Goethe Institut
20.11 - 26.03.2022
With painting, you know, every mark that’s there is made in time. On a quantum level, it’s connected to all these others things. Like somebody said — the whole idea of puritan painting is an oxymoron because what painting is, is the precise and absolute calibration of impurities.1Arthur Jafa, Blessed Being Black (2021).
Koples boek(e) — headless book.
What is a body without a head? What is a body without a name?
Opaque elasticity — urgent and necessary glitch…
Koples boek(e) is Kamyar Bineshtarigh’s solo exhibition — on show until March 26th — at the Goethe-Institut, Johannesburg. This body of work forms part of the artist’s ongoing research into public narratives and archives of Arabic-Afrikaans. Through materiality and processes of abstraction, he meditates on the textuality of the creolised language.
Writing about Bineshtarigh’s explorations in a text titled Transliteration’s potential subterfuge or/and inhibiting a grammar of opacity? — the exhibition curator, Amogelang Maledu, states:
Without necessarily taking a philological approach to Afrikaans, but to consider Arabic-Afrikaans’ formation as per Davids (1989) suggestions, we start from the creolised Dutch that immigrant enslaved communities of Black people in Cape Town spoke, alongside the Free Burghers. Even though colonialist denigrated the vernacular language, calling it ‘Kombuistaal’ or Hottentotstaal’, the exiles, enslaved communities, and indentured labourers — mostly Muslim — developed the intimacy of their creole language further… ‘Koples boek(e)’ begins with this awareness of Arabic-Afrikaans in Kamyar’s artistic consciousness.
The first time that I saw Kamyar’s work in person — that I got to be in the presence of lingering traces of his process — the words “you said this” were scrolled across a wall below Farsi script. As I sat in conversation with him in his studio in Salt River, I couldn’t help but think about opacity and its poetics of elasticity. An opacity that says something about cultural exchanges, H/history and how the pieces that make up our identities are constructed — and a poetics “that refuses the name as static or definitive.”2Legacy Russell, Glitch Feminism (2020).
- Untitled (Kitaab XIV), 2021.
- Untitled (Kitaab XII), 2021.
Upon seeing Koples boek(e), I found my thoughts dancing alongside Arthur Jafa’s words when he spoke about his own work — Love is the Message, The Message is Death (2018):
Early on I said, ‘I want to see what happens if you crossbreed, so to speak, a J. M. W. Turner painting and a John Coltrane solo’. I mean — one is visual and one is auditory — but what does it mean to, you know, to cross those things, to mix them? And anytime I started talking about or thinking about a mix, or that I’m always very much aware of like — ontologically speaking — the nature of Black Beings and how so much of who and what we are is a product of nonconsensual genetic and cultural exchange… So the idea of the mix — whether it be consensual or nonconsensual — is something I’m really interested in. And the mix as a process of creating monstrosities in a sense.
What does it mean to think about creolised languages — languages tongued out of H/histories of fugitivity — as monstrosities, as glitch and as Error? “Errors are fantastic in this way, as often they skirt control…accidental bodies that, in their error, refuse definition and, as such, defy language. Forcing the failure of words, we become impossible. Impossible, we cannot be named.”3Legacy Russell, Glitch Feminism (2020). This, in opposition to whiteness’ almost pathological preoccupation with purity. Here, fugitivity is positioned within the ideological framework of Black Pessimism, speaking to tensions between escape and creative processes of refusal as life-making resistance.
But what if we were comfortable inhabiting a grammar of opacity, centring unknowability?
Leading up to the closing event and panel discussion for Koples boek(e), I communed with Kamyar again — although this time virtually — to move in thought and conversation through his body of work and the work it’s doing.
Kamyar Bineshtarigh, Untitled (Diptych) (Gairodien’s student notebook III), 2021. Photograph by Ryno Stols.
Lindiwe Mngxitama: While engaging with the works that make up the body of work for Koples boek(e), I found myself thinking about opacity and fluidity a lot — which also had me thinking of the very opacity and fluidity of language itself — even where Arabic-Afrikaans itself is concerned.
When we spoke in your studio in Cape Town, you spoke about your practice as if led by intuition and impulse — almost like a living thing. Again, almost like language. Do you think there is something in the way you create that is influenced or affected by the poetics of language?
Kamyar Bineshtarigh: I think it is, but not in a direct way. You know, when we talk about poetry for example, it’s not necessarily just words, it’s not just language in a sense, anything can be poetic. The way you use materials, the way you render a visual thing is also poetic. It’s not just how you use the words, or how those words make sense to you as a language system. For me, the idea of the poetic is more about the fluidity of the material and the way I make it visual. It’s less about the meaning of the words.
Even when I worked with poetry — like Hafez’s poetry, which is very common poetry to use if you are Iranian or Persian, or if you are an artist who speaks Farsi, because Hafez was one of the most predominate poets — the way I wanted to use his poetry wasn’t necessarily about choosing a specific poem that I found beautiful and then wanting to make an artwork from it. It was more random. It was more about randomly choosing a poem. That is a cultural practice as well: when you are seeking guidance you randomly open Hafez, and that poem gives you some type of guidance.
With my work, I completely moved away from the meanings of the words in the poetry. Rather, I wanted to make it visual. The poetics of it is more about how I use the material, how I paint, how I tear. So, these interactions that I have with the works themselves — which is not necessarily language — it’s interesting because my work is usually based on language, but then the abstraction of it becomes more about the materials and how I use them.
- Untitled, 2021.
- Untitled (Book of Tawhid II), 2021.
Lindiwe Mngxitama: I think you’ve just struck at the cord of what I was trying to ask. Through your interactions while creating, there seems to be this interpolation, via process, that exists in the space of the poetic. Like you said, anything can be poetic. I also found myself thinking about your practice as imbued with a certain poetics, especially because of its relationship with abstraction and its evocation of things that exist outside of the boundaries of comprehensibility. I don’t want to call it spiritual, but the word sacred is closer to what I am reaching for.
Kamyar Bineshtarigh: Yeah, I’ve always received comments about my work looking “sacred” or “spiritual.” I don’t think that result is necessarily intentional because a lot of the time I find myself going in the direction that the works are visually creating. It’s not something that I can say I intentionally, with full control, am doing. I think it just happens naturally. Perhaps it’s my own intuition and the interactions of my mind and body with the material.
Lindiwe Mngxitama: There’s something about the bleeding technique you incorporate in some of your works that renders the marks made on the canvas to appear as if crying. Or, at least, that is how I experienced it. It reminded me of rituals or performances of collective wailing at funerals I’ve attended. This is a bit of a speculative exercise, but if Arabic-Afrikaans became animated and could wail, what do you think its cries would say?
Kamyar Bineshtarigh: That’s a very interesting connection you make with the tears and crying. Initially, when I was talking about the outcome of the exhibition, I was imagining if the whole archived history of this language — or any form of archived language — was in your basement undiscovered for 200 years. You then discover it, and there’s all these traces of its memories and perhaps all its tears, all its erasure. My initial idea was about that sense of…
Lindiwe Mngxitama: Contact with time, maybe?
Kamyar Bineshtarigh: Yes, contact with time. Yeah, exactly, how could I make a work look old, you know?
Lindiwe Mngxitama: Going back to materiality in connection to your work, it didn’t happen with all of the works, but with some of them, there was this unexpected affective surprise in the form of materials that had dripped down the canvas now dried up — almost suspended — about to fall off of the canvas and onto the floor. I found that really moving. It felt like an evocation of states of transformation and liminality. I know through our first conversation that you’re not precious at all in how you interact with your materials. You let them guide your process. But still, it could’ve been really easy to wipe those droplets away, why leave them there?
Kamyar Bineshtarigh: So yes, I usually don’t clean up my works afterwards. I leave the materials, allowing them to move how they want to. Sometimes I do touch ups because it can easily become too much. I think that can be called “skill” — when you know how to lead the material instead of controlling it, how to allow it to move.
The development of most of my work in terms of materiality starts with accidents. My most recent work for example, the wall piece from my studio wall, that was completely accidental. One of the major mediums I found myself using the past year, starting with this body of work, was cold glue.I usually apply the cold glue after I paint, so that sense of weightiness, like the tears you spoke about, is also because of the cold glue. The glue is thick, and I usually work on a wall. Gravity slowly pulls down, so by the time it gets to the bottom it’s almost dry. It gets thicker and thicker, then stays there. With those works, I didn’t remove them, I was like, this is part of it, they should be here. It’s the same with fabric as I’m tearing it. The first time, it may be an accident, but then the second time I use that accident as technique. It’s the material itself, the poetics of it comes while I’m doing it physically.
- Untitled (Book of Tawhid I), 2021.
- Untitled, 2021.
Lindiwe Mngxitama: I know you and Amogelang speak about this in Transliteration’s potential subterfuge or/and inhibiting a grammar of opacity? But can you tell me about the title, what it means, what it’s signalling at, and what inspired it?
Kamyar Bineshtarigh: I came across that word in writing by Achmat Davids who wrote Afrikaans Speaking Muslims (his most prominent thesis). He’d also written an essay I read which is where I found the phrase Koples boek(e). It was called The Words that Slaves Made. I came across it in that essay — which was part of the research I was doing — while thinking about a title for the show,. I kept going back to that part of Achmat Davids’ writing that explained what ‘Koples boek’ was in the Cape Muslim community in the Madrasa.
It was a notebook that everyone had, specifically the students at the Madrasa, and they had to learn different Suras of the Quran. They had to write it in the koples boek, go memorise it at home, and then come back and recite it to the teacher. It was a form of teaching based very much on the mechanisms of memorising, and less about learning. In terms of language, I’m from Iran and we learn Quran, we learn Islamic texts, we pray — I mean, I don’t, because I’m not necessarily a believer or practising Muslim — but when we went to school, we also had to learn verses of the Quran and the Suras but in Arabic. We couldn’t even understand it because we spoke Farsi. we would also pray in Arabic as is required in Islam. So, you don’t really know what you’re saying but you’ve memorised it from childhood. Koples boek(e) is also that. I was also thinking about ‘kop’ as in head and ‘les’ as in less — as the direct translation I had of it. Like, imagine if it were actually “headless book.” The fact that you had to memorise something without actually knowing what it is. I found myself thinking, “There’s a memory in that phrase perhaps?” And I realised that Cape Malay Muslim people still going to Madrasa today are still using the koples boek and the same methods. It was also a nostalgic thing for a lot of them to think about and remember.
Lindiwe Mngxitama: One of the paintings which makes up part of the body of work is displayed on the floor with the stretched canvas rolled up kind of like parchment. When viewing it, I found myself attempting to peer around it, trying to see that which had been rendered — now made invisible by it being rolled up. It felt like a provocation, but in a way that was also playful. Why the curatorial decision to place the work in this way, is that how it was always meant to be viewed?
Kamyar Bineshtarigh: It wasn’t. I didn’t arrive at the space with the intention of it being shown that way. That was actually the last work we installed. I had been working with rolls a lot — and not just with the rolls but also with the books stacked on top of each other. The idea behind that was concealing, but also the idea of ‘rolling’ and its connections with archiving, also connections with transport. Artworks or carpets, for example, you roll up when you are travelling with them. So there is this physical, historical element to it as well. It also then became something where you weren’t sure if it was an artwork or not. So that idea of it not necessarily being installed in a way that is “resolved” was something Amo and I were thinking about.
- Untitled (Book of Tawhid III), 2021.
Koples boek(e)’s closing will include a panel discussion, a one-hour live DJ set by Future Nostalgia’s El Corazon, Atiyyah Khan, and a Cape Malay cuisine inspired food experience by Lady Day. This public programme aims to reflect on Bineshtarigh’s practice as it intersects with the poetics and politics of Arabic-Afrikaans through multi-sensorial experiences.
The finissage will be held on Saturday, 26 March 2022 at the Goethe-Institut from 11:00.