Marta Deskur —Replaying with Kerchiefs and VeilsMarta Deskur —Replaying with Kerchiefs and Veils
By Bozena Czubak
At first sight, Marta Deskur’s project Fanshon II is an audacious combination of Muslim head kerchief and nun’s veils and can be viewed as a delineation of ethnographic categories with all their incongruous similarities and ambiguous relations. Yet, the artist’s approach has nothing to do with the ethnographic turn in art (or criticism). She does not pursue social, cultural and religious contexts as her subjects. Instead, she focuses on visual motives. The images of the kerchiefs and veils are extracted from their context, photographed, reframed, and burnt onto ceramic tiles. Referring to the Eastern tradition of mosaic and at the same time to industrial repetitiveness and multiplicity, the artist creates almost abstract patterns composed of repeating tiles and places them in stacks as exchangeable objects of consumption. One can say that by displacement and repetition she puts them in a postmodern game of circulation of signs. However, the procedure of making the images more evident in terms of their exchange value than in terms of their symbolic value appears to be much closer to the current situation on the market of values apparently redefined by political news.
For a long time, Western eyes have viewed Muslim head coverings as a kind of clich�, almost a symbol of inaccessibility for the undesired gaze. Recently it has become a ticklish issue, even a conflict-generating theme susceptible to various kinds of abuses. However, Marta Deskur has strongly emphasized her distance from this dispute; nevertheless, the choice in subject inevitably positions her work at the center of the continuing arguments.
The first version of Fanshon was limited to the Muslim head kerchiefs and was presented in the K�nstlerhaus Bethanien in Berlin in 2003. After a year, the project exhibited in the Le Guern Gallery in Warsaw as Fanshon II and the element of juxtaposing Muslim head kerchiefs and Christian nun’s veils changed the intent in the show.
The project took a further step into the video medium, and recordings with Turkish and Kurdish women were shot in the streets of Berlin’s Kreuzberg. The artist did not try to break into their private sphere. The sequences of the scenes show them during their regular, everyday rituals of walking, shopping, slow and hasty talks, meetings and gestures. What is more, she did not allow herself to interfere with the intimate space of these women. The camera never moves too close to them. As the artist herself said, she tried to remember that her viewpoint was always from the outside, from a different cultural perspective. Thus she succeeded in avoiding the traps of the West’s construction of the Orient and the Western way of perceiving the Orient as incapable of knowing itself and hence incapable of self-representation. The resulting images are free from stereotypes of monolithic representations of the oppressed Muslim women in the Western media. She looks at the head kerchief as a piece of clothing more or less influenced by current fashion, as a mode of signaling one’s belonging and, also, one’s individuality.
The artist’s view on the nun’s veils in the video recording where each consecutive frame registered the pinning up of the veil reveals a similar distance. The nun’s face is withheld from the viewer. In both cases, the artist does not concentrate on what is hidden but on what hides. Making the viewer’s eyes stop on the kerchief or veil, she refrains from going deep into the individuality of the adorned. Not only does she refrain from bestowing an air of exoticism and stigmatism, she is also far from over-identifying with her subjects. Instead of exploring their images she prefers to multiply them. One can say that what cannot be depicted, can only be repeated, and indeed the images are continually "replayed" in the rearrangements of the tiles. On the gallery floor, Deskur encourages the viewers to make their own compositions of the tiles stored in stacks. In this interactive play, she assumes that the audience and subject can engage in a new conversation of play, overriding that of subjectivity.
