What is art? And who decides what art is?
These are the questions that many are asking after an artwork displayed at Durbar Hall in Kochi was allegedly vandalised by sculptor Hochimin P H and writer Sudamshu on Wednesday.
Their argument was that the language of the work was “abusive, explicit and shouldn’t have been displayed at the exhibition”.
Algerian-French artist Hanan Benammar, whose work ‘Go Eat your Dad’ is now at the centre of the controversy, says attacks are not new to her. But she hoped discussions and criticism to be constructive — not limiting or physical.
Part of the exhibition titled ‘Estranged Geographies’, this particular work had the Malayalam translation of the abuses she curated as part of a linguistic research. It was a work triggered from racist attacks she faced in Norway, she says.
Excerpts:
Shall we start with a bit about your creative process??
I have several ways of working. Some works are research-based and slow. Then I have works that are responses to certain events. Works about cultural canons, colonial history, what is perceived as being colonial in art, national identity, etc. There have been instances when my work or I get attacked, leading towards work in response to that. I have done a few works like this in the past six years. So, this is a bit of a trademark of mine (laughs).
Was ‘Go Eat Your Dad’ one such work?
I had entered a very long conversation about racism. Some people disagreed on how I expressed anger or frustration around racism in one of my works back in Norway. A top curator told me to watch my mouth. I confronted this person about tone-policing and the class-based way of viewing anger. Why should I be the one bowing to a certain language when I am trying to express something that is traumatic, rooted in my everyday experience?
The same curator later invited me to an exhibition. I presented this idea that I wanted to make a piece about the perceptions of expressing anger in the language of insults. She understood that it was a response to her as well in a way. I wanted to push the limits. That’s how ‘Go Eat Your Dad’ happened in 2021.
Could you elaborate on the work?
I asked people I knew, those from multilingual backgrounds, to give me their best, worst swear words and insults. I curated them. It became like a list of words, a list of expressions, which I thought was a bit poetic in a way, because it was different attempts to say one thing — ‘f**k you’.
The title comes from the Somali language. ‘Go Eat Your Dad’ is a Somali expression, a feminist version of a more common insult that targets mothers. I first presented the work in Norway, after translating all the insults and cuss words into Norwegian language.
It was, of course, meant to provoke. Each time I am invited to display this work, I translate it into the local language. In Miami, I translated it into Spanish. In Denmark, I translated it into Danish, and so on.
Here, it is in Malayalam. It’s interesting to present this work like an infiltration of some sort. Viewers wonder — ‘What the hell is this?’ And that should ideally lead to a conversation. It can be triggering for some people. I don’t think an art space should always be a space of comfort. It’s also a place of questions, a place of provocation.
Did this particular work generate such a strong, angry response from other places?
Not for this work. I expected a bit of pushback from the Cuban community in Miami, but they loved it. They laughed so much. It was amusing.
I had the same experience here too initially — until the vandalism happened. Unexpected and unprecedented.
It was a fellow artist who vandalised the work...
I am not against direct actions. I would have respected his opinion if he had engaged in a critical discussion with me, rather than smearing my work.
I saw afterwards that there were several social media posts about the director of the [Lalithakala] Akademi, who has nothing to do with this show. One of the curators, Anushka Rajendran, is from Kerala and lives in Delhi. The other, Damian, is from Switzerland. They picked the artists, not Murali [Cheeroth]. But these people are using my work to smear him. They didn’t even mention my name while denigrating my work. Instead of saying, ‘Look at the work of Hanan, it’s a disgrace’, they were talking about ‘Murali is corrupt’.
It’s sad that the people who vandalised my work didn’t spend a minute reading the text that is next to it or the context. After the crime, he [artist Hochimin] proclaimed, ‘By the way, this is a protest against this anti-women work’.
What’s your take on that?
So you’re going into an exhibition that is very feminist as a whole, and you tear down the work of a female artist whose work has been against white supremacy!
I understand I am privileged when I come here. But my experience is not less valid here. It’s just that we come from different contexts.
My work was from within the context of oppression. I was born in France. My parents are from Algeria. My father was part of the Algerian war of independence. Leftist politics runs in my family. People died, were tortured, and were displaced as a result. And then I ended up in Norway, a country where they don’t really understand the history of the global south. So one has to make it visible. If he [Hochimin] had taken five minutes to analyse my works, he would have thought: ‘Oh, maybe we are allies’.
Are you planning any legal action against them?
The Akademi is pressing charges, not me.
I am more concerned about female artists who want to engage with critical, problematic, or obscene material. I think obscenity has a space in art as well. Once the din calms down, hopefully there will be a moment where we can talk about the role of art in society, culture….
Do you feel art is being boxed up?
Everybody can have their little boxes. But to dictate with physical means what should be in an art space or not… this is where it gets problematic.
There has always been this question of women’s expressions. That women have this space for beauty and quietness, and then ‘shut up and be pretty’. It’s classic, very vintage (laughs)!
I feel women should reclaim obscenity, vulgarity. That is a feminist tactic too.
Are you exhibiting your works anywhere else in India?
I am not sure if I will get invitations after this (laughs). But I hope so. I love being here.
