3.4.20 — Waiting for Islam’s Godot
Nearly sixty years after its struggle for independence, eighteen years after its civil war, and nearly a decade after the Arab spring, Algeria is still waiting. To trust the Wallach Art Gallery of Columbia University, it is “Waiting for Omar Gatlato.” Together with an earlier recent report on Gulf War art, it is also the subject of a longer review in my latest upload.
If that sounds like an awfully obscure title for an exhibition, it should. It borrows from a forty-year-old text on Algerian film, well before contemporary African art. That, in turn, refers in its proper name to an older “film classic,” as the gallery has it, in a show about anything but film.
Yet its two dozen or so contemporary artists are not just watching or waiting, through March 15. Many are still struggling simply to break out of old narratives and, only at times, succeeding. Mounir Gouri even calls his video Shipwreck.
Already, you must be bracing yourself for a stern recent history lesson, much as when the gallery looked at Harlem art or black women in European painting, and Louisa Babari (with Célio Pailliard), just for starters, supplies one. In a dark, empty alcove that you might be quite happy to overlook, a voice fills you in on Frantz Fanon, “close combat,” and “colonial pathology.” Sara Sadik appears on screen in vivid colors, but she is just lecturing, too—about beurs, or Europeans of Algerian parents like herself. (Think of Berbers, the country’s principal Arab peoples.) And the curator, Natasha Marie Llorens, plainly loves lectures, especially when they still point the finger at France. The Cardinal’s Arm by Fayçal Baghriche, a gilded arm grasping a gilded cross, literally points one in a largely Islamic nation.
France here weighs heavily, so many decades after the fact—and centuries after Eugène Delacroix and his Women of Algiers. Fanon, who wrote the book on colonialism with The Wretched of the Earth in 1961, served in a hospital during the French-Algerian war. The show’s title also plays on Samuel Becket’s Waiting for Godot, while shunning so much as a mention of Becket’s fellow absurdist and fellow fighter in the French resistance, Albert Camus. While Camus hated Colonialism, he also hoped against hope for a multicultural society in his native Algeria. (And no, The Stranger is not a defense of the random killing of Arabs.) Yet the artists have divided sympathies as well.
After the lectures, Sadek Rahim and Lydia Ourahmane may come off as the most dogmatic—the first with Lady Liberty in carpet fibers, the second with chains ending in dog collars on the floor. Still, one is as funny and wistful as the other is sincerely chilling. And the brutalism of concrete for Islamic training camps, in photos by Sofiane Zouggar, is chilling, too. Titles appear throughout in French and English, while Arabic characters appear just twice. Yazid Oulab places them on musical instruments, reconstructed to map unheard sound patterns, while Adel Bentounsi transfers keyboard labels to a pressure cooker.
Life here really is a pressure cooker and, contrary to William Butler Yeats, unheard music is not necessarily sweeter.
A European heritage appears as a mixed blessing for Halida Boughriet, who strands his subjects in a Paris museum. It does as well for Mourad Krinah, whose abstract rendering of war draws on the scale and color of Joan Mitchell together with a Renaissance battle scene by Paolo Uccello. It may yet, too, for Dania Reymond, who looks back to a French botanic garden in 1832 as a study in acculturation. Self-rule, though, comes at a price as well. That is not western clothing that binds Sonia Merabet. In an animation, Massinissa Selmani approaches a ruling dictator with an electric fan, as if uncertain whether to serve his needs or to blow him to the winds.
The dominant tone is melancholy, as in the archly dour drawing of a bird by Hakima El Djoudi, as Melancholy of the King. Shipwrecked in a rusted lifeboat, one of Gouri’s North African refugees can only strum a sad song while his bare-chested companion attempts to dance. Cheap housing, in wood fragments from Karim Ghelloussi, becomes Memory of the Jungle. People look out over their own country in paintings by Bardi, EL Meya, Fella Tamzali Tahari, and Djamel Tatah, wary or in pain. Tatah’s women also pose in front of a Minimalist red backdrop while just one edges toward a painted shoreline, trapped between East and West in geography or in art. Now that, since last April, a long and often dictatorial regime is gone, you will just have to see where they end up.
Read more, now in a feature-length article on this site.





