{"id":10278,"date":"2018-09-10T15:16:29","date_gmt":"2018-09-10T15:16:29","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/artjournalstg.wpenginepowered.com\/?p=10278"},"modified":"2020-07-27T19:59:03","modified_gmt":"2020-07-27T19:59:03","slug":"exhibition-situations-allyson-purpura-in-conversation-with-elizabeth-rodini","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/artjournal.collegeart.org\/?p=10278","title":{"rendered":"Exhibition Situations: Allyson Purpura in Conversation with Elizabeth Rodini"},"content":{"rendered":"

World on the Horizon: Swahili Arts Across the Indian Ocean <\/em>opened at the Krannert Art Museum (KAM), University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, in August 2017, and was recently on view at the National Museum of African Art (NMAfA) at the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C. Co-organized by Prita Meier, now associate professor of art history at New York University, and Allyson Purpura, senior curator and curator of global African art at KAM, the exhibition examines the Swahili coast as a space of encounter articulated through multifaceted, migratory objects. Six thematic sections take visitors into the streets and homes of Swahili port towns, investigating the arts of diplomacy and trade, the built environment and domestic interiors, society and fashion, and spiritual knowledge and pious devotion. A related catalogue (published by KAM and Kinkead Pavilion, 2018) includes twenty articles by a range of European, American, and African scholars. The exhibition will be presented in its final venue at the Fowler Museum at the University of California, Los Angeles from October 21, 2018\u2013February 10, 2019.<\/p>\n

Elizabeth Rodini visited World on the Horizon<\/em> at NMAfA, then spoke to Purpura about the conceptual structure of the exhibition, its engagement with geographical essentialism and the politics of place, as well as the complexities of presenting an exhibition about mobility and transformation in a static gallery space.  <\/em>What follows is an edited transcript of Rodini and Purpura\u2019s conversation, conducted via Skype in July 2018.<\/p>\n

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Elizabeth Rodini:<\/strong> Let\u2019s begin at the beginning: did you and Prita start with key objects and arrive at the theme of the exhibition, or did the theme drive the selection of objects? How did those elements speak to one another? I ask because different sorts of institutions have different working methods, and I\u2019m sure preparation was a long process.<\/p>\n

Allyson Purpura:<\/strong> It was a very long process.  The theme definitely came before the objects, because Prita and I had been doing research independently on the coast for many years. We both loved the idea of doing an exhibition about the Swahili coast as an intersectional, interstitial region connecting the Indian Ocean and the African interior. When Prita came on board at the University of Illinois, we already knew each other\u2019s work and we thought, we really have to do this<\/em>. It was like spontaneous combustion.<\/p>\n

So we started thinking about what kinds of objects could possibly tell these very complicated stories of confluence and mobility. The paradox, really, lies in presenting such stories with inert objects in fixed vitrines within galleries that are also contained. That\u2019s often the challenge for curators working with concepts of mobility and fluidity.<\/p>\n

And there are so many different kinds of stories that are embedded in these objects: sociohistorical stories, stories about Swahili cultural life, but also stories about globalism, empire, and the coming together of visual motifs and aesthetic sensibilities\u2014the objects themselves instantiate the fluid relations and intersectionality of the coast.<\/p>\n

So the question became: which objects could tell the stories of movement and transculturation that we wanted to tell, and how could we open those stories up? And the other way round: what do these objects want to tell us<\/em>? How do we show that the arts of the Swahili coast are very much \u201cof the coast\u201d and yet global at the same time? How we read the objects, the cues we take, depends of course on our own philosophical, political ways of thinking about the Swahili coast.<\/p>\n

Rodini:<\/strong> Your point about fixity and unfixity is important. What are some curatorial devices you thought would be effective in helping unfix static objects and challenge the stasis of geography?<\/p>\n

Purpura:<\/strong> Three strategies come to mind. The first, and most important, is object adjacency. We tried to take objects from different geographical regions and different time periods and place them in conversation with each other. Of course the text helps to link them, but visually, kinship between the objects was key. That kinship opens up the critical capacity of the object; the relationality between objects is where the stories emerge. That\u2019s where we begin to be able to push against the stasis and fixity of exhibitions\u2014by trying to listen to the tension or the dialogue those objects are having through adjacency.<\/p>\n

Rodini:<\/strong> Is there an example you\u2019d point to of a particularly successful grouping of objects, one that did exactly what you wanted?<\/p>\n

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Visitors viewing oliphants and Makonde masks in World on the Horizon: Swahili Arts Across the Indian Ocean<\/em>, Krannert Art Museum, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. Photograph by Julia Nucci Kelly, \u00a9 The Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois, 2017.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

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Makonde lipiko<\/em> mask, Mozambique, Makonde, mid-twentieth century, wood, pigments. Courtesy of Queens Community College Art Gallery, The City University of New York, no. 13-02-03. Photograph by Chris Brown<\/a>, 2017.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Purpura:<\/strong> One case of objects that was visually powerful held mid-twentieth-century Makonde masks from Mozambique, and ivory Kongo and Kuba oliphants from central Africa made in the late nineteenth or early twentieth century. The masks tell the story of the representation of outsiders in the Makonde world view, revealing the cosmopolitan perspectives of artists who were themselves migrating between Tanzania and Mozambique and also being exposed to the worldliness of the coast.  They are carved wood\u2014wonderful spherical forms that create a lively visual tension with the gorgeous horizontal and vertical sweeps of the ivory oliphants. The oliphants convey histories of the sovereignty and independence of central African kingdoms, but one of them was also a presentation piece, likely commissioned by a European from an African artist.<\/p>\n

So these clusters created a story about connectivity and mobility in eastern and central Africa in ways that were quite distinct and yet that had strong connections with each other. The ivory oliphants also open up stories of the slave trade; and like nearly all east Africans historically, Makonde people were affected by the slave trade, but also reconstituted themselves.<\/p>\n

Rodini:<\/strong> I found that point particularly fascinating, about populations that were reformed through these mobilities as well.<\/p>\n

Purpura:<\/strong> The larger story is one of resilience and reconstitution, but also of the devastating and brutal effects of slavery, told through the themes of movement, encounter, and self-awareness. These are also very \u201creflexive\u201d objects in that they were produced with viewers in mind. In a sense, they refer to or mediate relationships: to an audience, an interlocutor, and also the histories in which they were embedded.<\/p>\n

Another compelling adjacency was in the \u201cPresence of Words\u201d section of the exhibition. A case of illuminated Swahili Qur\u2019ans was installed at a right angle to a case of bicycle mud flaps from Zanzibar, which was decorated with Swahili sayings. The flaps demonstrated the pleasure Swahili coast residents take in language and its visual form. While the written word, as the word of God, is highly ornamented in the Qur\u2019ans, words themselves are the agent of ornamentation on these playful mud flaps.<\/p>\n

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Installation of Swahili Qur’ans and bicycle mud flaps in World on the Horizon: Swahili Arts Across the Indian Ocean<\/em>, Krannert Art Museum, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. Photograph by Julia Nucci Kelly, \u00a9 The Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois, 2017.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Rodini:<\/strong> It\u2019s interesting to consider \u201cadjacency\u201d as a lived concept as well. The context of your exhibition is the Swahili coast, it\u2019s all about proximity and interconnectivity, and yet this coast today also has very clear political definitions and, I\u2019m sure, many fraught international and internal relationships. So I wondered if that ever became an issue with your African collaborators and lenders\u2014along the lines of, say, we\u2019d prefer you talk about this as \u201cKenyan\u201d as opposed to \u201cSwahili.\u201d Is that something that you had to confront as you were working with these objects?<\/p>\n

Purpura:<\/strong> That’s a great question, and it happened in a different sort of way. The project is really about an arena, a whole region, from central Africa to India and beyond, largely during the age of empire. But it is also a story of interaction and exchange as seen through the location and lens of the Swahili coast, a place that is itself interstitial\u2014that brings all these people and things together, yet is a place in itself too.<\/p>\n

Thinking about the globality of Africa tends to be dominated, at least in this hemisphere, by a transatlantic orientation: Africa is seen as global toward the West. But of course Africa is global to the East and South as well. While most of our Kenyan colleagues were Swahili, from the coast, others were not. Yet all were very excited to use Swahili arts as<\/em> Kenyan arts, to help broaden the story of African globality and Kenya\u2019s contributions to it.<\/p>\n

Such confluence and globality is not just a Swahili story. It’s the whole of Africa. Central Africa, for instance, is a kind of ocean in itself. People like to talk about \u201cthe\u201d Luba, Kuba, Tabwa, and the Lega\u2014but these people were moving and shaking for thousands of years before they became siloed into distinct categories, which are themselves artifacts of colonial-era anthropological and art-historical epistemologies. You know, territories were always shifting, chieftaincies rising and falling, cultural histories blurring and merging.<\/p>\n

But to get back to your question: though it\u2019s really context-specific, some political tensions linger between coastal and inland residents that stem from conflicts over rights to land, political power, citizenship, and resources that can be traced back to the slave trade and to ethnic, racial, class, and labor politics under the sultanate and colonialism. These intersecting histories produced situations in which Swahili coast residents with family connections to the Middle East, for instance, were seen as \u201cforeigners,\u201d interlopers, as not \u201cnative\u201d to the coast, while at one point in Zanzibar\u2019s history, it was labor migrants from the mainland, and their descendants, who were seen as foreigners.  From such politics emerged contestations of belonging and entitlements, controversy over property rights, the movement of global capital and investments being controlled by one group over another, and the like.<\/p>\n

So, maybe ironically, objects embodying histories of cultural movement and mixing can get caught up in these intraregional politics as well.<\/p>\n

Rodini: <\/strong>Can you tell me more about how that played out in your exhibition?<\/p>\n

Purpura:<\/strong> Well, we were hoping to borrow two Swahili siwas<\/em>, magnificent, monumental side-blown horns, one brass and one ivory, from the NMK. Like the oliphants from central Africa we talked about earlier, these late eighteenth-century siwas are vital symbols of northern Swahili sovereignty and identity, and are imbued as well with spiritual power. The ivory siwa is on view in Nairobi and the brass one is in Lamu, on the Swahili coast. Our loan request was turned down as their importance as iconic objects of Kenyan cultural heritage was just too great to allow them to travel. Also, the ivory horn was already the subject of discussion between Nairobi and Lamu\u2014it has been on view at the NMK in Nairobi for decades, but the elders of Lamu have asked to bring the siwa back to the Lamu museum, to the vicinity of its origin. And so when we<\/em> came along asking to borrow it for our North American exhibition, well, that just was not the right thing to do! And then there\u2019s the ivory issue\u2014the strict laws governing even antique ivory\u2019s transport, its implication in the violent decimation of elephant populations\u2014that\u2019s a key part of the story that necessarily prevented this loan from going through.<\/p>\n

Rodini: <\/strong>That\u2019s fascinating\u2014the stories of what does not<\/em> make it into an exhibition can be as revealing of social and political configurations as the exhibition itself. Once you had a firm sense of what you would and would not be able to include, how did you go about organizing an installation that could communicate these various complexities?<\/p>\n

Purpura: <\/strong>Design of the gallery space was critical. At KAM, we worked with Rice+Lipka Associates, an architectural design firm based in New York City. They created a restrained, very elegant installation that gestured toward the monumentality of the striking coral rag architecture of Swahili port towns. Following cues from images Prita and I provided them of Lamu and Zanzibar towns, Rice+Lipka designed a layout that was both open and intimate, with sight lines across the galleries that created fortuitous adjacencies and connections across themes; they also painted the galleries in light gray and white tones that suggested the geometric play of light and shadow that animates the old town alleyways.<\/p>\n

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Introductory gallery, World on the Horizon: Swahili Arts Across the Indian Ocean<\/em>, Krannert Art Museum, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. Photograph by Julia Nucci Kelly, \u00a9 The Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois, 2017.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n
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Installation view showing floor-to-ceiling projected photograph of ornate plasterwork and wall niches (zidaka<\/em>) in a stone mansion in Lamu, Kenya, ca. 1920s. World on the Horizon: Swahili Arts Across the Indian Ocean<\/em>, Krannert Art Museum, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. Photograph by Julia Nucci Kelly, \u00a9 The Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois, 2017.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n
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View of thematic sections “Between Land and Sea: Objects in Motion” and “Architecture of the Port” in World on the Horizon: Swahili Arts Across the Indian Ocean<\/em>, Krannert Art Museum, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. Photograph by Julia Nucci Kelly, \u00a9 The Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois, 2017.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Rodini:<\/strong> So object adjacency was one strategy for unfixing these objects and their geographies, but you mentioned that there were two others.<\/p>\n

Purpura:<\/strong> Another is how we thought about the text. We knew how complicated these stories were, and we had relatively long labels\u2014at a university museum, we have a bit more leeway there than other sorts of museums do! We used a three-tiered approach\u2014thematic section texts, \u201cgang\u201d labels, and individual object labels1<\/a><\/sup>\u2014which nests layers of explication within those three levels. But that\u2019s pretty standard practice.<\/p>\n

Rodini:<\/strong> One detail that struck me as unusual in your labels was your attention to where objects were collected, in addition to where they were likely produced. Is that typical with these sorts of materials as a way of identifying them, or is it something you included to make another sort of point?<\/p>\n

Purpura:<\/strong> It was the best way forward because of the nature of the object histories. We’ve lost nearly all the original collecting information; and we don’t typically have records of artists’ origin, or of where objects were actually fabricated.<\/p>\n

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Introductory case, World on the Horizon: Swahili Arts Across the Indian Ocean,<\/em> Krannert Art Museum, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. Photograph by Julia Nucci Kelly, \u00a9 The Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois, 2017.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n
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View of silver jewelry in thematic section “Ocean of Adornment” in World on the Horizon: Swahili Arts Across the Indian Ocean<\/em>, Krannert Art Museum, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. Photograph by Julia Nucci Kelly, \u00a9 The Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois, 2017.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Take the introductory case in the KAM presentation, which was one of our favorites. It had, among other objects, a large silver bangle collected in Zanzibar, and two gold ear spools also collected in Zanzibar\u2014but where were these actually made? Of course an object has an origin, it was made some place, but these objects\u2014or their designs\u2014were highly mobile. It becomes a story of the multiple origins and intersecting trajectories of any one object. I may have a hunch that that bangle was made in Yemen because of its design, but there are lots of these bangles found in Zanzibar, too. Perhaps they were brought there by Yemeni women as part of their family heirlooms; or maybe they were fabricated in Zanzibar by local silversmiths. That\u2019s what we’re talking about when we talk about confluence.<\/p>\n

Rodini:<\/strong> And was this the problem that prompted you to do the video piece that was at the opening of the exhibition?<\/p>\n

Purpura:<\/strong> Yes, that’s it exactly.  The video, produced by the design firm Night Kitchen Interactive, was a third strategy for telling stories of mobility within the space of an exhibition. We didn\u2019t want to be too didactic about this. Our original idea was to have a large, immersive room that would convey connectivity and movement in an impressionistic, atmospheric kind of space.<\/p>\n

What we ended up doing, though, was more filmic, more narrative than atmospheric. At KAM the video was shown on a twelve-by-eight-foot wall by a\u2014magical!\u2014short-throw projector. So it was the first thing you encountered when you walked into the gallery, this huge wall, boom. Just right at you, twelve feet of the Indian Ocean.  We really wanted movement, we wanted it to be even vertiginous\u2014<\/p>\n

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View of introductory video projection, World on the Horizon: Swahili Arts Across the Indian Ocean<\/em>, Krannert Art Museum, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. Photograph by Julia Nucci Kelly, \u00a9 The Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois, 2017.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n
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View of visitors watching introductory video, World on the Horizon: Swahili Arts Across the Indian Ocean<\/em>, Krannert Art Museum, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. Photograph by Allyson Purpura, 2018.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Rodini:<\/strong>  You’re on the boat, it\u2019s rocking back and forth . . .<\/p>\n

Purpura:<\/strong> Yes. And then of course the soundscape\u2014the creaking of the dhow and a little bit of ocean and then the bustling sound of the streets . . .<\/p>\n

The challenge Prita and I put to Matthew Fisher and Valentina Feldman at Night Kitchen was: how do we visualize this vast geographic reach, the movement and multiplicity and connectivity, all this stuff going on at the same time? And there’s the history, too. How do we convey the temporal and spatial stories simultaneously? Night Kitchen came up with the idea of doing what they called object \u201cexplorations.\u201d<\/p>\n

They created a \u201cgeo-legend\u201d on the bottom of the screen, and different parts of the selected objects illuminated in sync with different places around the Indian Ocean, Africa, and Europe.  This hinted at how the form or ornamentation of any one object had multiple possible cultural influences; it also conveyed a sense of itinerancy.<\/p>\n