'Cross Currents' by Jill Morgan

Cross Currents

In my thoughts, the threads that hold this exhibition together are like the strings of kites; holding on to multiple coloured forms; birds, beasts or abstract shapes, as they fly on the cross currents of the wind, sometimes in synchronisation, sometimes in contestation.

The idea for this project was located in the specific social, political and cultural circumstances of a postgraduate student; Tsendpurev Tsegmid, who made her way from Ulaan Baatar, Mongolia to Leeds, United Kingdom, to study contemporary fine art practice. Her journey, through geographical, institutional and cultural space has been, in the words of Rosi Braidotti,[1] an ‘embedded and embodied’ process, one that has started a way of thinking about displacement, transition and translation within art practice.This exhibition has emerged as a result of her journey and in the shared reflections on the role of art as a process of mediation, change and affect; a counter current to post modern concepts of the nomadic and globalisation. The meanings of the Mongolian word Odoo and the English word Current are similarly complex, carrying multiple associations of the contemporary and the flows of electricity, wind and water. From an island nation to a country with no sea, our journey is a kind of physical, cultural and social reversal, as the cartography of this catalogue explores in its echoing images and translated texts.

Other journeys are proposed within the Odoo project; by train through Europe and Russia, passing through the fringes of those consolidated spaces of power, or ‘relative peripheries’ in the words of Maria Lind,[2] through spaces where borders are changing, where concepts of nation, border and identity are in violent and complex negotiation, by plane through accelerated time and space, the choice of international sports stars, businessmen, politicians, curators and artists too. Crossing borders in the footsteps of peoples who have historically and contemporaneously lost their lives and their histories in the re-making of boundaries, in enforced displacements, in the forging of new nations, new identities. How are these lost histories and identities recalled?

Contemporary art practices can take up this space of remembering re-memory, re-calling, re-making. The role of film and photography in this process is important in the work of a number of artists in this exhibition in the re-connecting of people to a sense of location and of belonging, photography as an index, where the depiction of a physical reality or presence makes an imprint on the film and thereby leaves its mark in time and space. Indexical art, according to Maria Lind, ‘is a matter of small scale projects, close to everyday life and colored by social involvement and private experience, of a wish to give a personal imprint without necessarily feeding the cult of the artist.’

The characterisation of a nomadic, globalised world that sustains the economic, cultural and political needs of late capitalism has been critiqued by many, and as Homi Bhabha[3] reminds us, ‘The globe shrinks for those who own it; for the displaced, the dispossessed, the migrant or refugee, no distance is more awesome than the few feet across borders or frontiers.’ The potential for this exhibition project to engage with multiple concepts of transition, translation displacement, the local and global is both philosophical and practical – as the organisation of the shipping of metal buckets with holes of text reveals. It exposes a technologically linked global world that is still fractured by wind, weather and translation.

Nomadism is understood and embedded within Mongolian culture in quite different ways to the experiences of artists from the west and particularly to those of us living in a small island with a global, colonial history. The nomadic is a seductive concept within western philosophy and culture, offering as it does a possibility of detached drifting across cultures, locations and spaces and thereby entering a different philosophical and academic space. Flying my kite in my imagination, the winds of Mongolia pull me back to the situating of art activity, as argued by feminists internationally; a resistance to the notion of a universal, unitary humanism. Travelling as an artist, or art works travelling in the crates, boxes and suitcases of the travelling exhibition; echoes of the colonial cultural expeditions of westerners such as Janet Wulsin, who, as Tsendpurev Tsegmid’s research shows, travelled with much accumulating baggage across the cultural landscape of Mongolia in the 1920s, writing and photographing a culture from the perspective of a privileged, wealthy New Yorker, but differently as a woman; creating an un easy archive that now sits in the collection of the Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology, Harvard University.

Comfortable it is not. Dealing with culturally specific moments, encounters and synchronicities across locational space and time raises issues for the negotiation of ourselves as subjects in the world, questions our very sense of ourselves. Who would think, for example, that when an artist from Mongolia, working as a waitress at a ‘luxury’ corporate event in the north of England, a day of racing at Aintree, Liverpool, lifts her head above the crowd of male businessmen in their hospitality box, she sees a horse named ‘Ghenghis Khan’ win over the distant fences? This disruption to the existing constructs of the centre and the fringe and their manifestations in the language of political geography can be explored through the coming together or the curation of ideas within different art practices. As a curator is it possible to think of, in the words of Liam Gillick and Maria Lind[4] ‘curating with light luggage’? My luggage contains buckets, photographs, films, drawings, performances, multiple concepts, memories, ideologies, hopes and fears as well as a number of kites. The process of curating feels more like an act of smuggling; across borders of philosophies, disciplines, cultural dominions, national boundaries and identities. Like economic or people smuggling it operates in co-existence with the state and it negotiates spaces that are in-between, that are liminal, like the site of the shore, in a continuous state of transformation.

‘To become invisible in the spot where you are supposed to be and reappear somewhere else’[5] is a tempting proposition and an apparent strategy in response to the monolithic cultural institutions in which we find ourselves; the allure of the internet is partly to do with its virtual spaces of appearance/disappearance. As Ursula Biemann[6] has identified, states on the edges of the new economic empires of late capitalism are characterised by the need to control and patrol borders, the state legitimised crossings of goods, military personnel, tourists, economic migrants, fishermen and the condoned, alternative crossings of smugglers, clandestine immigrants. To this she could have added government representatives, academics and artists. Technologies such as satellite surveillance, electronic reconnaissance and border video devices play a large part in this new geography of power relations. Biemann identifies art projects as sites where more creative approaches to issues of geography, borders and politics are explored, quoting the ‘Solid sea project’ by the art collective Multiplicity, where the Mediterranean sea is mapped or made solid as a space of neo-colonial economic relations, a non-transparent surface inhabited by tourists, immigrants, refugees, military staff. Making the sea solid returns us to the concept of a land with no sea and the kind of borders that exist in Mongolia with its deep and complex histories of nomadism, Russian colonisation and exposure to late capitalism’s economic forces. This project does not have an ideological intent to map this ‘other’ space of Mongolia, but rather perhaps to propose the idea of ‘transpositions’ as discussed by Rosi Braidotti as an ‘intertextual, cross-boundary space, a leap from one code, field of axis into another, an in-between space of crossing, non-linear but not chaotic, nomadic yet accountable and committed.’

The curation of work in this exhibition project has been akin to a liminal space; a space on the threshold, in transition from one state or space to another, boundaries between inside and outside, public and private. We want to think of the site of the gallery, as an in-between space where active exchange can take place, conversations can happen, ideas and concepts can be debated. In this context, a number of artists in the exhibition make use of strategies of the performative, bringing a physical presence and action to animate their ideas, inhabiting space, moving between private and public spheres. Performance works have taken place in the U.K. and will take place in Mongolia, negotiating artistic, political, cultural and social spaces, shifting the axis of language to the voice of the body. Voices on the wind.

Within these cross currents of displacement, fracturing, transition, we can perhaps see ways to re-define the world, to speak about place, identity, history in multiple ways. The interweaving of the work in this exhibition with the traditions of painting and craft in Mongolia that in their particular ways negotiate identity, location, history will, we hope, open new ways to think about contemporary debates in art and multiple art practices within a local and global context. In parallel to this exhibition project moves the global economic imperatives of urban centres; the city of Leeds seeking trade and exchange with Inner Mongolia, the institutions of universities and governments circling overhead, looking for opportunities for partnership and collaboration. What identifies this project is a certain self-organisation, a working alongside, or between the spaces of institutional control to effect a different kind of cultural engagement where different forms of communication may be possible, centred on the impetus and commitment of a collection, if not a collective, of artists working together. In our situated, multiple, transnational framework, maybe we can approach the kind of ‘relational sensibility’ identified by Miwon Kwon[7]

‘Only those cultural practices that have this relational sensibility can turn local encounters into long-term commitments and transform passing intimacies into indelible, unretractable social marks – so that the sequence of sites that we inhabit in our life’s traversal does not become genericized into an undifferentiated serialization, one place after another’

Not one place after another, but one place to another.

Jill Morgan
Curator
[1] Rosi Braidotti, ‘Transpositions: on nomadic ethics’ (2006) Cambridge: Polity
[2] Maria Lind, in ‘Letter and Event’ (2002) Apex Art
[3] Homi K. Bhabha, ‘Double Visions’, Artforum (January 1992): 88, quoted in Miwon Kwon, ‘One Place After Another: site specific art and locational identity’, London, 2002

[4] Liam Gillick, Maria Lind (eds.) ‘Curating with Light Luggage :Reflections, Discussions and Revisions’(2005) Munich and Frankfurt: Revolver
[5] Roger M Buergel, ‘Curating with Institutional Visions’, in Nina Montman (ed.) ‘Art and Its Institutions’ (2006) London: Black Dog Publishing
[6] Ursula Biemann, (ed.) ‘Geography and the Politics of Mobility’ (2003) Vienna: General Foundation
[7] Miwon Kwon, One Place After Another: site specific art and locational identity, London, 2002