Between Vision and Voice, Stasis and Movement: Al Charif’s Mémoire(s) de femmes

The idea of a multilayered interface can be developed, first, in relation to Bissane Al Charif’s Mémoire(s) de femmes (2014–15; Fig. 1). This installation encourages understanding through personal stories of loss. Yet the participants’ oral narratives and the artist’s arrangement of the work in the gallery space produce ambiguities and discrepancies that embody and activate the diverse spectators.

Figure 1.

Bissane Al Charif: Mémoire(s) de femmes (2014–15), “Syria: Third Space,” 2015, British Council, London. Courtesy of the artist.

Mémoire(s) de femmes comprises two videos displayed side by side on plasma screens, a set of photographs, and an audio track (Syria: Third Space exhibition, British Council, London, 2015).Footnote ¹⁸ The left-side video, “Women’s Memory, In Ten Years” (2 min., 56 sec.), displays footage of two young girls spinning or running in circles in a living room while we hear the voices of two women who talk, alternately, about their hopes of returning to Damascus after the revolution. In the right-side video, “Women’s Memory, Home” (3 min., 54 sec.), blurred footage filmed from a moving vehicle, alternating with static scenes from an apartment block, is accompanied by the voices of three women who describe, by turns, their memories of the home they left behind in Syria. On the right side of this video is a gridlike arrangement of small square photographs of personal objects, from jewelry to identity cards. In front of the wall of videos and photographs is a bench with two pairs of headphones for spectators to listen to an audio track of multiple fragments of women’s personal stories of displacement and loss, which can be related to the photographed objects (the track, designed for the audience in London, alternates between Syrian Arabic and English, as several fragments are translated at a time). The objects that might seem, in the photographs, quite ordinary, become, through the narratives, signifiers of loss and vectors for commemoration.

As the accompanying short text states, these objects are the women’s “last personal things, the very ordinary, the things, which remained with them, the things that will never be ordinary again.” The women’s words “capture daily objects,” while their voices function in a similar way to the objects: “Voices here are exactly as objects; they blend, converge and resonate in an attempt to pick up the feeble noise of loss at the moment it occurred.” The work includes the testimonies of six Syrian, or Palestinian Syrian, women refugees from different cities, of different ages and different social classes. It intertwines and interrelates diverse personal stories, while evoking “the travel of an entire country.”Footnote ¹⁹ Given this curatorial description of the work, spectators might expect it to reinforce binaries in the way that T. J. Demos suggests is characteristic of the traditional documentary project.Footnote ²⁰ Yet, although the women’s testimonies do provoke compassion and identification, “gaps” emerge in the experience of the work, which disrupt a straightforward understanding and activate the viewers.

These gaps are produced by the ambiguities and complexities of the journeys recounted by the women, which are enhanced by the unclear relationship between the narratives and images within the videos and in the audio track and photographs. First, in the video entitled “Women’s Memory, Home,” three women describe, in turn, the home (or homes) left behind. The physical spaces, dimensions, and scale of the home are detailed in Syrian Arabic subtitled in English. The first woman provides a long list of rooms, as if walking from one to another in her mind: “There is a long corridor, a door, then a long corridor. To the left of the corridor, there is the living room, then my parents’ bedroom.” The second woman describes the position of the furniture in the kitchen she loved, and the third tells of her refuge on the rooftop, away from the noise made by a house full of people. We learn, in the poignant lines that conclude these oral narratives, that the house was destroyed. The detailed description of the physical spaces that make up the house, which, the first woman says, “I see in my dreams,” can be seen as a form of commemoration through reconstruction, if only in the imagination. The home left behind is described in detail. It is also given a firm location: a camp in Qatana, outside Damascus. Yet it is unclear whether the description refers to more than one home. Spectators might assume they are talking about the same house, but this is not clear. The women’s current location(s), moreover, are not revealed.

The ambiguities that emerge from these narratives recounted in real time are complicated further by form. The accompanying visual footage displays, for the most part, concrete blocks and natural landscape, filmed from a vehicle, while this alternates with static shots of the area immediately outside an apartment block (Fig. 2). We assume this block is the women’s current place of residence. The binaries associated with exile—here and there, past and present—emerge through the contrast between this space and that evoked by the women’s stories. The still shots and occasional views of a dog or cat, together with the sounds of birds captured by the real-time audio footage, convey the calm domestic environment from which the women now speak in contrast with the turmoil of the place they recount. The high-angle shots filmed from the apartment are tightly framed by the concrete walls of neighboring buildings that obscure the horizon, in opposition to the extensive and detailed coverage of space in the women’s memories. These static, restrictive views, like the ticking clock we hear during a short gap in the narrative, convey the women’s endless waiting for an opportunity to return to their home. But these binaries are disrupted. The constrained, static shots from the apartment block, like the women’s narratives, reveal no clues as to their current location, and the fast pace of the equally unlocatable moving images, which merge intermittently into a shifting abstract colour field, disorients the viewers.

Figure 2.

Bissane Al Charif: “Women’s Memory, Home,” video from Mémoire(s) de femmes (2014–15). Courtesy of the artist.

The video “In Ten Years” similarly encourages identification with personal experiences of traumatic upheaval while generating ambiguities that disrupt the spectators’ full understanding, retaining the point of tension between viewers and the work of art. Although it conveys the omnipresence, for the exile, of the space left behind, this video, like the first, does not disclose the women’s present location. The connection between the women we hear speaking and the young girls we see (and hear faintly) also remains unclear. This piece maintains a static shot of the same interior space throughout. The footage of the two young girls spinning and repeatedly circling the room would seem simply to convey a happy and carefree childhood. Yet, listening to the alternating narratives of a mother and her daughter (also from Qatana), we might come to associate the children’s circles with constraint, stagnation, and a life on hold. The daughter, who hopes to return to Syria to complete her education, expresses this in physical, corporeal terms: “Getting my degree would be like life returning to my body.” She dreams of having children “so they can achieve everything that I didn’t get to achieve in my own life.” This video associates Syria with the future, rather than the past. The girls we watch might be taken to stand for a third generation of women, triggering questions in the spectators: Will they achieve what their mothers could not? How will they experience the return to Damascus? Will they return to Damascus? Will ten years be long enough for the conflict to reach an end? What will the outcome be? “In Ten Years” appears to begin midway through a conversation or internal monologue, with an answer to a question we do not hear: “Yes, after ten years, the image is extremely beautiful.” This line would go, logically, at the end of the fragment when the mother imagines the joy they will experience on seeing their village and Damascus again, despite the time it will take for people’s wounds to heal. Both videos lack a clear beginning and ending. They are played on a loop, which echoes the circles made by the young girls. The open-endedness and uncertainty in both pieces convey a sense of irresolution, which we might relate to the ongoing conflict in Syria as well as to the women’s homes and identities in transit. This sense of irresolution inhibits viewers’ straightforward access to the people and lives being portrayed. It disrupts binaries and promotes critical reflection.

The images and narratives in the videos might be seen as “layers,” which ambiguously conjure discrepant spaces and times. Further layers are added by the photographs and audio track, together entitled “Mémoire(s) de femmes, Objects.” (Fig. 3). These move further beyond the binaries of here and there, while heightening discrepancies and ambiguities, which are experienced not only intellectually but also kinesthetically. The potential perception of binaries between cultures is, in this piece, disrupted by the reference to multiple locations. In the photographs we see a Syrian bank note and a University of Damascus ID card, and the women’s stories, recounted in the audio piece, reveal further specific sites, both national and local: “A house key in Qalamon and a house in Abbaseen.… We were walking in Al Qassa’. Then we went to Bab Touma,” for example.Footnote ²¹ The recreation of space in the imagination here echoes the reconstruction of the lost house in the video “Home.” In the audio piece we also become aware of the diverse routes taken and destinations of the refugees, including Jordan, Egypt, and Paris. Further localities are conjured, particularly checkpoints and camps: Hashemi police station, Sarhan Square, Al Zaatari. Multiplicity between these two pieces through image, sound, and naming contributes to a complex impression of the Syrian diaspora.

Figure 3.

Photograph of the installation as exhibited in Lyon. Courtesy of the artist; copyright @INDIZ.

The presentation of women’s personal stories of loss encourages spectators to identify with them. The uniform arrangement of the multiple small square photographs in different colors evokes an impersonal abstract modernist grid, which contrasts ironically with its use to depict everyday objects and evoke personal, emotional narratives.Footnote ²² The women’s memories connect the objects to the country they were forced to leave and, often, to the loved ones they left behind or lost in the conflict: “This telephone is my brother’s, [G]od bless his soul … the smell of my brother’s perfume was still in it when we first took it. It’s very dear to my heart.” Yet, although the spectators are emotionally involved in this commemorative process, they also become aware of the gaps in their knowledge and of their locatedness. Many of the moments recounted and the relationships they evoke with family, friends, or lovers will resonate with spectators across cultures. Many of the everyday objects we see, and hear about, moreover, are not particular to Syria: a hairbrush, a comb, a pile of T-shirts, a set of colored pencils, a key ring, and a Nokia phone, for example. Yet, the work highlights, at the same time, the cultural, historical, and geographical specificity of these moments of estrangement, rupture, or tragic loss through the distinctively Syrian objects we see (the bank note and ID card) and the specific local sites mentioned by the women. The spectators’ experiences of the installation depend partly on their linguistic and cultural knowledge. This is the case when watching the videos, and it is more marked for the photograph and audio piece. The women’s stories, in Syrian Arabic, are translated into English through subtitles in the videos and oral translations on the audio track, whereas the documents we see in the photographs are in written Arabic with no translation provided. Those who are able to read the documents, however, might not be able to identify the accent of the women speaking as from Homs, although this is immediately evident to spectators from Syria (as I realized visiting the exhibition of this work with a Syrian friend). Relationships to the other objects in the work will similarly differ for spectators from, or with varying affiliations to, Syria or other countries in the Middle East or northern Africa. Certain objects, including the Christian incense burner, the Muslim prayer beads, and the copy of the Qurʾan, may be more familiar to some spectators than others, depending on their culture and religion. The women’s stories of their journeys also will resonate differently for people who have themselves undergone experiences of forced exile from Syria or other countries. They may resonate differently for women and men who have gone through these experiences.Footnote ²³ Through linguistic, cultural, experiential, and personal elements, then, this installation (through all four of its components) interpolates a diverse public and triggers consciousness of their positionality. The interface created involves the spectators in a variable process of familiarization and defamiliarization, identification and differentiation.

But experiences of this work are not only contingent on the spectators’ background. The installation is shaped, to some extent, by the narrators who recount their memories spontaneously. There are gaps in the details provided. We are presented with multiple incomplete fragments. Contingency is heightened by the artist’s arrangement of the work. The audio track pieces together these uninterrupted fragments of real-time footage. Further gaps and ambivalences emerge between the audio work and the photographs. Whereas some of the fragments can be related to the objects in the photographs, others evoke objects that are not depicted. In certain cases, more than one narrative seems to relate to the same photograph, and some of the objects depicted in the photographs are not evoked by the narrative fragments. These audiovisual discrepancies echo those within each of the two videos, as the gap is widened through the physical separation of the photographs and audio track in space and the reliance on the spectators to connect them. Spectators can, moreover, enter the space at two different points and can view the separate parts of the work in any order. The sense of irresolution and fragmentation within the videos is echoed by the “circle” created by the installation, which itself has no clear beginning or end.

Al Charif’s Mémoire(s) de femmes can, then, be seen to negotiate a way between iconic images of “women migrants” as victims or, indeed, heroines, and the traditional documentary impulse to trigger identification. The women’s memories of conflict, loss, and complex displacement do engender compassion and involve spectators in a process of commemoration. At the same time, however, spectators are embodied and activated. The interface that this work creates is reminiscent of Jones’s discussion of the tension that is produced between viewers and viewed.Footnote ²⁴ But this is produced distinctively in this work, through the ambivalent positioning of the women and the gaps within and between the installation’s components. Spectators may be defamiliarized, to different extents, as we have seen, by images of culture-specific objects, by Syrian Arabic, or by the Homs accent, depending on their locatedness. This experience of defamiliarization is reminiscent of Edouard Glissant’s use of the term opacité in the sense of irreducible “otherness” in which the self is always implicated.Footnote ²⁵ “Otherness” depends, of course, on who is looking and from where. This work encourages spectators to recognize that they cannot simply and entirely know and understand the people before them. All viewers, moreover, will be distanced by the ambiguities and gaps that emerge from the women’s stories and the artist’s arrangement of them. Such gaps may gesture to nonverbal ways of knowing and sensing, which elude exclusion or inclusion within globalized, nationalist, or patriarchal frameworks.Footnote ²⁶

The interface created by this work also calls to mind Bouderbala’s use of this term. The women are positioned between concealing and revealing by multiple verbal and sensorial, metaphorical and physical layers, extending to the component parts of an installation and the surrounding space. These layers evoke various times and spaces, as well as multiple and transversal trajectories, checkpoints, and transitory “homes,” including the undisclosed space(s) from which the women speak. The women, moreover, in this version of Al Charif’s installation, are absent visually yet present through their voices, as the images in the videos evoke their visions. Their narratives in Arabic call to mind ongoing oral traditions of storytelling, in Syria and the wider MENA region, to which women are central.Footnote ²⁷ The inclusion of uninterrupted footage of the women’s stories empowers them to participate in the work while also creating the history of Syrian migration from which their voices and language are usually excluded. Although we do not see them perform their stories, their voices, indicative of their embodiment, and the evolution of their contingent narratives and the images in the videos exceed the photographic images with which they are usually depicted and fixed.

Al Charif’s work protects the women from binary thinking while simultaneously supporting and emphasizing their agency. It positions women between clarity and ambiguity by combining or alternating between image and voice or narrative, the documentary and the abstract, absence and presence, stasis and travel, control and contingency. The dynamic between control and contingency is extended to the spectators, whose experience of the work is, partly, contingent on the degree of their cultural and linguistic knowledge, as well as their negotiation of the gaps within and between the installation’s components. The multilayered interface allows, in these ways, for images of women and migration that can neither be easily categorized nor entirely separated from the spectators.Footnote ²⁸

Between Presence and Absence, Speaking and Silence: Hela Ammar’s Becoming

Becoming (2019), by Hela Ammar, similarly evokes women’s experiences of migration while avoiding the extremes of reproducing clichés or eliciting compassion yet detachment. This installation, like that of Al Charif, creates a multilayered interface that embodies and activates spectators through ambivalent images and their contingent firsthand narratives of displacement. However, Ammar develops an alternative multimedia aesthetics of presence and absence, stasis and travel, control and contingency, within a specific public site, that is, Shepherd’s Bush Market in West London. This street market, which sells a range of goods, from fabrics, clothing, and homeware to fresh produce and street food from regions such as the Middle East and the Caribbean, reflects the diversity of local communities.Footnote ²⁹ The artist allows further chance elements to impact the spectators’ experiences by requiring them to walk through this extensive, bustling, and constantly evolving environment. This installation was exhibited in July 2019, having been commissioned for the biennial Shubbak Festival.Footnote ³⁰

The multiple layers that constitute Becoming are recorded audio narratives, photographs, the walls, and other surfaces of an outdoor public site and its wider multisensorial environment, as well as web pages containing copies of the images and audio tracks in diverse varieties of Arabic together with transcripts and written English translations.Footnote ³¹ The installation combines the oral narratives of multiple women who have recently arrived in London as refugees, after long journeys alone or with their children from diverse Arabic-speaking countries in Africa and the Middle East, with large-scale photographs of them. The photographs, entitled simply with the name of the woman portrayed, are pasted onto walls or garage doors at intervals along the passage through the market. The narratives of the women with whom Ammar spent time are transmitted by a speaker in two cases or can be accessed by phone with a bar code or a link to a website for the work. The installation can, however, be appreciated by its intended audience—most of whom will not understand Arabic—without consulting the translations. As the artist’s note, which appears beside some of the photographs, states, “By looking at their faces and listening to the voices in a language you may not understand, you are invited to reflect and imagine their journeys, hopes, and resilience.” In practice, viewing the work in the noisy environment of the market, the spectators depend on the written texts if they wish to engage with the full narrative, regardless of their level of Arabic. Some of the texts reveal the women’s origins: three from Syria, one from Sudan, and one from Morocco; others do not specify their point of departure. By contrast with Al Charif’s work, however, their current location is defined. The narratives focus variously on their journeys, the circumstances that triggered them, and/or their experiences of building a life in the United Kingdom. The states of “becoming” they reveal in their narratives are reflected by Ammar’s photographic portraits of the women, as well as her incorporation of the evolving unpredictable multisensorial and multicultural public space into the work.Footnote ³²

The women’s personal, often traumatic, narratives trigger compassion in the spectators while also activating them. These stories, like those in Mémoire(s) de femmes , move the observer beyond a binary understanding of migration and beyond clichés of women migrants while also producing a point of tension that limits viewers’ straightforward access to the community presented. In this work, the stories signal women’s agency and resilience, as well as their diversity. Iconic images of migration are exceeded by the narratives’ indication of a complex transnational space, including transversal trajectories and diverse cultures of origin and transit.Footnote ³³ The speaker from Morocco, Marwa, left at age 18 to study in France and then lived in Latin America for a short period. Khadija (Fig. 4), from Syria, tells how her family have dispersed: some are in Turkey; others are in Lebanon; she has one brother in Damascus, one in Turkey, and one in Lebanon; her sister is in Aleppo; and her nieces are in New Zealand. The narratives also reveal diversity in the women’s ages and generations, their different relationships to tradition, their levels of education, and their professions. Some work with other refugees; others study; Haja recounts her past in Sudan as a theater student, a political activist, a journalist, and a teacher; others are housewives. Some are mothers; others are not.

Figure 4.

Hela Ammar: “Khadija,” photograph from Becoming (2019). Shepherd’s Bush Market, Shubbak Festival, London. Courtesy of the artist.

The women’s narratives convey the complexity behind the term “refugee.” Some recount the violence they endured in their country of origin or the obstacles they suffered on their journeys. Others allude to their suffering in the past but prefer to tell the story of their arrival and settlement. The stories reveal the women’s strength, agency, and resistance in relation to the challenges they have experienced in their country of origin or in the UK. They convey sadness and loss, as well as optimism.Footnote ³⁴ The stories highlight the provisional nature of their status, and their evolving identities. Huda now thinks of Britain as her home: “When I travel to Turkey or Germany or anywhere else, I miss it, I belong to this place because it has given me a lot, and I want to give back. It has become part of me.” Khadija, by contrast, cannot think of Britain as her home: “Life is beautiful here, but it’s not home, and the language is difficult.”Footnote ³⁵ At the same time, she reveals her openness to change, relating how she would like to work, even though she has never previously been employed and her sons resist the idea. In assembling these numerous women’s narratives, Ammar’s work conveys the diverse and shifting identities and experiences of women migrants, and migrants more broadly.

The narratives presented also reveal convergences. A notable example is the view that being a refugee and a woman is a “double hardship”: as Huda says, “it was double the hardship for me.”Footnote ³⁶ Marwa points to the “additional layer of obstacles” she experienced as a woman in her country of origin and points to the “common elements of culture” she perceives to be shared by female refugees: “Patriarchy is a central one. And then there is an understanding of a culture [which prioritizes] the collective rules over the individual.”Footnote ³⁷ Through these ideas, Becoming conveys women’s migration as gendered to some extent, although the range of narratives demonstrates various and shifting relationships to patriarchies and understanding of this culture. In this way, the work avoids encouraging neocolonial clichés of oppressed women, extending to the tendency of certain Western feminists to view their agendas as universal.Footnote ³⁸ Instead, it encourages recognition of specificity as well as interconnectedness, alliance, and solidarity.Footnote ³⁹

The dynamic between diversity and interconnectedness in these narratives of women’s migration emerges through content and form. It is reflected by the languages used. The women all speak Arabic, but some recount their text in formal Modern Standard Arabic and others use oral varieties of Arabic particular to their country of origin. Their narratives resonate with oral traditions of storytelling, like those in Mémoires de femme(s), and the inclusion of multiple stories and varieties of Arabic calls to mind the rich, diverse history of oral literature—and women’s central contribution to this—across cultures in the MENA region. Becoming allows for history (and indeed art) to be made in diverse languages and women’s voices, as well as various styles, registers, and genres. Their narratives are variously prewritten and read or spontaneous, as spectators can hear in the register they use (if familiar with Arabic) and in their flowing, declamatory style or their more variable tone and pitch, their hesitations, and the moments of silence that convey the strength of their emotion. The genre of the narratives varies: some present prose accounts of their stories, and others convey their experience of exile through poetry.

The use of oral literature and spoken varieties of Arabic calls to mind their resistance to appropriation by former colonizers and other authorities.Footnote ⁴⁰ Ammar’s incorporation of multiple oral narratives calls to mind the North African storytelling form, the halqa (lit. circle).Footnote ⁴¹ The collective nature of this form contrasts with the individualism that is central to Western histories of the “modern” artist.Footnote ⁴² Yet Ammar’s presentation of a collective of women, whose storytelling tends to take place in private settings, subtly resists not only neocolonialism but also the traditionally male-dominated nature of this and other public forms of storytelling (for which audiences were also male).Footnote ⁴³

The women’s narratives of double hardship, then, trigger emotional engagement and compassion, which is exacerbated by voice as well as silence. Nevertheless the work retains a point of tension between viewers and the viewed through verbal and auditory evocations of multiplicity, metamorphosis, and diversity, extending to form and language but also elements such as accent and ellipsis. Moments of silence can provoke compassion while also constituting gaps that activate viewers. These gaps in the accounts or poems, which are also perceptible in the oral narratives included by Al Charif, depend partly on the inevitably fragmentary and nonlinear nature of remembering but also on what the women choose to recount or withhold. Some gaps arise from what they feel unable to tell, the recurrent ellipses in certain stories suppressing yet poignantly evoking the “unspeakable” parts of their experiences. The diverse spectators will be defamiliarized to different degrees by the narratives, depending on their cultural and linguistic background, as is the case with Al Charif’s work. The use of oral Arabic and written translation will similarly produce gaps that encourage awareness of their specific position in relation to the work and to the histories of migration recounted. Yet, as in Al Charif’s work, spectators’ experiences will, regardless of their background, also be affected and shaped by such gaps, including ellipses. The allusion to “untranslatable” elements calls to mind the utterances for which Abdelkebir Khatibi allows in his call to resist totalizing ideologies formulated in Arabic or French by “thinking otherwise”: “dans une pensée autre qui parle en langues , se mettant à l’écoute de toute parole—d’où qu’elle vienne” (in multilingual ways, listening to any utterance—wherever it may come from).Footnote ⁴⁴ In the context of Ammar’s and Al Charif’s works, such “utterances” elude exclusion or inclusion within globalized, nationalist, or patriarchal frameworks. Spectators’ experiences are contingent on the participants’ words, which are allowed to develop in real time. Indeed, ellipses, as much as and together with women’s voices, become an indicator of women’s agency and resistance to symbolic violence.

The point of tension between the spectators and the women narrators also is created by the artist’s ambivalent positioning of the women and the exploration of the gap between visual presence and absence, echoing that between speaking and silence.Footnote ⁴⁵ The diversity of the women evident in their narratives also is indicated visually in Ammar’s photographs. It is apparent, first, in their content. The women’s diversity is visible in their ages and their different styles of clothing, from jeans and trainers to various types of hijab. It is reflected by their corporeal language. The women’s postures are varied, revealing their faces to different degrees: some face the camera, while others look away; some smile, while others gaze into the distance. The narrators, in most of the photographs, appear variously in their homes or in outdoor environments. The backdrops also incorporate a wide range of color, texture, and patterning through natural or artificial elements, from the translucent sunlit curtain that emboldens the silhouette of Khadija (Fig. 4) to the elaborate kitchen tiles behind Khairia (Fig. 5) or the bold red painted surfaces that frame a part of Haja’s face. Diversity is echoed by composition, framing, and perspective. The portraits of Haja and Khairia, for example, are close-ups, tightly framed. Those of Huda and Marwa, by contrast, are full-length portraits capturing more of their surroundings (Fig. 6). At the same time, the photographs and the women they portray are interconnected through an aesthetic that reflects the women’s transitional and provisional position between cultures and between their past and future. Their states of becoming are evoked recurrently through the women’s situations between stasis and movement and, frequently, between inside and outside. Some appear beside a window or looking through one. Huda appears on the threshold of her house, holding the door open as she steps out. She is still, but on her way somewhere. Khadija stands motionless, but her gaze through the window evokes the journey she remembers, as well as, perhaps, her hopes for her future. Her stillness contrasts, as in many of the photographs, with her narrative of multiple displacements.

Figure 5.

Hela Ammar: “Khairia,” photograph from Becoming (2019). Shepherd’s Bush Market, Shubbak Festival, London. Courtesy of the artist.

Figure 6.

Hela Ammar: “Marwa,” photograph from Becoming (2019). Shepherd’s Bush Market, Shubbak Festival, London. Courtesy of the artist.

Becoming is evoked, in several of the photographs, through Ammar’s technique of superimposing images. The photograph of Leila and her son, taken indoors beside a window, is overlaid with a photograph of sun-lit trees, the branches and leaves framing and appearing to participate in their embrace. Inside and outside are, in this instance, both juxtaposed and superimposed. A similar process is used to portray Khairia: the image of this narrator in her kitchen is overlaid by an image of a window, once again allowing inside and outside to intermingle (Fig. 5). The upper edge of the photograph, in this case, reveals a further intervention. It shows a fragment of the portrait upside down, so that the woman’s face appears slightly elongated. The discrepant spatiotemporal frames in both photographs might be taken to evoke the experience of dislocation in exile. This impression is enhanced in the second case because the portrait of Khairia is both layered and off center. This portrait also is “fractured” by vertical and horizontal lines, the two most dominant of which converge beside Khairia’s head, reinforcing the off-center focal point of the image. Yet, these disruptive fault lines and the woman’s literal decentering also convey her shifting multilayered identity. The static medium of photography and (conventional) mode of portraiture come, through Ammar’s use of superimposition, to indicate movement and time. The coupling of stasis and dynamism in both photographs echoes the women’s agency and evolution despite obstacles, and despite fixed views of women migrants, particularly from countries in North Africa and the Middle East.

Stasis and movement converge thematically in other photographs. One of the pair of photographs of Haja portrays her with a bus speeding past behind her while she, too, appears to stand partly in a doorway. The other shows her still while in motion on a bus. The mundaneness of her current life (reinforced by the “Subway” advertisement on the bus) contrasts with her narrative of pain in the past (Haja recounts how she and her family were tortured for political activism). Her absent look can be taken, alongside her narrative, to evoke her memory of her journeys. The photograph can be connected, in this respect, to the portrait of Khadija. “Life is starting to go well,” as Haja says, and her physical movement as she travels on the bus can be taken to convey her new-found freedom.Footnote ⁴⁶ Yet, despite her movement, the crutches beside her evoke the persistence of obstacles and the enduring impact on her body of the violence she experienced.

Stasis and movement contribute to aesthetics of becoming in the photograph of Marwa, who, by contrast, stands smiling on a bridge against a background of boats moving along the river (Fig. 6). Her bike is behind her, motionless, yet indicating that she is mid-journey. Marwa’s state of transition and transformation is also evoked, physically and metaphorically, by her suspension between past and future, here and there. Opposites are more subtly drawn together by the different tones of blue in her denim shirt, her bike, and the boats, along with parts of the sky and water. The color blue unites foreground and background, stillness and motion, signaling differences while integrating the woman in her environment. It also unites artificial and organic elements. These elements are linked similarly in other photographs in which the linear frames of windows or doors are crossed by the play of natural light or balanced by organic shapes and colors of trees or flowers. Such organic elements chime with the gradual and less immediately perceptible, and inevitable, process of transformation that people undergo on their journeys. They contribute subtly to the work’s transgression of a binary understanding of there and here, and migrant and citizen, which is produced by the superimposition of images or off-center portraits or, in photographs such as that of Marwa, through multiple-part or dynamic compositions. This photograph can be seen in terms of three sections, depicting the footbridge, the bridge barrier, and the sky. Yet the sections are connected by the color blue, as well as the view of the shifting river through the rigid bars of the barrier. These bars and the edge of the ground, moreover, draw diagonal rather than neat horizontal lines, which intersect with the riverbed. A further (imaginary) line is conjured by the narrator’s gaze, which suggests there are two focal points: one within and one beyond the image. The narrator’s gaze into the distance toward a space beyond the frame suggests, as in the portraits of Haja and Khadija, that viewers cannot see and know everything about the subjects of these photographs, by contrast with icons of migration that are designed for easy and unthinking consumption. Such gazes echo the ellipses in the narratives. The ambivalence between inside and outside is extended in these images to the interaction between image and hors champ.

While Ammar’s photographic aesthetic reflects the diversity of the women and their experiences of migration, it also highlights their interconnectedness by subtle visual rhymes and resonances. These photographs resist the oppositions found in images and rhetoric surrounding migrant identities between there and here, past and present, us and them by holding in tension stasis and movement, inside and outside, image and hors champ , shadow and light, artificial and organic, the everyday and the momentous. In this way, they also create a gap between the women they portray and the spectators. “Becoming,” for these women, emerges as a complex and ongoing process of exchange and negotiation within oneself and with others. A similar dynamic is encouraged in the spectators as they interrelate elements within and between the photographs and narratives, as well as between these components of the work and the wider shifting environment of Shepherd’s Bush Market and between the installation and the online presentation of the work.

The presence of ambivalent and discrepant elements in and between the texts and photographs, reminiscent of Al Charif’s work, activates and embodies the spectators, encouraging a more nuanced understanding of migrants or refugees and a more complex relationship between refugees and citizens. In this case, as we have seen, the women are visible, but they are not objectified (or problematically included in Western frameworks), given their positioning between stasis and movement, inside and outside, and the ambiguity that at times surrounds their exterior, as well as their interior, vision. The spectators’ access is partially restricted. As in Al Charif’s work, ways of knowing and sensing move beyond not only the European and the written word but also exceed language. These visual absences, or gaps between presence and absence, echo those between speaking and silence, or written text and ellipsis, in the accompanying accounts or poems. The point of tension produced through photographs by the artist coalesces with that which is allowed to emerge in the participants’ narratives.Footnote ⁴⁷ This gap is, in both works, contingent on participation at the stage of production but also interactivity at the stage of reception. Contingency, and therefore the potential for gaps, is heightened in Ammar’s work, given its installation in public space at the specific site of Shepherd’s Bush Market and across an extended area.

Between Sight and Site, Listening and Sensing

Ammar’s photographs, which reveal the contingent uneven surfaces of the walls and garage doors beneath, also are embedded in the unpredictable everyday life of the market. They connect the people they depict to an even more complex cultural space; that is, a space traversed by products and people with, presumably, different statuses of belonging in the UK, as well as diverse affiliations to countries beyond it. The images and audio tracks combine with the sounds of multiple languages, smells of food, and sights of clothes and objects from countries in Africa and the Middle East, including kaftans, brass coffee pots, and plates displaying Arabic inscriptions. Vendors, clients, and passersby wear clothing from diverse cultures. The work is part of an evolving multicultural and multisensorial environment, which becomes busier and noisier as the day progresses, shaping individual experiences of the installation. The spectators’ experiences depend, first of all, on their finding the photographs and, second, on the extent of activity at the market. These portraits are placed at irregular intervals on either side of a long stretch of the walkway. Early in the day, they can be located easily and contemplated from close by and at a distance. As the market fills with crowds, though, they are provisionally obscured by passersby or everyday activity. Returning to the market at peak time, I saw that the portrait of a further woman named Khadija had been partially obscured by clothes on hangers and one of the two portraits of Haja on double garage doors had disappeared temporarily as a door had been raised. Other photographs appeared to have acquired new elements designed to extend them beyond their two dimensions: the bike in the image of Marwa was doubled by a real one, parked in front, and the portrait of Khadija wearing an abaya was echoed by a woman passing by in similar clothing. The sound component of the work similarly shifts between presence and absence. The women’s voices, heard through speakers or by phone by scanning the bar code, were muffled or interrupted by the loud sounds of voices or activity or by the intermittent din of a train passing above the market. Their words could, however, be listened to after the event or read online at any time. Although the women’s words could not be heard fully in situ, their voices were nonetheless present and their combination with other voices served to further connect the women to the wider community. The photographs and voices had become an integral part of the daily life at the market, which had produced temporary gaps or forged provisional links with objects and people.

In these ways, the dynamic within the photographs and texts, between speaking and silence, absence and presence, stasis and movement, is extended, moving further beyond the idea of the interface and point of tension articulated respectively by Bouderbala and Jones. The gap between viewers and viewed also is generated by shifts between, or simultaneous evocations of, two- and three- (and four-)dimensionality (time being the fourth dimension), as well as control and, to a greater degree, contingency. Contingency depends partly, in Ammar’s installation, not only on the participants’ oral narratives and the spectator’s position and cultural or linguistic knowledge but also on the use of a specific public site that is multicultural, multisensorial, and (usually) full of everyday activity. It relies also on the extent of the space, the time of viewing and the time of listening or reading, and the spectator’s degree of engagement with the parts of the work presented in situ and online. “Thinking otherwise” involves not only thinking but also sensing, listening, and experiencing in multicultural, multimedial, and multidimensional ways that allow for unheard or unseen perspectives.Footnote ⁴⁸