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CONVERSATIONS
Reshaping the Politics of Visual Representation
A conversation with Ruanne Abou-Rahme, Iris Kensmil, Edwin Nasr, Sawangwongse Yawnghwe and Vivian Ziherl
Vivian Ziherl (VZ): You’ve all been invited as artists today because of where your work sits within bigger conversations around representation and power, particularly as they intersect with both the legacies and ongoing manifestations of colonialism and state violence.
To give some Dutch contextualization, I’d also like to cite the important work of Gloria Wekker, who, via Edward Said, points to ‘the cultural archive’ in order to unpack how cultural references are socially coded in tandem with the memory politics by which historical violence is registered or suppressed. For you Iris, this is mobilized explicitly amid a Dutch history of portraiture relative to social power and prestige, and which you displace in relation to the subjects of your painting; Black women revolutionaries like American civil-rights icon Angela Davis or anti-conolonial Comintern member Hermina Huiswoud, as well as more contemporary figures such as activist and political scientist Munganyende Hélène Christelle and philosopher Grâce Ndjako. Could you introduce how you arrived at portraiture as “Dutch painter” – and how you grapple with its grammars of representation?
Iris Kensmil (IK): I work from my own lived experience to bring in a Black feminist perspective on history. I research with a focus on achieving a postcolonial future. Another important part of my research concerns styles of representation; [this research] allows me to find out how the complexities of life are archived within art. Artistic strategy implies for me not only choice of subjects but the style of presentation as well. My styles have changed over time. The first break with the lyrical abstract style, which I developed after attending art school, came when I started to paint memories from Suriname in 2003. My work had to become figurative to fulfill this purpose.
I am now mostly known for my portraits. But if you walk through the Stedelijk Museum now, you see a very different [aspect of my] work. In a wooden house I present images of unity within emancipation struggles against the backdrop of memories from my youth in Suriname. This concept demands the complexity of collage and installation. Wayne Modest beautifully analyzed this aspect of my work in an essay called “Gazing into the Blues: Hope and the Archaeology of Black Memory in the Work of Iris Kensmil.”
My portraits of the last seven years are about Black people—especially Black women—who made history, who influenced the world. I do not want to paint them as Black bodies, but as the intellectuals they are. This means that I knowingly look at the techniques of classical and impressionist paintings of historical subjects. I consider the focus on the recognizable personal expression of the painter in the romantic side of modernism less apt for my purpose. With the same intuition, I look more at earlier generations of African American figurative painters, such as Henry Taylor and Kerry James Marshall, than at recent African American star artists.
I think the intention to care for a postcolonial spirit demands this style, even as it tends to be dismissed by the art-critical and commercial realms, which prefer a less confrontational aesthetic.
Iris Kensmil, Munganyende, 2021, oil on canvas, 190 x 145 cm. Collection Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam. Acquired with the support of the Mondiraan Fund, the public fund for visual art and cultural heritage, 2023.
VZ: Sawang, let’s take up your work The 2nd of March 1962, Rangoon, Burma and its knowing place in evoking the archive of history painting. It was produced in 2016, during a residency in Palestine with the Al Ma’mal Foundation for Contemporary Art, and I have the honour to be a commissioner of the work as a guest curator there at the time. The piece cites Goya’s The Third of May 1808 (1814), which commemorated Spanish resistance to the Napoleonic army. Famously, the faceless and murderous gendarmes of Goya’s painting were later cited by Manet in The Execution of Emperor Maximillian (1868-69), where they appear as a French imperial firing squad.
In your own revisitation, you apply this cipher of state repression to Burma in 1962, how did that image crystallize for you in 2016?
Sawangwongse Yawnghwe, The 2nd of March 1962, Rangoon, Burma, 2016, acrylic on canvas, 210 cm x 405 cm. Courtesy the artist.
Sawangwongse Yawnghwe (SY): This event marks the beginning of my family’s exile from Burma. It was the beginning of a traumatic division, the beginning of the loss of my grandfather—my dad’s father. This loss catapulted my father to join the rebellion in 1963, which meant he went into the jungle to fight. I’ve always been interested in Burma’s repressed history and the idea of archiving a lost history. It’s also in a way an attempt to reconcile grief. First, there’s sadness. Then there’s silence, and then after the silence there’s a song. Works of art and the production of a work of art are like putting on a song. [The artwork or its creation] becomes a celebration. This is certainly a way to try to heal this wound, this ontological wound that my family has [experienced] and is still living with.
What heals the wound is the image of the military, the image of violence: only the spear that smote you. It always goes back to violence and its unavoidable dislocation, its irreversible severing. You can never go back.
VZ: You reappropriate the gendarmes as the Tatmadaw, as the Burmese army. Were you making an argument about state power?
SY: I’ve always asked myself: How does one represent the space of someone who has no political rights? The military in Burma has always gone through different reincarnations and positions. During the Rohingya Muslim crisis, [the military was] almost the hero of the nation for pushing the Rohingya out, but then their role was reversed during the 2021 coup: When Aung San Sun Kyi was arrested, they took up the position of the monster again. I think I always try to look at these publicly contentious historical events and issues surrounding Burma’s traumatic history.
VZ: Ruanne, for yours and Basel’s practice, I’m interested in your work between complex archives of embodied video that comes through protest and social movements—as well as the place of raw footage in relation to state and colonial surveillance. You’ve used [this kind of footage] in your recent work Oh shining star testify, that was exhibited as part of the twelfth Berlin Biennale. It draws upon CCTV footage related to the killing of a fourteen-year-old Palestinian child by Israeli forces as he was gathering akub [an edible plant found in Palestinian cuisine]. What techniques and strategies did you employ to disassemble and avoid reproducing the violence inherent in that footage?
Basel Abbas and Ruanne Abou-Rahme, And yet my mask is powerful Part 1, 2016, five-channel video projection, two-channel sound and subwoofer, tools, bricks, boards, variable dimensions. Courtesy the artists.
Ruanne Abou-Rahme (RAR): That was a very long and difficult conversation. I think that you don’t want to reproduce the violence, yet you don’t want to completely turn away from it either. In handling the material, we did make the decision to not include the moment in which he is actually shot. There were parts of the footage that we resolutely decided should not be included. This footage was actually leaked online, and it was only publicly available for a very short period of time. We managed to download it just before it was removed.
For me, so much of that work is about the inability of that material to actually testify and properly bear witness. The formal language of the piece points at the impossibility of such documents to speak not only to the actual weight of the violence but also to all forms of resistance to that violence.
The other archive that’s in the work is the archive of the songs used, popular songs that are really fragments from different songs that are then used to narrate a different testimony. Then there’s all these archival materials, of moments in dance and song, that we’ve been collecting for a long time. It’s really thinking about the way in which the actual physical erasure of the place and living fabrics is connected to digital and virtual erasures, but also the way there is also this surveillance factor that keeps returning in digital and virtual spheres, like a reembodiment. It’s sitting in that tension.
I think there are other archives that are doing the actual witnessing in the piece, whereas the CCTV footage points out how it’s an impossible form of testament in a sense. It’s very violent, very delicate. There was also something about its erasure, its withdrawal that [made it] significant for us to recirculate—and to then really think about how to go about that. That’s how the formal and political language of the piece emerged.
VZ: I’m wondering if you could also speak about how you’ve evolved that sculptural vocabulary, if there were particular images that provoked it early on in your practice?
RAR: I think it really comes more from the issue of pursuing the archive and the presentation when it comes to Palestine or when it comes to any situation of this position. Edward Said reminds us, in his book After the Last Sky, that images used to represent us only diminish us further. That flattening of the image is also for art a real flattening of the conditions of being in this situation—conditions where the geography is fragmented, the communities are fragmented, where all memory and testimonies and archives are evacuated and stolen, so you are actually living in this condition of broken parts. In that brokenness, also, some really incredible things emerge.
It can be something that is produced through colonial violence, but also something that then people use and we take to generate all kinds of incredible resistance practices. For us, it is through fragmentation that we are in a way resisting the linearity of time and space. There’s something very central about the body network and the body complex, but also like the projection takes on this physicality, this material to this body. It took years of thinking through certain things that could hopefully give us a sense of integrity.
VZ: I heard you once say that the Arab uprisings would not reach Palestine because it would get stopped at the checkpoint. This is such a clear insight into both the agency and futility of the circulation of images.
RAR: Often, we are actually in places that are, according to the Israeli military, places we are not allowed to be in. As a matter of fact, it’s like cleaning those places and bringing them there. We have to work with very small cameras that are obscured [to appear to be] photo cameras, video cameras. When we were going to the sites of the destroyed village, we also had people from the West Bank who didn’t have the permits to be there. Part of that [visual] language [of our work] is also through necessity, which is in dialogue with the necessity of what happens in these types of trials, the protests, and the language of the moving images.
IK: While listening to Sawang and Ruanne, I realize how important for the choice of medium and style it is whether you intend to expose historical wrongdoings or represent the own force of your people and those you identify with. As Vivian mentioned in relation to Sawang’s work, in Goya and Manet there are strong breaks with classical representation for the sake of articulating a critical stance. In my work I don’t aim to present white history and its victims. I present those who fight against it and made Black history. The closest I came to showcasing “victimization” was through my paintings of slave forts in Ghana. But they are not about the individuals who suffered there, rather my personal empathy with and attachment to the experience of the enslaved there. For that reason, they are more abstract and “painterly” in style. So the question of producing portraits in terror times comes down to either exposing those committing said terror or to presenting counterforces.
Iris Kensmil, Crawl Hole, 2021, oil on canvas, 120 x 165 cm. Courtesy the artist.
VZ: Sawang, the body of paintings you produced during the 2022 military coup in Myanmar are entirely different from the history painting that we see in your earlier work. [The paintings created in this period] were intensely gestural, quick, and responding to an iconography of press and social media. In a way they’re more like drawings or sketches than painting. Could you speak about that body of work and what went into making them during those days?
SY: I was looking to make visible these images that the media is maybe not picking up on, like a protest poster or propaganda images, in order to protest the military and the coup. Watching the coup unfold, I felt completely helpless and useless, [as] most people in Burma [felt at the time]. The work addressed that we want democratization to go with urbanization. The works address these issues in Burma’s vast complex multitude of ethnic nationalities, some of which are not represented or recognized by the state. All their history has been written out. The works are an attempt to find a way to talk about this.
In The 2nd of March painting I showed the back of the soldier because in colonial Burma, when the British first came for us, they were the invisible men: They had machine guns, [and] they could fire at us from a distance. We didn’t know who we were dealing with. We couldn’t see them. They were almost invisible because of their modern arms. Even now, the drone can be thought of as an invisible force. My idea was to make visible something that is not visible. So it’s the opposite of what we are talking about, the culture of visibility in terms of this idea of surveillance.
[The painting] is also [based on] an account that my father had written. He was woken up in the middle of the night. They start firing into the house. My uncle, who was seventeen at the time, went out of the house and was shot at. Later on, I found out that they basically wounded his leg, but had shot him execution style in the back of the head. I showed this bloody corpse being held by my father in the painting. Of course, the official state narrative was that there was a fight between my grandfather’s bodyguard and the soldier. They basically repressed the whole thing. They didn’t tell the truth.
The coup of 1962 looked like a bloodless coup wherein no one died, but in reality, of course, my family and the students who were protesting were killed by the military in the student union building . Again, it’s dealing with this kind of history that we’re still not being told or is being repressed, so I find that it’s sort of my job to uncover [it]. [My work is] a constant revision and reworking. This stuff is still going on now in Burma and it’s just a never-ending process.
VZ: Perhaps it’s an appropriate time to recall that you developed that work as an addition of the Qalandiya International in 2016, which had as its theme and title The Sea Is Mine. [This theme and title is] a citation from poet Mahmoud Darwish that posits the Palestinian ‘return,’ a shorthand for political emancipation and the end of exile. How did this painting respond to that theme?
SY: Well, at that time, there was trouble brewing with the Rohingya Muslims in Burma, and they were being chased out of the country by the military through clearance operations that would go through villages, kill whoever was there, and burn down the village. They bulldozed everything and flattened everything and rebuilt internal camps. Of course, being in Old Jerusalem, there was this sense already. I was talking to some locals there, and when they saw my painting, they thought, “Hey, is this Jerusalem? Is this . . .?” We could relate to each other through this vocabulary of state violence.
I was not addressing the Israeli government. I was addressing the Burmese government, but it was for me quite a positive experience to be able to talk about this topic. When I first immigrated to Canada as well, I realized, well, also this land has gone through the genocide of Indigenous peoples. I had a realization that colonialism is everywhere, [it’s] still alive, and I don’t think we can start to talk about postcolonialism when we have not fully addressed present happenings everywhere around the world.
VZ: Ruanne, Sawang’s description of destruction and erasure recalls your earlier work And Yet the Mask is Powerful, which focuses on the revisitation of the spectral and actual presence of life in depopulated Palestinian villages. [The work] plays on and acts as a representation of a mask, which is anciently a holistic mask from the place, but nonetheless something that avers from the representation. Where national projects are so freighted with issues identity, how did you arrive at the use of a mask as a central feature of the film?
Basel Abbas and Ruanne Abou-Rahme, And yet my mask is powerful Part 1, 2016, five-channel video projection, two-channel sound and subwoofer, tools, bricks, boards, variable dimensions. Courtesy the artists.
RAR: The starting point was a poem by Adrienne Rich called “Diving into the Wreck,” which was from the 1970s. She dives into the wreckage and finds a potential to be in the world differently. We were reading that, I think, at a time when it felt very strongly for us that we were facing the wholesale destruction of complete living situtations. That poem became the portal through which we could think that in a sense, think about what it means to return to the site of the wreckage as a site of potential.
We were very much influenced and moved by people’s practices. We started to learn more about groups of young people that were going to the sites of destroyed villages, thinking about the site of the destroyed village as a place that could be reactivated and as a place that is still living now. It’s not just about the traumatic loss. It’s also the heart.
They would, of course, enter into all kinds of struggles with the Israeli state and it’s still all ongoing. The trips that we made were very much in line with that. As a result of making these trips to the villages, we would find the villages very often through streams and vegetation. We could cut this or dig a tunnel under the ground, and we would follow the vegetation and it would lead us to the site.
It also brought us very much into the sphere of thinking about the nonhuman life forces that are also resisting erasure and are an incredible living archive. The other thing was the mask because Adrienne Rich in the poem talks about nearly losing consciousness when she makes this dive and she can’t breathe. It’s the mask that gives her power. We really were interested to think about that in relation to Palestine and in relation to being anonymous, unrecyclable.
In that process, we came across these incredible Neolithic masks that The Israel Museum had made a whole exhibition for. They have incredibly placed and situated these masks within the mythology of the Israeli state. It was really just an out-of-this-world discovery because their mythology around it was really just fascinating; it spoke to all kinds of mythologies of the state and also the way they completely erased Palestine. Even the map that they produced—because actually most of the masks were found in the West Bank—didn’t have any Palestinian areas or towns or cities.
We decided to write the masks into this mythology that we were making and to also think about this idea of becoming other through these masks. It’s not just stopping at the idea of being anonymous, but being able to slip [between] the two times and places and positions and letting go of a certain subjectivity.
The project is also thinking about how the masks are actually part of a living material culture rather than what happens when the masks enter into imperial colonial museums that fossilize it. It’s also about how the Israelis use these certain sites of destroyed villages and renovate some of them to force them into time, right, so that they’re not part of living time.
VZ: I am curious to know rather directly: Have there been moments in your practice when you’ve encountered censure or surveillance within the realms of contemporary art?
IK: In the Netherlands there is no open censorship, and I don’t have to work under such heavy threats and circumstances as my colleagues here. In the first decade I had nobody around me who made works about Blackness and almost nobody wanted it. Now that for some years the colonial heritage of the Netherlands’ is being engaged with and recognized, I see another purport, the market here prefers white guilt to Black power. Diversity seems more about expanding white society than embracing change, although our influence can be felt.
SY: Yes. In this sense, the only place where I’ve experienced censorship was when I showed my work in Burma. It was at the Goethe-Institut, actually. It was a vast map of this industrial complex that I’ve made. First, they were like, “Oh, we’ve got a problem with the word Tatmadaw. We don’t want it.” I said, “Okay, fine. You can just cover it up.” Then they come up, “Oh, we have a problem with the word genocide.” I said, “Okay, fine.” I ended up showing a blank piece of paper, right, because all the words have been censored. That in itself then became a work of emptiness.
I made a portrait of the Rohingya Muslims who were on a boat, [an image] that had been captured by Time magazine. I made a portrait of each of them and I just lined them up. This was also a bit costly in fact. It was censored, so it had to be shown in another building away from the main site in Burma. This kind of censorship happens only because of the military presence.
RAR: The censorship that we’ve encountered is an ongoing affair. It starts as a silent censorship. I think of the nonpresence and noninclusion of Palestinians and their work or their voices in various places. There is also an invisible censorship that’s very violent that we’re not aware of as much. It’s not surprising that sometimes in Germany, when you’re talking about Palestinian musicians or writers, you realize they are being attacked and they’re trying to pull them from programs or from awards.
I think it’s important to also point to the fact that institutions are actively not recruiting Palestinians to begin with. Then if you are included, I’ve found censorship takes so many different forms. Institutions that have basically tried to bury the show, not have signage to where the show is in the museum, close curtains to the gallery so you don’t see work from other places in the museum now. Then there’s also institutional censorship—when a show is on, but doesn’t in any way get press coverage or see itself getting promoted because the institution’s like, “Oh, whoa, this is not what we thought.” That’s why I think there are some forms of selection in the work that we’re using and playing [with]. I have been asked in Germany recently, the mayor of the place we were in was involved and the institution wouldn’t protect us, so I was forced to withdraw.
VZ: Conditions of impossibility can be inhibitive as much as lack of access.
RAR: Absolutely. [There is] the more traditional idea of forbidding an artwork to be shown. There are all kinds of other words to say it [and ways of achieving the same result].
About the Participants
Ruanne Abou-Rahme works with Basel Abbas across a range of sound, image, text, installation, and performance practices. They have been developing a body of work that questions the present and searches for ways different imaginaries and languages can emerge that are not bound within colonial/capitalist narratives and discourses. The duo has exhibited at the Sharjah Biennial (2023), the Berlin Biennale (2022), and the Busan Biennale (2018), as well as in various museums, including the Astrup Fearnley Museum, Oslo (2023), the Museum of Modern Art, New York (2022), the Art Institute of Chicago (2021), Centraal Museum, Utrecht (2020), and the Bonnefanten, Maastricht (2020).
Iris Kensmil is a visual artist whose oeuvre mainly consists of paintings, drawings, and installations that portray the power of Black people from a feminist perspective. She reinforces the canon of the arts with images of Black writers, musicians, and activists demanding their own place in history. Since 2023, she is a member of the Society of the Arts (Akademie van Kunsten). In 2017 her work was part of the Black and Revolutionary exhibition at the Black Archives in Amsterdam. Kensmil represented the Netherlands at the Venice Biennale in 2019. She shows her work regularly, and her work is in collections in museums in the Netherlands and abroad.
Edwin Nasr is a writer and curator from Beirut now based in Berlin. His work is broadly concerned with art practice’s engagement with the anticolonial Left, as well as its propensity to make legible spaces and forms of capture. He was curator at CCA Berlin – Center for Contemporary Arts (2021–23) and assistant to the director at Ashkal Alwan, the Lebanese Association for Plastic Arts (2018–23); he has held fellowships at de Appel Amsterdam (2021–22) and the Singapore Art Museum (2022). Recent writings can be found in Afterall Journal, Mousse Magazine, e-flux Criticism, n+1, and The Funambulist.
Sawangwongse Yawnghwe is an artist whose works critique dominant Burma-centric artistic language and use investigative methodology to approach philosophical problems about what history means when the narratives of minorities have been dismantled and erased. Yawnghwe has exhibited at the Thailand Biennale (2023), the Singapore Biennale (2022), the Kathmandu Triennale (2022), and the Dhaka Art Summit (2018, 2020), as well as in numerous museums, including the National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Seoul (2020), the Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw (2018), the Van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven (2018), and the Stedelijk Museum Bureau Amsterdam, Amsterdam (2015).
Vivian Ziherl is research and programs manager at Kunstinstituut Melly in Rotterdam. Ziherl founded and directed Stichting Frontier Imaginaries (2016–19), presenting exhibitions with the Institute of Modern Art in Brisbane, the Al Ma’mal Foundation in Jerusalem, e-flux and Colombia University in New York, and the Van Abbemuseum in Eindhoven. Ziherl has also been an advisor to documenta 14 (Athens and Kassel, 2017) and was curatorial advisor to the 24th Biennale of Sydney (2024). She holds a PhD in curatorial studies at Monash University in Melbourne.
