The Distance From Here : Folding Bellies - A Video Art Collaboration
Still from Folding Bellies on display at Jameel Art Center - https://jameelartscentre.org/whats-on/mona-ayyash/
The Distance from Here exhibition explored personal responses to and interactions with space and time. This group show explores how our bodies become essential materials through which to navigate the day-to-day spaces we inhabit, and the interconnectedness of the body with space through touch, language, movement and memory.
The artists included in the exhibition cover wide ground, drawing on personal understandings of isolation, movement, boundaries, displacement, confinement and waiting; their works speak to each other through multiple shared concerns, moving between fiction and truth, the ordinary and curious, then and now, visible and invisible, presence and absence, and the familiar or everyday.
‘The Distance from Here’ is drawn largely from the Art Jameel Collection and features several new commissions; the exhibition includes works by Mona Ayyash, Yto Barrada, Hicham Benohoud, Jason Dodge, Shilpa Gupta, Joana Hadjithomas and Khalil Joreige, Sreshta Rit Premnath, Hrair Sarkissian, Do Ho Suh and Anup Mathew Thomas.
Where do I come in ? There was an open call requesting artists to collaborate. We were all in a strange pandemic space in the end of 2020 and the artist Mona Ayyash was looking to create a group of artists to work remotely with her during her residency with Warehouse421. Here’s the official blurb :
“Mona Ayyash’s aim during the Warehouse421 Homebound Residency 2020/2021 was to make a video piece containing footage filmed by the participants selected to work with her on this project. She compiled them together to reflect the themes of attention and boredom, response and relation. In some videos, she plays with an accumulation of gestures and actions; in others, a reduction or subtraction of gestures. For this project, Mona created a call for participants via Warehouse421’s social media, inviting anyone to assist in creating the footage. She selected seven people from the local community and invited them to film themselves doing a series of body movements. Participants were asked to commit to 6 online Zoom sessions. During these sessions, artist and participants discussed the evolution of the project and reviewed the developing video, as well as the next set of exercises for the following session.”
I have known Mona Ayyash for over 17 years now. We went to university together, were part of an art collective as students and are friends. When I saw her open call I applied almost out of jest and curiosity, but she took my application seriously and after an interview I was accepted into the project, along with a writer, an architect, a literature student, and a dancer. I was the only practicing visual artist in the group , yet I felt utterly out of my depth as my work has never included my own body the way I had to explore and express through video. Mona would give us prompts and directions every zoom meeting, and we spent months creating visuals and filming ourselves. She provided us with a phone tripod, and that became the only standard tool we were all using. We all had different methods to film ourselves.
We ultimately ended up becoming an intimate group, even though we never met physically during the project itself thanks to Covid restrictions. Our work was a reflection of each other, a response to the pandemic, a study on the boredom of existence, and a response to the artist in charge. Mona led us with gentle yet challenging thought processes, prompts and assignments, leading us to create more and more.
We would submit our videos to the artist before every Zoom session and we would view, discuss and breakdown what we could do next. We would sway between philosophical discussions to mechanical, discussing movement and subtle changes that affect the visual in various ways. I was personally obsessed with lighting during the project, and that bled into other people considering light as well. We all influenced each other. We inspired each other through movement. We would feed off each other and that helped each of us grow and explore. We had visual conversations through the videos and our movements. If I made a video twisting my arm, another would respond with a similar movement, creating chain reactions that were quite intriguing and strangely surprising. We kept reaching out through the visual to each other. A movement as simple as moving a knee from one side to the next became exciting to us all. We would gasp often watching each other make the most simple of movements. Mona would fuel us with questions, thoughts and movement requests.
After we were done, Mona went to work with our creations and ended up making one of the most haunting visual works I have ever been a part of.
Warehouse 421 hosted a zoom artist talk where we all got to reflect on the project.
Here it is in it’s entirety !
The Artist Talk we had discussing our unique collaborative experience with artist Mona Ayyash hosted by Warehouse 421 - Hosted by Mays Al Baik
The talk ended with so much emotion for us all. I think all of us teared up when we realized what we had done together. It was intimate. It was special. It was real. I took a screenshot of the moment where I was tearing up and noticed the same in the others and made a small collage for myself so I never forget the purity of that moment.
Jameel Art Center displayed the work in the group show The Distance from Here.
Here are some shots of the opening night that I took between the excitement and the anxiety of being put on display.
This was a rather strange way for me to end up in an exhibition, even though I was credited as a collaborative artist, I was really the subject of the work. None of us had seen the final composition Mona Ayyash had created until the opening night at Art Jameel.
We were all hypnotized by the collage of videos that was created by the artist. It was strange to stare at your body parts in public for 32 minutes straight. Imagine it. You on a giant screen. Strangers staring. Your legs revealed. Your stomach. Your back. Your skin. All the things that we hide, were suddenly on display. We had to be so vulnerable to create these visuals, and it felt safe when it was just the group on zoom, but suddenly we were outed in a public space. We knew this would happen, but I for one was not able to comprehend what it meant and how it would feel until I was standing in that room.
For me personally what stood out the most was just how much I was in the finished art film. It felt like it was about me. I often wonder if the others felt the same.
Ego is in the eye of the beholder ? I felt like I was in 75% of the shots. I even asked the artist if I was imagining things, as I keep seeing myself over and over, and she confirmed to me that yes, I was in it quite a bit. I will never know why my body parts seemed to me to be such lynchpin in the art piece, and how much is perceived importance, exaggerating my place in the artwork and the artist’s perspective, and how much of it was real. Such a surreal experience overall. I cannot remove myself far enough from the work to see it as it truly is.
The Distance From Here exhibition then traveled to Hayy Jameel in Jeddah for the of summer 2022 and is on until October.
So now our bodies, our limbs, our shoulders and our folding belles are in Saudi Arabia, playing on a loop, moving slowly but surely.
Almost a year later, I still think about the strangeness of the project, the intimacy of the group, and the pressure of the public exposure felt within me. It was overall a beautiful experience and has opened me up to more collaborative projects in the future.
Speaking to Shamma many months later, she expressed how alienated she felt watching herself in the final video and how liberated she felt to have her face disconnected from her body ( she pointed out the irony in that as a woman). “I felt like I was tied to a movement that was much less about my body and more about the visual of movements together”.
Shamma smartly kept notes from our sessions of thoughts that stood out to her, and she gave me permission to share some.
My favorite sentence from her notes : “The body is limited in a sense that it can only do so much to heal itself from its own exhaustion and pain “
We all had no idea what it would look like until the opening day, and for sure there was ego involved in questioning which shots of ours made it into the work. How they sit together, who’s point in the same movement was loudest.
The best thing to come out of this project for me, besides making a beautiful work of art with an old friend was honest friendships with the participants. More than a year later we communicate often. We don’t make artwork together but we support each other in so many other ways, by just keeping communication open. Kind, honest and open friendships mean the world to me, and I will be forever grateful to Mona for introducing me to Olivia, Iñes, Shammako and Mohammad. I reach out to them for the most random thoughts, and they do the same. Mona created an unofficial collective to create 1 artwork, and we ended up just seeing each other as support systems for the difficult moments we all face in our lives.
You can see an excerpt of the project on the artist’s website here :Folding Bellies
Courtesy of the artist
This project was supported by Warehouse421,
Mina Zayed, Abu Dhabi