Today, I attended an Art for Lunch featuring Nasrin Himada. The description for the talk was as follows:

“Nasrin’s curator talk will delve into the personal, experiential and embodied forms of knowledge by exploring the ways in which art can be a catalyst in constituting a radical, intimate and poetic ecology that extends beyond the work. Instead of talking or writing about artwork as a way to analyze, explain or interpret, art criticism and curation can engage with art as relation, rather than representation.”

Quotations are what I transcribed from the (I’m a fast typist) and either noted in quotation marks or in red.

As stated in this event’s description, Nasrin is interested in “frameworks” (they used this word a few time) of knowledge: who creates them, who controls them, and how we may shift them. They opened the talk with a quotation from Solmaz Sharif’s book, Look, from a poem of that same title:

“Let it matter what we call a thing” – Solmaz Sharif 

They went on to explain how they’re interested in how art, curation, and writing can “challenge ways of seeing, manipulate our perception, and give us a new framework for ways we can form a thought.” Their epistemological inquiry is deeply rooted in an considering the ways political and institutional systems attempt to control these knowledge frameworks. They gave a few clues as to what it means to them to be Palestinian and how that diaspora (and lost original materials, such as Palestinian film footage) has impacted their life, including their work, in part because of what it means to have had your history (a knowledge system) attacked and nearly wiped out. Suspicious of knowledge systems and frameworks, they ask, what does it mean to “break form” in both language and in exhibition? Their work often involves writing, and even within the structures of writing (imposed by academia, for instance), they say,

“I do not function from a place or representation; my intention in curating and writing about my experience is not to come at it from a place of representation but a place of experiential and process-based formation, so for me it’s so difficult to bring language to this and why I find it so fascinating to bring language to process-based work.”

This is really fascinating to me, as I’m just starting to understand what it means to me to create work (artwork) in a serious way. In the last week, actually, I made huge progress in one of my two projects (“Cracked”), and I was thickly aware of how I was letting “process” just take over. At times, I felt as though I was relinquishing control over the work. I have yet to write about this experience of my last few days, but I’ve been mulling over how I’ll even go about doing so in a near-future blog post. I guess, I’ve been thinking, that I’ll do the usual combination of a few photos and a bit of text. But how, I have yet to figure out, will I adequately convey what it felt like to be working on this piece and to nearly feel like I was the medium that the work was using to bring itself to this stage? Can I get that into a blog post? Also, for whom and for what purpose am I writing these posts (the ones on my art practice this term)? Will writing that post about this past week help me understand something about the experience I had? This has been the case several times, that writing has helped me “think through” or “process” what I’m doing, and it’s also a good way for me to keep track of what I’m doing/thinking, but I should continually question this practice rather than fall into it as a comforting routine or structure to my work.

Nasrin gave a brief overview of a few publications they contributed to, such as Scapegoat journal Issue 07: Incarceration and What Is Invisible Labour? MICE Issue 01

In this writing, they say,

I try to think about what is the right space for something to be expressed that is going to make the most sense. “I think about intention and how in intention we position ourselves as practitioners. How to extend beyond the materiality of the work, the outcome. Often it’s the process, the relationships, the events around making and doing that spark the initial idea. In this way, I also think often about form, what it enables. Form conditions content.” (this was quotation of their own writing they had up on the screen during their talk) (emphasis mine)

Artists are aware of (or at least questioning) how their work fits into the form—content relationship. Some more than others (and for Nasrin for sure), the process of making the work determines the end form. I think that what this boils down to for me is that the very process of art-making has influences not only on the result (the art) but also on my relationships: with the art I’m creating, with the people involved in making it, with the people I speak to about the work and show it to, and with the way I live in the world at large.

For another writing piece, Project: For Many Returns, Nasrin described how they were in a transition period, going through a lot in life, and was facing a deadline for a commissioned piece of writing. They felt entirely unable to write yet another piece of academic writing (or read any), and how after stumbling on a writing project for a while, text they really needed to write just came out of them:

I sat for two hours and I just wrote something, it’s the most … it resonated so much with so many people, but it goes to show that I really just pushed myself to be the writer I wanted to be without any pressure, and this is what came out, and I was so thankful for that moment because now this is an entire project, I’m at part five, and now it’s allowing me to create a manuscript out of this work. When I said fuck it, I decided I was going to turn my back away from academia because I’d had enough of writing in that framework. I didn’t like the kinds of pressures that come with that kind of writing, I didn’t even like reading it, and also I was so bored of reading art reviews that just gave nothing, and I didn’t want to just write another boring art review that doesn’t really say very much. I wanted to move away from art writing as an analytical tool, and rather as a relational one, and not as a review that explains the object in question, but as a way to extend the work by seriously confronting my love for it. So, I really started to think about the form that this writing was taking was a love letter, and I really stuck to that. How was I going to write a love letter to this work that I love so much?

I love the way they spoke about their writing about art as a love letter. I could see myself getting into doing writing like that about my own work as well as the work of others.

Holly asked Nasrin to elaborate on the reactions they got to this type of writing. In their response, Nasrin gave a few names of writers who’ve inspired this type of writing in them, but I wasn’t able to get their names (I’ll see if Holly will forward my email to them so I can get in touch and ask for these names). They also said that the reactions they got show that people have wanted to write on art in the way they were doing, but they thought they couldn’t. After writing this first “love letter,” they realized “what a beautiful challenge it would be to bring the experience (of viewing art) through art writing, rather than writing about it in this analytical mode above the work.” They said about this type of art writing,

I realized I was writing alongside it, like it was living beside me, sitting right here all the time, and what did that feel like, and what did that do, and what did it bring up? And that’s what I articulated in that piece.

I wished that Nic Wilson had been listening in on this talk, as I know from his Art for Lunch that he’d have an interest in this topic.

Larissa Tiggelers asked Nasrin to describe what it means to “find the right form” for their work. Nasrin spoke more about how their exhibitions have come from the relationships they’ve built with the artists, how they often become close friends with these artists and then the exhibition comes from that relationship. They also said they care a lot about context when deciding what to take on:

It’s driven by the conversations I’m already having with the artists themselves: what are we grappling with right now? I think the most import thing for me right now is context. I don’t want to show work that has nothing to do with what’s going on in the world right now. I think the questions I’d have are how are we going to do better, how are we going to be better, how are we going to create language that’s going to make us think better, in order to change this world that we live in that’s riddled with all of this violence? I don’t stop thinking about that. I don’t stop thinking about that. The artists who come into my life are doing the same kind of work.

In short, I would love to one day be one of the artists who come into Nasrin’s life. I wonder what they think about climate change.