Review no 108: Saudi Arabian film Wadjda

NORTH AFRICA, MIDDLE EAST AND CENTRAL ASIA

Written and directed by Haifaa al-Mansour, this heart-warming 2012 film was the first movie feature to be filmed solely in Saudi Arabia, and the first Saudi feature film to be directed by a woman. That it got made at all sounds almost fantastical, given Saudi Arabia’s constraints not just on the activities of women, but on film – cinemas were banned for some 35 years from the early 1980s until 2018. Al-Mansour had to direct some scenes from inside a van in case she prompted protests.

The story focuses on feisty pre-teen Wadjda, who attends a strict religious school in Riyadh, and lives in a devout household. She is determined not to let the expectations of her school principal and her parents deter her from her goal of owning a bike (“”you won’t be able to have children if you ride a bike”), so that she can challenge her friend Abdullah (“girls don’t ride bikes”) to a race.

Wadjda’s school is run by the terrifying, glamorous principal Ms Hussa (nicknamed Cruella), who comes out with devastating lines like “Don’t you know that a woman’s voice shouldn’t be heard by men? A woman’s voice is her nakedness” when she hears girls innocently giggling together. However, there is gossip circulating that she might not be as pure as she likes to suggest, and she seems to be wearing Laboutins under her abaya.

Wajda’s mother is also super-glamorous and attractive behind closed doors, although she is fully covered by her abaya when she leaves the house. However, despite her careful appearance and domestic deference, she fears that she is losing her husband, Wajda’s father, who she learns is meeting prospective brides in the hope that he can be provided with a son.

The film treads a careful line between religious and social conformity and incipient adolescent rebellion against the strictures of Saudi Arabian society. Wadjda experiments with nail varnish, sometimes fails to properly cover her hair, is a bit of an amateur entrepreneur and hangs out with Abdullah unsupervised on her roof terrace, but she also sets out to win the money for the much-longed-for bike by entering a Qur’an-recitation competition.

Wajda is persistent and resilient, and the film is often lightly humorous and charming. Overall a very entertaining watch, if shocking at times to a Western eye in its depiction of what is still an intensely repressive regime.

Review no 107: On Time and Water by Andri Snaer Magnason (Iceland)

Translated from the Icelandic by Lytton Smith

EUROPE

This book is a mostly interesting, frequently terrifying meditation on environmental degradation and the inconvenient truth that true, irreversible climate disaster may be closer than we like to think.

Andri Snaer Magnason is well-known in Iceland as a best-selling author and an environmental activist, as well as a former presidential candidate. He also has some spectacularly long-lived adventurer grand-parents, who traversed enormous glaciers and explored the far-reaches of the landscape during their youth. A glacier that they ascended in 1956, which seemed permanent and immutable, has begun to melt away over the course of the subsequent 70 years, to such an extent that the Iceland Glaciological Society’s annual trips to the glacier are no longer able to take place, thus providing a concrete and terrifying example of the pace of climate change.

We are told that, as glaciers melt in some parts of world, an initial increase in water supply, will, with the disappearance of melting glaciers and their resulting rivers, lead to a desperate lack, potentially making parts of Peru, Tibet and India uninhabitable.

Alarmingly, Magnason writes that:

“It is the official policy of the Trump government … to remove words related to climate change from public records and web sites. The US Secretary of State, Mike Pompeo, talked about the melting of Arctic ice as ‘a new business opportunity’. Commercial sailing routes to Asia could be shortened by up to twenty days.”

Magnason also succeeds in effectively condensing our notions of time to put into perspective the timeline that we’re working within when we discuss climate change:

“The history of Iceland is, in a sense, the continuous story of twelve women like my Grandma. Twelve girls who were born and lived lives that each felt like a flash. … The earliest written records of humans date back five thousand years, events that happened practically yesterday. Humanity first emerged the day before that, in comparison to the ocean’s fifty-million-year history.”

Rather than being a straightforward polemic, Magnason incorporates family history and fascinating miscellaneous facts (for example, he notes that humankind has filled the world with chickens while wiping out so many other species), to provide what is an engaging call for action.

Review no 106: Film Midnight Traveler by Hassan Fazili (Afghanistan)

NORTH AFRICA, MIDDLE EAST AND CENTRAL ASIA

I’ve never understood the lack of empathy and dehumanizing torrent of media and political ire directed towards refugees and other migrants. It doesn’t take much to imagine how desperate someone would have to be to sell their possessions and hand over all their savings to a people smuggler, putting their life, and the lives of their family in the dubious hands of a professional trafficker.

In case we’re struggling, Midnight Traveler, a 2019 film directed by the Afghanistani filmmaker Hassan Fazili, documents his family’s attempt to escape Afghanistan after he is tipped off that his life is in danger. The family’s aim is to reach safety in Western Europe.

Shot entirely on three mobile phones over a period of about three years, we follow the ups and downs of Fazili’s family. They leave Tajikistan (where they’ve stayed for over a year in an unsuccessful effort to apply for refugee status in various locations), after making the desperate decision to make their way to Turkey and take the perilous refugee route that was well-documented in the European media in 2015-16. From Iran they plan to reach Turkey, then cross to Greece, passing through Bulgaria, Serbia and Hungary, in the hope of finally making it safely to Germany, which famously announced a (domestically controversial) policy of extending an unequivocal welcome to refugees.

Often the events of the film are pictured against an evocative soundscape: sometimes discordant, sometimes beautiful and mournful. Although, like the excellent Syrian documentary For Sama, this is an account of real events, Midnight Traveler is also a work of art – a testament to Fazili’s talents.

Amid the harrowing events, there are moments of joy, connection and fun – playing in the snow in Serbia, the older daughter’s exultation at the tidal waters in Turkey – which really shine forth from this film. And although filmed on mobile phones in difficult conditions, the finished film does not feel scrappy or incoherent. Emelie Mahdavian, a US-based documentary maker, produced and wrote the film that emerged, and it went through extensive post-production. The film notably won the World Cinema Documentary Special Jury Award for No Borders at the 2019 Sundance Film Festival.

Hassan and his mostly cheerful wife Fatima try to remain positive in the most gruelling circumstances, partly for the sake of their two young daughters. Despite nights in the freezing forest and the barest of facilities in the various refugee camps and safe houses in which they end up, the girls and their clothing always look astonishingly clean and well-cared for. But their lives are uncertain, and at best simply on hold. In terms of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs at times they’re not even ticking off the bottom rung, and the countries they reach on their way to Germany do not exactly welcome them with open arms.

I wonder why people avoid films like this. Is it too much reality? I’m really glad I watched this film. It was beautifully made, fascinating and enlightening, and it should be essential viewing.

Review no 105: Photographer Joana Choumali (Côte d’Ivoire)

AFRICA

Photographer Joana Choumali was born in Côte d’Ivoire (Ivory Coast) in 1974, and came to my attention after wining the Prix Pictet photography and sustainability prize, themed ‘Hope’, in late 2019 for her series Ça va aller (It will be OK).  The winning photographs were taken on an iphone three weeks after terrorist attacks were carried out in the former colonial Ivorian capital of Grand-Bassam, a popular beach resort town, in March 2016. The photographs were then decorated with ornate, vibrant embroidery. Embroidery, that traditionally feminine craft activity, has been employed by other artists working to explore trauma, notably Mexican artist Margarita Cabrera.

Choumali is quoted as saying: “This work is a way to address the way Ivorian people deal with trauma and mental health. Each stitch was a way to recover, to lay down the emotions, the loneliness, and mixed feelings I felt. Adding embroidery on these street photographs was an act of channelling hope and resilience.”

Due for physical exhibition and a world-wide tour, the Prix Pictet initially had to be reimagined as a virtual exhibition in response to the COVID-19 pandemic. The interactive 3D exhibition was designed by digital artist Gabriel Stones. A physical exhibition has since opened at the EPFL ArtLab in Lausanne, Switzerland.

More of Choumali’s work can be found on Instagram here and here, and if you’re feeling flush is available for purchase here.

Review no 104: Viennese artists Gustav Klimt (1862-1918) and Egon Schiele (1890-1918)

EUROPE

I’ve always liked Klimt, most famous surely for The Kiss, a large reproduction of which hung on the wall in the house that I grew up in. When I had my first child I remember sending out a card featuring the charming maternal part of the Three Ages of Women. Schiele, meanwhile, equally talented, feels much darker. I’ve seen two joint exhibitions of their work. One was in Paris in 2018 at the incredible digital art museum Atelier des Lumières.

The work was recreated on a massive scale, set to music, and the images dissolved and were reassembled before our eyes. It sounded like it had the potential to be excellent, or incredibly cheesy, or some infernal combination of the two – but thankfully it worked brilliantly. Klimt was a perfect choice for this exercise in dematerialisation, because his art – as here with the Water Nymphs of 1899 – often seems to be in the process of simply melting into the air.

I was inspired, and bought a book on Klimt – whose work only achieved mass popularity in the 1960s – in the gift shop, but was then put off by all the French (bearing in mind I actually did French at degree level, go figure), and it still languishes unread in my book pile. Think of all the extra facts I could include if I only read the bloody thing.

Meanwhile my daughters found the exhibition a bit creepy, due to the dim lighting and, I think, that very immersiveness. And while Klimt’s work blown up to a massive scale is pure beauty, amplified – with its undulating curlicues and opulent gold leaf detailing – Schiele’s tortured, twisted figures were more disturbing.

The following year I went to see an exhibition of drawings by the same two artists, which had travelled from the Albertina Museum in Vienna, Austria, to London’s Royal Academy of Art. The drawings, as might be expected, were beautiful. However, the focus on young, gorgeous, barely adolescent girls made me wonder about those girl-women and what became of them. The exploitation was evident in cast-down eyes and shielding hair (#themtoo), as in the Klimt drawing below, although Schiele went in for more raw eroticism (see below). Schiele was also a fan of an agonised self-portrait, seemingly flayed, martyred (this is the man who even portrayed himself as Saint Sebastian), wrongly (maybe) imprisoned (owing to a sexual misconduct charge) and more or less crucified.

Although decades apart in age, both men died in the same year, Klimt in February 1918, following a stroke, and Schiele in October, a victim of the Spanish flu, which – unlike COVID 19 – was no respecter of youth. Schiele left behind an unfinished picture, The Family, which has been said by some to depict himself, his wife Edith and the child they were never to have. Laura Spinney suggests in her book on the Spanish flu pandemic that Schiele painted it following Edith’s death from the disease when six months’ pregnant, and that he followed her to the grave three days later. Such a frenzy of activity, while succumbing to a mortal illness, although romantic, sounds unlikely. Other sources suggest the painting actually features a sentimental depiction of his nephew Toni. Either way, Schiele’s is a tragic tale of curtailed talent.

Review no 103: stories by Katherine Mansfield (1888-1923), and My Katherine Mansfield Project by Kirsty Gunn (New Zealand)

FAR EAST, SOUTH ASIA AND AUSTRALASIA

I’ve dipped into Katherine Mansfield’s stories over the years, and then recently worked my way through a huge batch of them, as well as listening to a number read by the actress Juliet Stevenson on Audible. I’m a fan of the modernist period, and I love Mansfield’s stories for their imagery, their symbolism, their devastating moments of epiphany and their focus on interiority and the timeless, shimmering moment – which sounds like something Mansfield would have said, and maybe I’ve accidently plagiarized her. I prefer her shorter short stories to her longer stories, some of which almost approach novella-length – particularly the evocative Prelude which was snapped up by Virginia Woolf’s press. Prelude, set in her native New Zealand, was intended as an elegy for her brother, who was killed in WWI. Perhaps my favourite stories, though, are the beautiful, ironic and explosive Bliss, which evokes and then shatters a world of complacent, upper middle-class domesticity, and the bleakly amusing The Daughters of the Late Colonel.

Simultaneously, I read a short 2015 essay/memoir by New Zealand writer Kirsty Gunn that I picked up in the Oxfam book shop, entitled My Katherine Mansfield Project. I was intrigued by the implied premise, and attracted by the beautiful book jacket and binding by Notting Hill Editions. Gunn, like Mansfield, was a native of Wellington, New Zealand, who was drawn to the UK, but found herself drawn back to Wellington for a winter on an academic fellowship. Mansfield, too, effectively rejected New Zealand for the UK (and Germany, for a time), but during her final illness wrote yearningly of her homeland. Gunn’s book is a lyrical exploration of the themes of home and memory, and she encounters again places that would have been familiar to Mansfield. However, I didn’t really enjoy the book and found myself skimming the pages. I think, as I was reading Katherine Mansfield at the same time, for me it just threw into stark relief that fact that Gunn is a less proficient writer and her focus on “exile” seemed a bit overwrought given the smooth travel connections of the 21st century.

Review no 102: Artist Wangechi Mutu (Kenya)

AFRICA

Kenyan-born artist Wangechi Mutu was suggested to my daughter by her school art teacher as worthy of research on the topic of “marginalised female artists”, in response to the BLM protests. This provided me with some much-needed inspiration, and a new artist to find out more about. I hope to visit galleries again in person in the not-too-distant future, but for now I’m getting my fix online and via books and magazines – and Mutu’s art, as displayed here at the Victoria Miro gallery, is definitely worthy of interest.

Wangechi Mutu has lived and worked in New York in the USA for many years. As well as creating paintings and sculptures, she also works in film and performance. Her work has been widely exhibited in the USA, in particular, but also throughout Europe. In the UK her work has been on display at Tate Modern in London and in 2014 her Sirens and Serpents exhibition was held at the Victoria Miro gallery in London. As the Victoria Miro notes, her work comprises not only paintings, but also collage.

In creating her mixed media collages, “Mutu manipulates ink and acrylic paint into pools of colour, then carefully applies imagery sampled from disparate sources including medical diagrams, fashion magazines and traditional African arts. ” This technique is exemplified in her 2007 work, A Dragon Kiss always ends in Ashes. Often the pictures are created not on canvas or a paper-based material, but instead on mylar, a kind of plastic sheeting.

(Le Noble Savage, 2006, ink and collage on mylar.)

Recent, larger-than-life sculptures of seated African-inspired female forms for the Metropolitan Museum in New York “speak as messengers from an Afrofuturist-inflected otherworld” writes the New York Times. They are cast in bronze, with robe-like clothes that seem to ripple to the ground, while the imposing lip discs reflect an aspect of traditional Kenyan culture.

Apparently trained as an anthropologist as well as an artist, she repeatedly recasts and represents the female body as a site for an exploration of identity, self-image, gender, trauma and environmental degradation, in concert with the influence of African politics and post-colonialism.

“My work is often a therapy for myself – a working out of these issues as a black woman. And a way of allowing other black women to work through this kind of stigmatization as they look through the images and feel how distorted or contorted they might be in the public eye.”

Review no 101: Family Lexicon by Natalia Ginzburg (Italy)

Translated by Jenny McPhee

EUROPE

“Even though the story is real, I think one should read it as if it were a novel, and therefore not demand of it any more or less than a novel can offer … memory is ephemeral, and … books based on reality are often only faint glimpses and fragments of what we have seen and heard“

This is a deceptively light read, an autobiographical novel describing the ticks and cadences of Ginzburg’s family life before, after and during the Second World War in Italy under Mussolini. (I’ve not done very well at stepping away from books set during the War!) It comes with a useful introduction by Tim Parks, who notes that “Ginzburg’s book is written in an extremely colloquial Italian, something quite unusual in the early 1960s and difficult to show when translating into English“.

Ginzburg wrote the book while living in London during the 1960s, and missing her Italian family deeply. The characters of Ginzburg’s family members, friends and servants are vividly drawn, and there is much humour. The prose is straightforward and somehow unemotional, briskly whipping through moments of great tragedy as well as charming domestic incidents, which are described with beguiling levity.

“My father went very reluctantly to the seaside. He would sit under a beach umbrella, dressed for the city, angry because he disliked seeing people in bathing suits. My mother, she would go into the water, but she’d stay very close to the shore since she didn’t know how to swim. While she was in the water she enjoyed herself, rolling in the waves, but when she returned to sit next to my father, she also sulked. She was jealous of Paola, who would go far to sea in a pedal boat and not come back in for ages.”

Ginzburg’s father, the Jewish scientist Giuseppe Levi, sounds as though he may have been somewhat belligerent and even terrifying, as his intolerance and extreme inflexibility come across with clarity, but again the author’s lightness of touch means that is affection and warmth that dominate, rather than any sense of domestic turbulence. His gentile wife Lidia is the perfect foil for his temper, and then there are their children, Mario, Gino, Alberto and Paola, who, led by Natalia, the youngest family member, we follow well into adulthood.

Unfortunately, I didn’t realise until the end of my edition of the book, published by Daunt Books, that there are extensive notes explaining various historical and cultural points that might be a bit oblique when reading the book, and which would have been handy to know about in advance. A few footnotes might have been a useful addition, then. Overall, though, this was a great read.

Paradise by Abdulrazak Gurnah (Tanzania)

AFRICA

Author Abdulrazak Gurnah was born in East Africa in what is now Tanzania, and emigrated to the UK in 1968. Shortlisted for the Booker Prize in 1994, Paradise is a coming of age story set in East Africa prior to the First World War, and during the German occupation. The book is beautifully written in a lyrical, mythical style, and takes the story of Yusuf, from the Koran, as the loose basis for its plot.

“The boy first. His name was Yusuf, and he left his home suddenly during his twelfth year. He remembered it was the season of drought … Unexpected flowers bloomed and died. Strange insects scuttled from under rocks and writhed to their deaths in the burning light.”

The Swahili boy Yusuf is plucked from his home in the first pages of the book in order to settle his father’s longstanding debt to a wealthy Arab merchant, ‘Uncle Aziz’. Yusuf becomes, in effect, a domestic slave – long after the practice had been officially prohibited. The title Paradise may, at least in part, allude ironically to the preconceptions of Western tourists to the eastern coast of Africa; the location is not much of a paradise for Yusuf, who – like historical East Africa – is a powerless pawn, subject to dominance by exploitative forces beyond his control, whether Arab or European.

The paradise of the title no doubt also refers to the beautiful walled garden that belongs to Aziz, and is largely barred to Yusuf, and which serves as a sort of gilded cage for Aziz’s wives Zulekha and Amina. As Yusuf matures, his good looks and nature lead the older, physically disfigured wife Zulekha to take an uncomfortable interest in him, while he is increasingly sexually attracted to young women that he meets, particularly the forbidden Amina. Zulekha, who is rumoured to be “crazy”, feels that Yusuf’s touch may heal her:

“She says you are a beautiful boy. She watches you in her mirrors in the trees when you walk in the garden. Have you seen the mirrors?”

Because the tragic Yusuf is largely a symbolic figure, I struggled a bit with the book. I (lazily?) prefer fiction that is strongly character-driven, and I never really believed in Yusuf as a fully fledged person – that’s not the point of the book. So I must admit that, although undoubtedly written in a truly beautiful prose style, and constructed with awe-inspiring intelligence, the novel failed to involve or move me. Highly successful on its own terms then, Paradise is not a book I would go back to.

Review no 99: Ai WeiWei (China) at the Royal Academy of Arts, London

FAR EAST, SOUTH ASIA AND AUSTRALASIA

An email dropped into my inbox the other day from the Royal Academy of Art (RA) in London, which like everything else has been closed during the coronavirus pandemic. The email announced that the RA was reopening (hurray!), and also invited me to experience the Academy’s 2015 exhibition of Ai WeiWei’s work in a “360 degree immersive tour of the galleries“, together with commentary from curators – plus the newsreader Jon Snow. I quite like Jon Snow, so how could I resist?!

Seriously though, I had been intending to cover Ai WeiWei for my “China artist”, so I clicked on the link. I had expected slightly more tech than I got: the 360 degree claim is a little over-stated, as it only applies to certain clickable areas, and I’d imagined I’d somehow be able to be transported around the exhibition more or less at will, from any imaginable angle.

The work itself is really interesting. Ai WeiWei is a prolific conceptual artist, well-known as a proponent of freedom of expression, who stands in opposition to the ideals of the prevailing regime in China. He is no doubt China’s most famous contemporary artist, and his biography is fascinating, and makes his political sensibilities seem almost inevitable.

I’ve not encountered much of his art work in real life, though I did visit the Tate Modern’s Sunflower Seeds installation almost a decade ago (and I believe my mum still has a pilfered porcelain sunflower seed from that very exhibition, tut tut). Each of the 100 million life-sized seeds that filled the Tate’s massive Turbine Hall appeared to be identical, but was, in fact, carefully hand-made and painted in Chinese workshops by skilled craftspeople. The Sunflower Seeds installation challenged the ubiquitous ‘Made in China’ label and the geopolitics of cultural and economic activity.

In 2011 Ai WeiWei was arrested at Beijing airport and imprisoned for 81 days, accused of so-called economic crimes. He subsequently created a six-part diorama documenting his time in prison, S.A.C.R.E.D., depicting himself and his guards, encased in steel boxes. The installation forced the viewer into the uncomfortable role of voyeur of degradation and powerless bystander.

He is currently on show at the Imperial War Museum in London, with History of Bombs, in which the museum’s atrium has been given over to an artist for the first time. The work promises to continue Ai WeiWei’s interrogation of political freedoms and strictures, and the impact of state power at the individual and societal level, through an exploration of migratory flows. Ai WeiWei himself feels that he has been forced into exile, of course – after finally regaining his passport from the Chinese authorities in 2015 he moved his family to Europe.

An exhibit in the 2015 RA show that I viewed online is an exquisitely crafted marble pushchair, and a marble camera (2014). Ai WeiWei recalls walking with his son in parks, visiting restaurants, and then becoming aware of a man taking photos. When he challenged the man, he claimed to be simply a tourist, but after angrily taking his memory card, Ai WeiWei discovered image after image of his child at the family’s regular haunts – it was at that point that Ai WeiWei says (on a video clip on the exhibition commentary) that he “was speechless to see how a state functions, how they invade people’s privacy and how powerful they are” and became determined to remove his family from China.