina represented the communist body

and Ulay the capitalist body. Now the situation looks different: The Great Wall Walk reveals the

desire of artists to lose their previous social and national identity. Thus the way of the artists

presupposes the incorporation of the phenomenological body of the Other, or the Alien, into their

own body, the body exchange as the necessary condition of the ritual of changing status and

position before the final separation. It should be noted that at first the project The Great Wall

Walk was planned to include the wedding party of Marina and Ulay on the Great Wall, and in

coincidence with Chinese traditions. The trauma of the separation from the body of the

motherland, which is characteristic for émigré mentality, in the case of Marina and Ulay

obtained a personal character, though not free from the geopolitical perspective.

The separation resurrected the artists’ independent gender identities and specified the

notion of the way initiated by the trauma of separation. In the texts written by Ulay and Marina

for the third part of their project, the exhibition The Lovers, the main tendencies of the male and

female versions of the way are represented: the exteriorization of the experience by Ulay (the

masculine version of the way considers the alien as its own) and the interiorization of the

experience by Marina (the feminine version of the way considers its own as alien) (The Lovers

1989). The part of the Great Chinese Wall from where Marina started her movement is called the

Head of a Dragon. Influenced by the legends about the live activity of a Dragon concentrated

alongside the spine and the connections of these legends with acupuncture, Marina in her effort

to fixate the emotional, spiritual and intellectual experience of the way called her part of the

project Boat Emptying/Stream Entering. The heart of Marina’s concept of the way is the

releasing of the body/soul/spirit from the ballast in order to further fill the body/soul/spirit with

new energy. The egocentrism of Marina’s experience of the way is quite obvious, as well as her

intimization of the alien experience (Marina read the legends about a Dragon as instructions for

her own activity). The experience of Ulay is different in its nature. The subtitle of Ulay’s part of

the project is The Wall. The Walk. The Alien. Ulay sees the idea of “the way” in absolute terms.

The works of Marina Abramovič after 1988 show the accomplishment of the liminal

phase of rite de passage. In 1989 Marina created the performance that marked her transition into

the post-liminal phase of inclusion into a new identity field, The Ship is being Evacuated/The

Current is Entering. In 1995 appears the series Cleaning Works: House Cleaning, Mirror

Cleaning 1, 2, 3, The House, Five Rooms and Storage. The principal idea of the latest works of

Marina Abramovič, who has overcome the trauma of separation and who has accomplished the

transition into a new identity and new place, is a) the disintegration of body, space, and history

as a way of self-investigation, b) the investigation of the past, both personal and historical,

through the death experience, and c) the exploration of space at the new stage of self-

development and self-identification.

3. Another example of a contemporary émigré artist whose works combine the marginal émigré

consciousness of alienation with hybridity and closeness to an alien culture, i.e. the émigré who

is the insider and outsider at the same time, is Shirin Neshat (born in 1957), an artist (a

photographer and a film-director) from Iran living at present in New York City. The works by

Shirin Neshat demonstrate differentiation of the Eastern and Western mentalities, and they

attempt to integrate Iranian experience into a new context while re-conceptualizing it. The period

of separation from the native land and from native culture started for Shirin Neshat, though, not

in 1979 (when the anti-Shah revolution made it impossible for her, a student at the University of

Berkley, US, to return home and thus turned her into a forced émigré), but after her first trip to

post-revolutionary Iran in 1990. The trip initiated not only the émigré consciousness but also the

artistic activity that found its expression in the first series of photo portraits made by Neshat —

Women of Allah (1993—1997) (Shirin Neshat 1998).

The series Women of Allah attracts attention by its enigmatic and crypto-semantic

character: the artist covers the bodies of photo models, herself and a young boy, with text in

Farsi. The Farsi language in Neshat’s photos functions as a transfer into another language and

into another system of expressiveness, incorporated into the system by the visual means of

photography. The choice of Farsi language excludes the meaning of the text for a recipient (both

Western and Muslim) who is unfamiliar with Farsi and thus creates the atmosphere of alienation.

Furthermore, the model is often fragmentated; in the frame there is a face (Rebellious Silence),

part of a face (Whispers, Speechless), eyes (Offered Eyes), hands (Faith, Stories of Martyrdom,

and Guardians of Revolution, Bonding), face and hands (Faceless, Lesbo), feet (Allegiance with

Wakefulness)… The fragmentation of the body destroys old connections and creates new ones.

In the theory of bodily transformation by Shaykh Ahmad Ahsa’i, the body in its existence

and development passes through four stages; two of them can be called jasad (corpus) and the

other two — jism (body). What is to be resurrected is in fact the caro corporalis, but purified

from its opacity and density and revealing the invisible luminous body, which is then the caro

spiritualis. Shirin Neshat in her photo series tries to construe the caro spiritualis, which in Islam

is considered imperceptible to the sight of ordinary humans. The Arabic calligraphic script of the

text in Farsi looks like an ornament and, on the one hand, like a garment masks the human body

in its first stage of existence — caro corporalis. On the other hand like the caro corporalis,

which is metaphorically identified as an item of clothing that one wears, the text hides the caro

spiritualis, the fourth stage of bodily evolution. The photo series in this respect develops the

traditions of mystical poetry of Sufism and Rumi in particular, for whom the veil (including the

veiling between life and death) guards the mystery; unveiling means movement from the depth

to the surface. Besides, it is similar to the traditions of hurufism (huruf — ‘letter’) introduced by

Fazalullah Astrabadi (740—796/1339—1394), that prescribes high meaning to letters and reads

them in the surrounding world as signs of fate and destiny. However, the referent of the

enigmatic Farsi texts incorporated into Neshat’s photos exists; it is the poetry of Iranian poets

Forugh Farrokhzad (1935—1967) and Tahereh Saffarzadeh (b. 1936) that gives the key to the

conceptual configuration of Neshat’s series.

The motif structure of Farrokhzad’s poetry is indicated by the titles of her collections of

poems — Captive (1955), Wall (1956), Rebellion (1958), Another Birth (1964), and the

posthumous collection Let Us Believe In The Beginning Of The Cold Season (1974) (Farrokhzad

1981). The image of the wall stands in the centre of her poetry and ends her life, for Forugh

Farrokhzad died when her car crashed into a wall (Hillmann 1987). The wall is the background

of Shirin Neshat’s photos that bring to the forefront the figures of a woman or a woman and a

child (Faceless, Rebellious Silence, Untitled 1996, Seeking Martyrdom #2). In her series Neshat,

like Forugh Farrokhzad, creates the image of a captive longing for liberation from the past and

from the frames of behavior in the private or public sphere that the past dictates. Both

Farrokhzad and Neshat look for ways to set themselves free from the constraints of one’s world,

either individual or social. Whereas for Farrokhzad the past from which she wants to escape is

the private past connected with a conservative family organization, for Neshat it is the public

past of the national bipolar state structure.

Farrokhzad widely uses the metaphor of a window as the passage into the

otherworld, above all into new forms of world perception liberated from numerous social

conventions. The photo as well as the painting is also a metaphor of a window. The photos

Women of Allah are windows into the reality of the anti-Shah revolution and into the inner world

of the artist. In addition, the sense of the loss of home, and hence instability, which is common

for the poet and the artist, though caused by various reasons, brings up the common motif of

escape. For Farrokhzad it is escape from the house-cage into a Utopian zone of freedom; for

Neshat it is escape from the militarized and politicized reality of the anti-Shah revolution, and

from the prison-house of the body, into a free spiritual space of love and peace. For both artists it

is a release from the cage of a former identity.

However, while for Farrokhzad the new identity is connected with coming into being in a

new social role that differs from the traditional role of mother and wife, for Neshat the new

identity is connected with a new geopolitical interrelationship. In this respect the poetry of

Tahereh Saffarzadeh is relevant for Neshat (Saffarzadeh 1987). In contrast with Farrokhzad,

Saffarzadeh, an active Muslim, focuses on the questions of Iranian and Arabic identity and tends

to affirm the universal and supra-national character of Islam. This tendency is in tune with the

geopolitical interests of Neshat, who aims to meet the extremes, e.g. the East and the West. The

revolution that turned the country from Westernization to traditional forms of social organization

did not, as is often assumed, turn Iranian women into passive recipients of the decisions made by

the revolutionary government. On the contrary, the success of the new regime was possible due

in part to the active women’s support of the new Islamic Republic government. Thus, the

revolution unveiled the energy of women and their openness to change. In her shared experience

of revolutionary Iranian women Neshat affirms activity as a characteristic of women and

connects this characteristic with woman in general and primarily with the Islamic woman.

Neshat disseminates the poetry of Farrokhzad and Saffarzadeh outside Iran in order to make

heard the voices of the Iranian other, especially women, beyond the national boundaries of Iran,

and in order to return abandoned Iranian political poetry home through, and due to, its public

recognition in the West.

In her series devoted to the events of the Iranian revolution, and playing with the images

of a woman and a gun, the model (Shirin Neshat herself) is shown as a woman of the period of

the revolution. Thus, Neshat expropriates and recreates the experience that she had missed in her

real life. As the result, the series is, on the one hand, an example of role-playing and, on the other

hand, an attempt to occupy a meta-position and to look at oneself as at the Other. Both role-

playing and meta-position convey the search for one’s own image or self-identification and serve

as the means for acquiring self-knowledge. The formation of self-consciousness is connected

with the self-objectiveness in the role of the Other, who is the artist’s spatial and temporal

doppelganger. The photo starts to serve as a mirror. The idea of a mirror reflection in Neshat’s

photographs is likely to come from the Koran, where the created world is compared with a

mirror into which Allah looks, and from classical Persian poetry. In the monistic Sufism of Rumi

that interprets the mirror as insight, and opposes it to eyesight, the Sufi is the lover, the beloved

and love itself, i.e. the subject, the object and their connection. Shirin Neshat, looking at herself

as at the Other in her non-existing experience, is the subject and the object of the series, the artist

and the model. As a result, the photo series Women of Allah serves as an analogue of Lacan’s

mirror stage that marks the transition from Imaginary to Symbolic. It is the reaction to the

traumatic event of emigration, a reference to the past and at the same time the beginning of self-

creation (Lacan’s mirror stage).

The “photography” stage of Shirin Neshat’s artistic evolution represented by the series

Women of Allah in this regard corresponds with the pre-liminal (separation) phase of rite de

passage. It marks separation from the former place of living and is equivalent to the state of

temporal death experienced by the subject in rite de passage. However, such works as the photo

Lesbo witness the completion of this phase. The image there is represented in a personal and

intimate aspect – as Lesbos, the island of love. At the same time Lesbos is an island that lies on

the boundary between the two worlds, Christian and Muslim, and hence the image marks the

artist’s orientation to the West as well as to the East.

In 1996 Shirin Neshat becomes a so called “migratory artist”. She turns from

photography to experiments with video and creates what are in many senses transitional works,

e.g. Anchorage (1996) and The Shadow under the Web (1997).2 The transition from photography

to video marks the transition from the surface to the depth, for the screen creates the illusion of

volume. It also serves as the transition from temporal limitlessness to temporal discreetness, i.e.

from eternity to time. The linear conception of time is inherent in European mentality as well as

in visual perspective. In this respect Neshat moves from Muslim culture via European culture.

The transition marks the end of the pre-liminal phase of rite de passage and the beginning of the

2 The originals of the Neshat’s films are the property of Barbara Gladstone Gallery, NYC, US.

liminal, intermediate phase that is characterized by motion. For Neshat video produces an

opportunity “to trace the immense distances that she had already traveled between cultures and

continents, between styles of living, and between opposing and irreconcilable notions of morality

and modernity.” “I’m nomadic in my art as in my life”, Neshat has said referring, to her need to

keep moving. “I have a resistance to anything becoming too fixed” (Goldberg 2002, 67).

In The Shadow under the Web a Muslim woman walks along an empty street and passes

by American buildings. Thus the journey-theme emerges that achieves its peak in Neshat’s video

Rapture (1999). A group of men is attacking a fortress in the desert, while a group of women is

moving through the desert to the sea. They launch the boat and some of them try to escape by

boat from the desert and, therefore, from the limited and desolated social space of the Muslim

men. The principal idea of the obvious allegory is movement as the means of escape and

salvation. In her later works such as Soliloquy (1999) and Possessed (2001) Shirin Neshat

develops the journey-theme that is not a journey-escape, which is a movement either from or to

some place, though more a movement between places or spaces. The central character of the film

Soliloquy (played by Neshat) is a Muslim woman who is in constant motion, negotiating the East

and the West, tradition and contemporaneity. Neshat’s films Turbulent (1998), Rapture, Fervor

(2000), projected on two opposite walls, also initiate the idea of mediating movement due to its

dual structure. Projected with intervals onto two opposite walls, they place a spectator into a

position of a mediator choosing between the parallel scenes of the films and uniting them in his

receptive consciousness.

The new phase of Neshat’s artistic evolution and the process of her self-identification is

the performance Logic of the Birds (2001). One of the obvious pretexts of the performance is the

poem Conference of Birds by Farid ud-Din Attar, which tells the story of group of birds that

travels through seven dangerous valleys. Some of them perish, but the others find Simorgh,

whom they see in their mind’s eye. Simorgh is a specter and the final stage of spiritual evolution

in Sufi terminology. In the valley Fulfillment in Annihilation, i.e. Death Valley, the birds turn

from eyesight to insight and realize that Simorgh is every one of them taken separately and all

together (Attar 1984). With this performance Shirin Neshat seems to finish the process of

transition into a new identity. Having passed the phase of temporal death in rite de passage and

having rejected her former identity, the eyesight, and the recollecting panoramic vision, Neshat

enters the final post-liminal phase of rite de passage, which is the phase of inclusion. The main

character of Logic of the Birds persuades everyone to join her in her quest for Simorgh “through

a series of discourses with others, or more precisely, through the evocation of glassolalia

(speaking in tongues)” (Goldberg 2002, 168). The polyphony that advocates for the idea of

hybridity becomes the principal characteristics of Neshat’s works. Neshat’s last works present

the new form of the final phase of rite de passage that is no longer the phase of total inclusion

into the culture of a new place of residence, but the phase of transition into a new hybrid and

polyphonic cultural identity.

Proceeding from the assumption that the Alien is neither the object nor the subject of

perception but the structure of the field of perception, it is possible to conclude that

contemporary émigré art demonstrates changes of émigré mentality via hybridity and polyphonic

structure. Moved into the space of emigration, the émigré artist projects her or his insight onto

the outer world, and the natural forms of the world become the mirror of insight and the place of

projections. The third and the final phase of rite de passage for the émigré is no longer a ritual of

incorporation into the culture of the country of residence in its pure form, but a ritual of

transgression into a new identity of symbiotic character.

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