The second wave of Coronavirus is bringing more anxieties and uncertainties to our lives and culture is again suffering with many countries across Europe closing down museums and galleries. Due to the measures adopted by the Brussels government to combat the pandemic, for example, all museums closed down in Belgium and the exhibition "A Short Long History" dedicated to Egyptian-Canadian artist Anna Boghiguian, scheduled to open at the end of this week at S.M.A.K. in Ghent, had to be postponed.
While we wait for the event to be rescheduled we can maybe look at the work of this artist that was going to be featured in "A Short Long History" and ponder about some of her favourite themes.
Boghiguian, born in Cairo to an Armenian family in 1946, first studied economics and political science at the local American university. In Montreal she focused instead on other disciplines, art and music, and started making art from the early '70s. Boghiguian is a travelling artist, a free-spirited thinker on the move, something that has allowed her to take inspiration from different countries and people and to combine in her practice past and present, poetry and politics. In her works her own experiences and news reports are analysed and explored via drawings, collages, cut-out figures and complex installations.
Textile fans should take note of Boghiguian's works that will be part of the S.M.A.K. event once it will be rescheduled. Quite a few of the works originally set to be part of this exhibition move indeed from the history of the global cotton trade.
Cultivated in ancient times, cotton became popular throughout the centuries: the city of Ghent established a florid cotton industry in the 18th century, importing the fibre from the East Indies and later also from the United States (until recently, cotton was spun, woven and printed in Ghent and traded all over the world). Local magnates became rich thanks to cotton, but the history of their success is also linked to the unfair treatment of textile workers and the exploitation of land and forced labour on the cotton plantations in Congo.
Boghiguian created a new installation for this project: during her stay in Ghent she produced "A Short History: How the Industrial Revolution Changed the Pace of Europe" (2020), featuring a variety of cut-out paper figures (stiffened with wax and painted with pigment and attached to wooden sticks) evoking the main protagonists and places of the local history, among them Congolese cotton pickers, textile workers in their modest homes, spinning and weaving machines, ships loaded with bales of cotton, and lost Ghent factory buildings.
The artist started exploring the history of cotton a few years ago with "Woven Winds. The Making of an Economy - Costly Commodities" (2016), a piece that outlines via a series of paintings the link between the American cotton trade and slavery, violence and exploitation, connecting them to the social and racial inequalities in evidence today. Boghiguian retraced through this work the history of African slaves sailing across the Atlantic to the New World in vessels that, for many of them, became floating coffins and she included in the series of paintings also the "cotton gin", a machine invented by the American Eli Whitney in 1793 that allowed seeds from the cotton plant to be automatically separated from the fibre, but that was rather dangerous to operate.
Boghiguian's previous work, "The Salt Traders" (2015), was based on a story set in 2300 about a Roman salt-trading ship suddenly released from the melting polar ice, and consisted in a sail on which a map of the world indicating salt-trading routes was combined with hexagonal patterns symbolising the chemical structure of salt.
"Promenade dans l'inconscient" (A Walk in the Unconscious, 2016), a procession of paper characters - among them Popes and cardinals (symbols of religious wars), soldiers, swimmers, ferocious gods and bullfighters, reminiscent of free-standing shadow puppets - recount the early history of Nîmes, combining it with that of Boghiguian's homeland, Egypt. A large denim canvas dyed crimson completes the installation, hinting at the role of the city in the international textile industry, including the development of jeans fabric or "denim", an abbreviation of "serge de Nîmes" ("a sturdy fabric from Nîmes").
While in "Good Alianore Is Coming" (2020) Boghiguian doesn't include textiles, she focuses on honeycombs that she often uses as symbols. She sees the organisation within a hive as a socio-political structure that is both a monarchy and a democracy, striking in this way a comparison between the natural world and humans, while also reminding us that the bee population is threatened with extinction.
This constant link between art, symbols, historical details and contemporary news is ever present in Boghiguian's works. The artist uses indeed her work to address global issues, to look at them from her personal point of view and prompt viewers to ponder about our collective experiences.
Her histories about the cotton trade are indeed not just a way to tells us more about the origins of the fibre and the slaves who suffered because of it, but to reshift our attention on how cotton helped modernising cities such as Cairo, Mumbai and Shanghai, while enslaving a new generation of textile workers in low-wage countries. Behind her works integrating textiles and her cut-out figures there are therefore contemporary themes to rediscover, from human rights violations, exploitation and slavery to depletion of natural resources and climate change, from modern colonisation to migratory movements and financial crises.
Last but not least, there's politics and irony as well: some of her paper collages on glass panels entitled "In the World. East and West, North and South" show dictators and dubious politicians. Vladimir Putin and Donald Trump are easily recognisable, placed in explosive scenes with assorted wild animals and villains. Terrible and funny they become perfect metaphors for our times. In one of these collages, a monkey with a wide open mouth listens to a screaming Donald Trump. Boghiguian made it in 2017, but it seems incredibly apt for the historical moment we are living in and for the looming US elections.
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