About the Right of Being Different

Shirin Neshat

Women of Allah (Version #2)

1995

gelatin silver print photograph
56.5 inches x 40 inches

(b. 1957 — Iran) Shirin Neshat explains the impetus of her work as being inspired by visiting her homeland after a 16-year absence. Neshat’s dramatic and confrontational black-and-white photographs frequently feature herself, severely garbed in a black chador, sometimes with other women, and sometimes carrying a weapon. Often, Neshat inscribes Farsi verses and the words of Iranian poets as a means to further “veil” her face, hands, or feet. A critic writes, “One might say that these photographs document the artist’s effort to feel her way, through the veil, toward an empathetic understanding of who she would be if, instead of having escaped the Iranian revolution, she had chosen to live it.” Writer Hamid Dabashi explains, “The glory of Shirin Neshat’s photography is in her uncanny ability to turn violence into a source of energy for serenity, sadness into an animating force for sensuality.”

Yasumasa Morimura

Self Portrait (Actress)/After Brigitte Bardot 2

1996

Ilfochrome photograph
47.25 inches x 37.5 inches

(b. 1951 — Japan) Yasumasa Morimura is a photographer and performance artist best known for his photographic remakes of old master paintings with himself in the starring role. His recent body of work, which Morimura calls “self-portraits,” pays tribute to the legendary queens of the silver screen. He focuses on the actual actresses playing characters who have attained a reality of their own. New York Times art critic Roberta Smith writes, “These images are strangely affecting and ... deeply Japanese. Their precision and artificiality bring to mind a host of Japanese traditions and crafts, most notably the female impersonators, or onnagata, of Kabuki, who were also depicted in many Japanese prints. It is not by chance that Mr. Morimura’s makeup here is always a bit on the light side, deliberately evoking the white, mask-like faces of Kabuki ... As with the onnagata, Mr. Morimura never completely disappears.”

Kara Walker

Untitled (Kneeling Woman with Mask)

1998

cut paper and adhesive
55.25 inches x 32 inches

(b. 1969 — Stockton, California, U.S.) Kara Walker is best known for her wall installations of cutout silhouettes staging pastoral scenes reminiscent of the Old South. These visually seductive works comment on the sexual, physical, and racial exploitation that remain issues today. Walker grew up in a multicultural community in California and didn’t encounter feelings of overt racial bias until she moved to Atlanta. It was this profound experience that inspired her to create works that relate a certain romantic vision of a “Gone with the Wind” Deep South while directly confronting racial stereotypes and stories of slavery. These images serve to narrate dark, often ludicrous tales through fantastic allegories. A critic writes, “As if derived from some sort of collective unconscious, these narratives touch on issues of racial struggle, division of labor and gender, as reenactments of episodes of 19th-century American history.” Walker elaborates, “I’m trying to set up a narrative of myself that references ... a fictional construct through which I tend to view much of my life. A fiction ... with a heroine and an almost discernible plot. In my case, the plot suggested a lot of suppressed, self-imposed racism.”

Zwelethu Mthethwa

Untitled (“Sugar Cane” Series)

2003

C-print on Fuji Archive paper mounted on plexi
60.5 inches x 78 inches

(b. 1960 — Durban, Kwazulu Natal, South Africa) Zwelethu Mthethwa is a photographer best known for his vivid color photographs of fellow South Africans. From the “Sugar Cane” series, this photograph portrays a field worker who performs rough, backbreaking work. The artist depicts him in a dramatic, elegant posture. The gaze and stance of the worker are strong, while his hood envelops his face in shadow, creating a striking contrast between figure and sky. The artist describes, “Their gestures and postures, clothes and working tools speak volumes about their social and economic circumstances and, most importantly, about their personal experiences within the landscape.” Like 19th-century French painter Jean Francois Millet, who was known for his portrayal of peasants in the field, Mthethwa gives voice to an otherwise forgotten group of people. Mthethwa states, “Sugar cane is an international commodity. The depiction of landscape erases any clues of an identifiable geography, thus negotiating universal conditions.” He illustrates the contrast between globalization in South Africa and the poverty of its people, stating, “I do not think poverty is equal to degradation.” Mthethwa believes photography can serve as a healing process, providing a narrative for the way in which social systems are being affected by the move toward a market economy. The artist received his MFA at Rochester Institute of Technology in 1989. He has exhibited his work worldwide since 1986 and was a lecturer of photography and drawing at Michaelis School of Fine Art, University of Cape Town. His work was included in the 2003 Istanbul Biennial, as well as the 2003 International Center for Photography Triennial.

Carlos Vega

About the Right of Being Different

2004

mixed media on canvas
10 inches x 10 inches

(b. 1963 — Melilla, Spain) Carlos Vega creates work that reflects his interest in his birth place—a Spanish colony in North Africa—and in his childhood in Spain. Vega’s paintings are built onto collaged surfaces composed of historical documents such as wills, accounting ledgers, and religious texts that he finds at flea markets or estate sales. Vega’s work attempts to sustain the legacy of past lives by combining actual evidence of their world with renderings of their intimate surroundings. In this work, Vega painted two clasped hands that translucently hover over a collaged page of the Tractate Ketubot from a copy of the Talmud (a central rabbinic text that discusses Jewish law, ethics, customs, and history). The two hands, seemingly male, are clasped in a way that suggests a variety of possible jarring juxtapositions to the sacred text. One reading of the hands implies that they’re lovingly embracing, as per a wedding ritual or partnership ceremony. Given that so many historic religions have written law forbidding, complicating, or at least strongly limiting the expressed love between two same-sex individuals, it becomes somewhat irreverent for the hands to be placed atop the words of a religious text. The thumb-in-hole gesture also easily conjures the classic and immature way in which children translate their naïve understanding of sex. In this vein, the overall message addresses questions of so-called obscenity. Which is more obscene: the simple act of homosexual love, or the way in which many ancient, and often uncontested, religious doctrines are selectively applied to contemporary culture and customs? The title of this artwork is a wonderful summation of its various interpretations. It is, quite literally, about the right of being different. It is about the malleability of law and the unfortunate way in which the governance of human behavior too often comes at the expense of civil rights.

Anita Dube

Peep

2003

installation of enamel eyes
variable dimensions

(b. 1958 — Lucknow, India) In 2005, Anita Dube proudly represented India in their inaugural participation in the Venice Biennale, a contemporary art exhibition. She currently lives and works in New Delhi, a city proud to emerge in the last few years as a significant Asian art center. Peep is comprised of hundreds of enamel and copper eye pieces made by Buddhist monks living in the monastic regions of the Himalayan Mountains. Each eye sculpture is blessed for use as the eyes of Buddha statues in Buddhist temples throughout Asia. Dube personally traveled to these monastic retreats to obtain these eye pieces from the artisan monks who made them, and, with their blessing, appropriated them into her body of work. The eyes in this installation become an aesthetic language that asserts sculptural fragment as a cultural, spiritual, and personal bearer of memories and history. For Dube, the art space, not merely the temple, must be a meditative location. Just as the presence of the eyes conjures the absence of the eyes in their intended setting, so their appropriation provides an unlikely moment of meditation. In this way, Peep reflects the artist’s central concern with individual loss and regeneration. “What is lost here, will be found and regenerate elsewhere. What now grows here with me, may have once been lost by someone else.”

Erwin Olaf

The Boxing School

2005

Lambda Endura print on Kodak Professional paper
48 inches x 66 inches

(b. 1959 — Netherlands) While the trappings of a mid-20th-century America are present in Erwin Olaf’s photographs, the photographer’s models betray their contemporariness. The boxers in The Boxing School are excessively buff and their shorts could easily be from a Y-3 or Prada spread. But atmosphere, not accuracy, is the point here, and Olaf excels at producing evocative images. His photographs are striking not simply because they seamlessly and effortlessly misapply commercial photography, or even because they successfully deploy tricks from product photography to add visual interest, but because of their open-endedness. They’re entry points for the viewer to step into a world that is almost mid-century America but certainly not our own. Olaf’s performers are static, melodramatic, and uncomfortably isolated in this work; the actors’ expressions are significant, but significant of what? Anger? Boredom? Embarrassment? Insecurity? Perplexity? Racial tension? There’s an atmosphere of jangled nerves and unexpressed cruelty, where the biggest threat is the threat of the unknown. Olaf states the following:

“It all began with the drawings of Norman Rockwell. I like that sort of nostalgic feeling. Originally, I wanted to do something really happy, upbeat, after all the depression of my last series, “Separation” (2003). But then it somehow became terrible. I realized this was a world which has vanished. So instead, I radically simplified the images. Now, everybody is just waiting for nothing; it’s the moment after happiness. I suppose after separation, comes the well of loneliness.”

Michael Hayden

Clean Up

2007

oil and acrylic on panel
35 inches x 80 inches

(b. 1981 — Siloam Springs, Arkansas, U.S.) Michael Hayden depicts an all too familiar scene burned into our visual library; prisoners being forced to clean up trash and debris along the side of a highway. Inserting a slight visual twist, Hayden tears away the landscape to reveal an unusual orange support structure. At first, this structure seems to be nothing more than a hint of science fiction exposing the matrix-like infrastructure of the earth’s geology. But taking a further look, it can be interpreted as a metaphor for the underlying forces (like our judicial system) responsible for adjudicating social misconduct—forces often plagued by prejudice and corruption. By drawing attention to the larger system, Hayden challenges us to think critically about the economic, social, and racial superstructures enabling, and even perpetuating, unjust cycles of crime and punishment.