I was thrilled to contribute work to documenta fifteen in collaboration with members of the Refugee Art Project community and my band Hazeen, which took place in Kassel Germany from June to September 2022.
Border Farce-Sovereign Murders-Alien Citizen is a 3 part work, comprised of a video installation, the debut vinyl record of my band Hazeen, and an accompanying zine, which critically addressed questions of belonging, the politics of representation and weaponisation of the border. This was accompanied by 4 short films made by women of a refugee background, which were shown in Kassel and then submitted to various documentary film festivals.
Border Farce is a two-channel video installation made in collaboration with my friend the Kurdish-Iranian heavy metal guitarist Kazem Kazemi (who was detained as a refugee on Australia’s offshore prison camp on Manus Island for 6 years) and the talented filmmaker Alia Ardon. The video alternates between a type of documentary storytelling, conveying Kazem’s experiences of detention, and footage of us collaborating, playing music together, in convulsions of sound, performance and feeling. The first channel gives context for the work and conveys a powerful critique of Australia’s racist border policies. The second channel playfully explores the notion of affect: a relational experience of intensity communicated or felt in the body, which precedes language and reason, and which is too often discarded in accounts of trauma and human rights abuses.
From left: Myself, Hazeen bandmate Can Yalcinkaya and Kazem Kazemi.
Hazeen with Majid Rabet on the left (art director to one of our video sessions) and Alia Ardon.
The album ‘Sovereign Murders’ is the debut record of my band Hazeen, featuring Can Yalcinkaya on drums and guest musicians Kian Dayani on bass, Kazem Kazemi on guitar and the vocals of Susie Hurley. Kazem and I began to collaborate in 2018 when he was imprisoned on Manus Island, which is reflected in these pages from my graphic novel Still Alive.
Alien Citizen addresses Australia’s (and by extension much of the Euro-American Anglosphere’s) burgeoning white-nationalism and the construction of racialised minorities, with a particular focus on where the narrative frame breaks down in the teeth of government abuses. Australia’s race-driven border politics brings into question how the ‘other’ (in this case the outsider, refugee and/or minority Muslim) is historically and aesthetically represented. Alien Citizen was distributed with the Hazeen album ‘Sovereign Murders’, as an accompanying booklet, and was given to visitors who attend the documenta fifteen exhibition in Kassel.
The title comes from the work of Mae M. Ngai, who uses it to describe the modern state’s way of marking people who it deems unfit for liberal citizenship, including racial or sexual minorities.
Accompanying this was a set of 4 short films made by women associated with the community art organisation Refugee Art Project. Those films are ‘Cleaning in Progress’ by Miream Salameh, ‘Neverending’ by Tabz, ‘Zeinab’ by Zeinab Mir and ‘Take it Easy’ by MN (a young person from Iran who had been detained on Nauru). These films were shown at document fifteen in collaboration with the collective ook_ visitorCentre, and later in the SWANA Film Festival in Parramatta (2023) and the London Migration Film Festival (2023).
The really exciting part of documenta fifteen was its emphasis on cooperation and knowledge sharing amongst different creative communities. The Artistic Directors were the Indonesian collective Raungrupa, who built the event around the core values and ideas of lumbung (an Indonesian term for a communal rice barn), which is an artistic and economic model rooted in such principles as collectivity, communal resource sharing, and equal allocation. I participated in some of the large online majelis-gatherings organised by Ruangrupa and had the pleasure of harvesting-documenting some of the artist talks. Below is my drawn reflection on a very inspiring talk about the subject of socially engaged art, given by the artist Tania Bruguera.
After documenta fifteen the Refugee Art Project community has deepened its connections with the Indonesian-based collective Taring Padi, who we hosted for an artist residency and workshop in our Thirning Villa studio in Ashfield Sydney in March 2023. (See the Refugee Art Project page on this site for more details.)
safdar ahmed 