Third Text

29 June 2024

Ahmad Makia

‘Muawiya’s Thread’, 32Bis, Tunis, Tunisia, 2 June – 31 October 2023

Exhibition view of ‘Muawiya’s Thread’ at 32Bis, Tunis, 2 June – 31 October 2023, with (right) Jan Kopp’s installation Constellation ordinaire #11 (Après, la mer s’est évaporée), 2022, courtesy of the artists and 32Bis

‘Muawiya’s Thread’ is not an exhibition about the history of Islam’, claimed Nadine Atallah in the curatorial statement of this exhibition. Staged at 32Bis, a newly inaugurated arts organisation in downtown Tunis, ‘Muawiya’s Thread’ centred Islam as an alternative historiographic canon from which to contextualise political and personal expression. The audience for this exhibition encountered a curatorial offshoot from some of the usual trends in exhibition-making about Islam. The works did not touch on calligraphy, mysticism, or forms of immateriality; and Islam was not seen here as an agitator to Western liberalism or coloniality. The exhibition decentralised the spectre of the abstracted ‘Western’ as a historic locus that needs to be rectified or retold in contemporary critical practices. Also, it did not bring forth a curatorial speculation on postcolonialism, decoloniality, indigeneity, and subjecthoods that endure systematic marginalisation, such as Muslims or those from the Islamic world, in order to help manifest realities of inclusion and access. Rather, ‘Muawiya’s Thread’ offered a social capture from an acolonial and non-patriarchal reading of time, space and identity.

Visitors to the exhibition engaged with contemporary conditions of living under the auspices of a ‘culturally Islamic’ hegemon alongside accelerating poststructuralist tendencies in contemporary knowledge production and public thought. Thus, Islam became an objectified artefact, separate from its classical portrayal as feverish, enigmatic or esoteric. Losing such qualities, it was narrated through human-made self-selection and practices of refashioning negotiated from within an institutional and political domain. The audience learnt about Islam not from the perspective of the occult and the spiritual but as a discursive method that can uncover and establish alternative meta-narratives about the histories of power consolidation, politicisation and civic-building. Since the exhibition was ‘not about the history of Islam’, it pointed to power, language, revolution and visions outside mainstream media and propaganda. It was a teleportation from an intimate mysticism to a loud world of technoscientific, posthumanist, visually-mediated and representational emancipation.

‘Muawiya’s Thread’ also imagined Islam as a philosophy of ideas and an intellectual system that destabilises the supposed secularity of modern and contemporary aesthetics and narrativisation. This was achieved through the mobilisation of Islamic softpower statecraft, or fitna, as a way of articulating expressions of agency, love, ritual and despair. Fitna, in its most common street-level use, is gossip and badmouthing. In historic annals it is understood as sedition, strife, unrest, discord and revolt. As a historical political term, the term derives from the tumultuous spread of sectarian Islam and the infighting at the turn of the mid-seventh century CE, when Muawiya Ibn Abi Sufyan became the first supreme leader of the Islamic Caliphate. The genesis and establishment of the Caliphate across Arabia, North Africa, Anatolia and its European dependencies, archived as victories after the First Fitna, is a military history which led to the splintering of the message of God and his prophet, Mohammed, into Sunni and Shia Islam, as well as the Khawarej, translated as ‘The Outsiders’, and numerous adjacent spiritual communities.

During the first fitna, Muawiya and the development of his Ummayad caliphate consolidated Islam’s imperial and administrative profile and this has since continued to operate as the at-large cultural hegemony of the religion. Its status has been, and continues to be, forcibly maintained. In the vast civilisation arena inherited from Muawiya’s caliphate, the contemporary Islamic world lives side-by-side with opposing and alternative interpretations of the religion – most notably Shia Islam. Muawiya himself articulated that the ascendance of a hegemonic power was directly attached to its fringes and faultlines. In his own alleged understanding of the collective ‘social fabric’, he says: ‘If there were only one thread between me and my subjects, I would loosen my grip when they pull it, and pull it back when they loosen theirs.’ Interpreting the phrase, Muawiya saw a direct and delicate relationship between the ruling and the ruled. Human dynamism and life in strife, unrest, discord and revolt is central to the monopolisation of political power, yet also provides agency in its associated resistance cultures. Muawiya consolidates power through an acknowledgement that fractures and breaks in the system, rather than an ideal civil harmony, as imagined by the canon of Islam, are a more truthful path of worldbuilding.

Muawiya’s analogy of the thread plays out as phantasmagoria in this exhibition where audiences were asked to look at the hegemon’s visual culture to perhaps encounter an uneasy thought: Muawiya has conditioned contemporary lived experiences more than God’s message has. Taking his lead, the Islamic visual culture of the blissful and entropic sense of the inhuman and non-human, the universe of digits, pixels and shapes, indigenous to Islamic visual representation, is sidestepped. Islam is not a beautified, romantic intellectual system but more a creolised, Machiavellian discipline. Through manifesters such as Muawiya – who sought the development and establishment of absolute and pure power rather than harmony – we come to learn how mainstream religious narratives and allegories are appropriated by self-elected intermediaries who are in the profession of future-making. Similarly, the religion’s followers, and the artists who featured in this exhibition, show similar tendencies of hailing the future.

The exhibition departed from a classical interpretation of the fitna as a world of breakage and discord, imagining it instead as an allegorical motif, a delicate, precarious balance; in a state of kineticism. It suggested a weird interplay between imperial histories of fitna and its lived reality in a capitalist-crisis society. Mirroring this in the exhibition was Amel Benny’s compositional installation using building and scaffolding detritus from the construction process of the opening of 32Bis. It informed viewers of the embodied energy in the exhibition, from its curatorial ideas to the physical space hosting it. Similarly enforcing the materiality of the exhibition was printed matter – notably, from Lara Khaldi and Yazan Khalili’s bilingual booklet Love Letter to Mars, a result of extracts and notes from a lecture-performance between earthly beings after they have left earth when it is no longer able to support human life.

Lara Khaldi and Yazan Khalili, Love Letter to Mars, lecture-performance at 32Bis, Tunis, 2023, originally performed in 2014, courtesy of the artists and 32Bis
 

Slavs and Tartars, River Bed, 2023, installation with wood, killim and books, courtesy of the artists and 32Bis

Nearby was Slavs and Tatars’s reading room-cum-installation, which explicated on the transfer and migration of certain words or sounds through the tumults of religious imperialism by researching printed matter and graphic design. Joëlle de La Casinière’s story-board installation similarly brings together found graphics, illustrations, cover art and comics, rendering an eerie, contemporary hagiography of the Islamic Sufi scholar Mansur Al Hallaj. The medium of the artist’s book was also experimented with by several Tunisian university students, who made their own publications based on the exhibition’s main conceptual guidelines. Another expression through print was in Doa Aly’s performance video installation, which recasts and repossesses the vexed circulation of the autobiography of a nineteenth-century eloped princess from Zanzibar, Emily Reute, who was originally from the ruling Bu Said Omani family.

Joëlle de La Casinière, Perspective transhistorique sur la vie de Hallâj d'après Louis Massignon, 1978, story-board, courtesy of the artist and 32Bis

Exhibition visitors were also confronted by the environmental ruinification brought on by civilisational imposition and administrative centralisation. In these works, the caliphate is made akin to a hegemonic, unseen force realised through industry, materialism and cartography. Amputated body parts in Huda Lufti’s work reflect on the motions of the embroiderer as a re-enforcer of binary gendered identities. Haunting and anxious landscape documentary is captured in Emmanuelle Andrianjafy’s photography of Dakar, as well as in the uncertain zones of territorial borders in Lina Ben Rejeb’s work. Talismanic fabric weaving in Abdoulaye Konaté’s work reveals the trans-African mutations of the term fitna as a ‘political burn’. Meanwhile, Souhir El Amine revives Islamic antiquarian practices cultivated during the Umayyads’ reign, through duplicated homeware artefacts and a personal manifesto on active forms of fitna in contemporary society. Nadia Kaabi-Linke recreated a twentieth-first-century method of public insurrection as experienced in the Tunisian town of Siliana, when residents weaponised their own desertion of their households as a form of protest after the rise of an Islamist government.

The thread that curator Nadine Atallah invoked was felt across the four-level venue, with each floor expressing a hauntology of the present and how art can build meta-histories. In the progressive zones between the different levels, audiences came across acts of walking, wandering and mythologising in Siryne Eloued’s work, while another staircase broadcast sonic diasporic landscapes from the expulsion from Al Andalus of the Sephardic Jews. Elsewhere the thread was more literally imagined and captured, as in Intissar Belaïd’s work with its exploration of the colonial histories of silk spider-web farming, and in the gravitational experiments of Jan Kopp’s dangling ropes made of sea sponges that move dependent on the existing spatial conditions of humidity and air pressure.

Intissar Belaïd, Above Your Heads, I’m Still Weaving…, 2022, mixed-media installation, courtesy of the artist and 32Bis

Other works questioned the hegemonic canon of what is considered the origins of fitna mythology, encapsulating genres from fantastical fiction to documentary evidence. These included the diorama works of Randa Mirza, which recast the mythologies authored during the transition and conversion of the Arabian peninsula’s tribes from their underground and animistic Jahaliyya cultural expression to Islam. The mutation of the non-human or more-than-human worlds are also expressed in Marwan Elgamal’s hallucinatory film about the origins of the universe, and in the overly scenic portraits of Gouider Triki that narrate the rift between the human and the divine. These works were complemented by vernacular Tunisian heritage artefacts of reverse glass and gold leaf paintings narrating the great Arab epics.

Randa Mirza, Issaf and Naila, 2015, diorama, courtesy of the artist and 32Bis
 

Marwan Elgamal, A Green House I, 2017, animated film, courtesy of the artist and 32Bis

Wandering further up the building, the works there positioned the atomised, urbanised subject as the new protagonist under fitna statecraft. Here, the self was the new frontier for revolution, through embodying technology and in making the intimate a radicalised apparatus. Ngozi-Omeje Ezema’s ceramic and immersive installation reflects on silenced and suppressed domestic violences, while Wiame Haddad presented an unsettling video montage of historic mourning and wailing practices in the region, and Dorothy Iannone and Sarah Pucci presented flamboyant religious artefacts as a means to practice parenthood and matrilineal lineage through embroidery. These works pay homage to the precarious, disembodied subject who lives in a world of increasing dissolution and decentralisation.

Wiame Haddad, مات ڨالو [A rumour in the mouth], 2023, video installation, courtesy of the artist and 32Bis

Altogether, the exhibition plotted fitna into several universes or phases, from historic mysticism to material and colonial violence, to capitalist crisis and new-age self-empowerment. The works rendered states of liminality and marginality, edging the thread between different agencies of power. Moving up through the different floors, with several landings and pauses, visitors came across artists who approach fitna as a conceptual mood. The result was a world which lacks mystical attributes. Here was a world of transfiguration and metamorphosis, not of the usual cosmic geometry and entropy of Islam but a universe of posthuman rupture found in paper, in propaganda, in synthetic and plastic forms and a hyper-awareness of material forms.

Sarah Pucci, from Sky Rockets, c 1990s, beads, sequins, pins, foam, locket and stand, courtesy of the artist and 32Bis

The curatorial concept queered the vision of the ‘thread’ as imagined by the iconic Islamic ruler: it is not a web, or a push or pull, but an undulating and suspended vision of the world. It mobilised fracture into an opportunity to visit underground constellations; a condition of transposition, where the sacred and esoteric were not externalised to a spiritual plane but at the heart of human expression and political action. In the absence of mainstream Islamic emotional representations of terrorisation and orthodoxy, ‘Muawiya’s Thread’ expressed a realpolitik of the present: Islam as scattered and in diaspora or immigration, in a state of nebulous enterprising, in weird and alternative expressions, from how we mourn to how we revolt, to how we find the sacred and how we make art.

An exhibition about a hybrid Islam was also a mirroring of and an expanding on its host city, Tunis. Tunisia is an African member state of the Arab League, sharing a small yet robust claim in the pan-Arab liberation imagination. What is well-known about Tunisia is its staunch political class, its mobilised women’s movement, and its cosmopolitan citizen base whose identities counter the more-normative tribal and self-enclosed communities of the Arab region. It is geographically marginal from the Arab heartlands – the Levant, Egypt, the Maghreb – and shares cultural ties with the inter-region islands of the ‘Middle Mediterranean’: Sicily, Sardinia, Malta and Corsica.

What is also known about Tunisia, and neighbouring Algeria and Libya, is the minority Ibadi Muslims, prominent in the island of Djerba – the Khawarej, followers who detached from Sunni and Shia Islam. In their view, much of the end of First Fitna is an end to a certain practice of Islam that they have continued to safeguard. The history of the Jewish community in Tunis is also longstanding, stretching from Punic times to their resettlement in Tunis after their expulsion from Al Andalus, to more recent histories of settler Zionist colonial activity in Palestine. A Jewish community continues to live in Tunisia today.

One of the most important points that can be made about the exhibition’s context is that Tunisia perceives the Arab-Islamic identity as a conquering force rather than as a cultural native of its habitat. Such historiography perhaps lends itself to different vantage points, enabling a critical exploration of the hegemons and inversely creating this formidable exhibition. This sense of multi-religiosity and hybridity was directly tenable in this exhibition that extrapolated its critical reading of Islam from Hichem Djaït’s The Great Discord. In his book, Djaït, a Tunisian, and atheist, author and thinker, deconstructs the history of fitna and the rise of the Islamic Caliphate. It is considered one of the few Arab-authored sources on the history of Islam outside the discipline of western Orientalism, and is by an author not aligned to any theocratic regional schools. The book is a serious and critical compendium of Islam’s political history rather than mythological tales, a non-sacred reading of the history of Islam’s social structure and global presence.

Such an ethos is also found in the cultural scene of Tunis more generally. With the absence of major contemporary and state-led spaces for art, the current contemporary art scene in Tunis is run by individual patronage, gallerists and through artist-led spaces or activations. Most of the newer cultural platforms are engaging with site-specificity. 32Bis, apart from being an exhibition space, functions as a residency, library and a community centre. Many of the works in the exhibition were made by artists who were on a residency or a research trip at 32Bis. It is located in downtown Tunis, when most galleries and initiatives are outside the historic centre. La Boîte, BL79, and the annual city-wide festival Dream City – which uses different historic and modern sites, usually disused, across the city centre – are all expanding on the role of Tunis as a place for critical thought and a questioning of monolithic and hegemonic power structures. The scene shows a strong evasion to tactics that monopolise and agglomerate the production and consumption of arts, emphasising plurality and liminality in exchange and intellectual thought. ‘Muawiya’s Thread’, and organisations like 32Bis, advance a pedagogy that does not claim that ‘the conversation’ is happening at the ‘fringes’. Rather, it demonstrates how cultural production is manifested through non-hierarchical visions of the world and which accelerate the weird ontologies of simultaneous placelessness and placefulness.

Ahmad Makia is a geographer, author and editor. His work spans the fields of spatial studies and counter-cartography, gender and identity, Arab and Islamic history and material philosophy. He is the founder and creative director of HYPERHOUSE, an independent publisher and distributor, Head of Publications at Sharjah Art Foundation, and Architecture and Design Editor at Kaph Books, an Arab arts publishing house. He has published essays in academic journals, magazines, artist books, zines and online. Makia was also founding editor and contributor to the publishing projects THE STATE, ZIGG and Dubailand.