Top, Mahmoud Khaled, part of the installation Proposal for a House Museum of an Unknown Crying Man (
Top, Mahmoud Khaled, part of the installation Proposal for a House Museum of an Unknown Crying Man (detail), 2017, mixed media. Via. More. Bottom, Nicholas Riis/nicchi, Boomblaster Misty Rose I (sold), 2021, custom-printed misty-pink cow leather with pigskin lining and all-leather handle. Slightly elastic opening. Made by hand. Medium-weight leather, lightly waxed, giving it a skin-like feeling. Soft and slightly powdery with a natural grain, 35 × 29 × 15 cm. –Conceived as a fictional museum, the audience enters with an audio guide and discovers that the absent inhabitant of the house is an Egyptian man who moved from Cairo to Istanbul a decade ago. A narrative of queer persecution in Egypt and later in Istanbul is told through this unknown man’s belongings. Contextual references are drip-fed throughout the tour: the arrest of 52 men on a gay disco boat on the Nile in 2001, photos of cruising areas, a disturbing excerpt of Egyptian director’s Maher Sabry’s film All My Life (2008) in which a gay man is being tricked into an arrest, and a leather jacket typical of what the mukhabarat (Egyptian secret service) might wear, to name a few. Jacques Brel’s classic song ‘Ne Me Quitte Pas’, a tale of love lost, resonates throughout the house. Khaled’s piece is gripping and the format of the museum works exceptionally well to keep the memory of this unknown crying man, and so many others with him, alive. It also operates as an ominous foreboding, if not warning, for the threatened position of LGBTQI communities in contemporary Turkey, who face increasing harassment and abuse due to growing conservatism in the country. A threat that the art world, too, is grappling with, if events in recent years have shown, including attacks on galleries—and one assassination at an exhibition opening.Nat Muller, from A good neighbour? The 15th Istanbul Biennial, for OCULA, October 5, 2017.–Most galling, perhaps, is (Maggie) Nelson’s refusal to take seriously art’s role in the concentration of wealth, or of the power such wealth confirms. Such a glaring oversight, coupled with her argument that critics like (Hannah) Black are “holding art to a utilitarian standard [that] echoes capitalism’s own fixation on quantifiable results,” shakes the foundation of the entire chapter. This distorted perspective about who threatens whom, or what, and what that threat actually consists of, is endemic to established writers with lucrative careers and secure platforms. (Recently, and infamously, it was on display in “A Letter on Justice and Open Debate” in Harper’s Magazine.) Liberal opinions now often come with the claim, perhaps the sincere belief, that their originators are aligned with the people they rebuke—that they are anti-capitalist or anti-prison, pro–trans rights or pro–racial justice, and so on. But these gaps in analysis, which ignore the most urgent aspects of our present reality, guarantee that this isn’t so.Charlotte Shane, from Free Fallin’ - Maggie Nelson’s essays on life, liberty, and the pursuit of indeterminacy, for Bookforum, September 2021. -- source link
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