Contested Borders: Politics, Art, and Mapmaking in the Contemporary Middle East
Matthew Rohde
“Contemporary art is exactly about what is happening around us, [and] as an artist in the Middle East
you go to bed with politics on the television and newspapers, and you wake up with it.”
-Moataz Nasr
O
ne morning in 1921, as withdrawing colonial forces were agreeing on the future
borders of the countries that together, and to this day, would make up the better part of
the troubled geopolitical subsystem known as the Middle East, Winston Churchill, who is
said to have drunk as prolifically as he wrote, had a bit too much brandy. As he traced
what would be the future Saudi-Jordanian border over a blank map of the region, his hand
slipped. Until that moment, Churchill’s pen had wandered along a wobbly but consistent
northeastern path from the Gulf of Aqaba in the general direction of Syria, but about 200
miles in, it jutted inward toward Amman. 100 or so miles later, it angled back, as if to
correct its navigational error, ultimately reaching Syria, but not without adding a several
hundred square mile triangular chunk of land to Saudi Arabia. The damage was done, and
the so-called Saudi triangle – affectionately known as “Winston’s Hiccup” – became a
permanent fixture of Levantine political geography.
Of course, the story is entirely apocryphal. (The Saudi Triangle is in reality the
result of negotiations between the British, the house of Saud, and the Hashemite
Kingdom at roughly the same time.) But it’s not for nothing that the story has been
accepted as truth by so many people over the years. Like any good story, it has a line of
truth to it. The Middle East is a region that for centuries has been defined, imagined and
delineated from the outside. The borders that were drawn did not correspond to the
internal characteristics of the region or the populations therein. That Churchill did not
personally draw the Saudi-Jordanian border does not alter the fact that the borders of the
Middle East, to say nothing of the very concept of the Middle East to begin with, have for
centuries been determined according to the interests of outside powers.
In recent decades, increasing numbers of writers, academics, politicians, and
artists have sought out ways of “remapping” this contested space. The phenomenon,
which is not of course limited to the Middle East and which lies at the intersection of art,
cartography, politics, and critical theory, is known in many circles as critical cartography.
Maps are not simply objective representations of geography, after all; they “they tell”, as
Paul Tacon has written, “stories of relationships to geographic locations that are
important to the individuals and groups doing the story telling. They are artifacts that
embody, reaffirm and publicize the personalization of place.” In the best of
circumstances, I might add, they also cause us to reexamine our assumptions about the
geography, and the space, around us.
What is the relationship between map and art? In the age of satellite imaging, we
may be forgiven for momentarily forgetting that in Renaissance Europe there was
effectively no distinction between maps and art. In any event, as long as maps have
existed they have tended to provide more insight into the minds of their creators than into
the world they purport to depict. (Just consider those Medieval maps, crude but
expressive, whose authors decorated the unknown continents of the world with imaginary
monsters.) In discussing modern critical cartography, we might also ask: What is the
relationship between maps and knowledge, and between knowledge and power? How are
the experiences of exile, fragmentation, dispossession and dislocation expressed in the
maps drawn by increasing numbers of artists of Arab origin? How do maps deal with, if
not anticipate, social and cultural realities? What does, and what can, a map say about its
creator? It has been argued that with the passage of time state boundaries in the Middle
East, however artificial or arbitrary at the start, have acted as the formwork for
increasingly concretized state nationalities. The national borders of the Middle East may
have felt arbitrary at the time of their drawing, but they are here to stay. Benedict
Anderson once described the maps drawn in the wake of colonial withdrawal as follows:
“A map anticipated reality, not vice versa. A map was a model for, rather than a model
of, what it purported to represent.”1 But could the same, then, also be said of the maps
produced today? To what extent do they anticipate alternate realities, whether social,
cultural, or even political? Most do not set out to redraw borders, of course; but they do
lay claim to alternative ways of thinking about a region and the kaleidoscopically diverse
experiences of people and populations in that region.
These are open questions, of course, and in the following pages I will survey a
variety of works, some explicitly cartographic and others more abstract, wherein their
artists, all of Arab origin, look to maps as a way of commenting on the nature of the
space around them.
Some Maps in Contemporary Arab Art
In The New(er) Middle East (figure 1), Palestinian-Jordanian artist Oraib Toukan
treats the conventional map of the Modern Middle east as if it were a puzzle to be
assembled. She cuts white foam into shapes corresponding to modern states or regions,
which if assembled “correctly” form what we might recognize as a standard map of the
Middle East. On their own, each of the pieces – especially those corresponding not to
countries but to regions within countries – are as meaningless as they are unrecognizable
to most viewers. (Most non-Saudis, for example, are unlikely to recognize an unlabeled
1
Anderson, 73
foam cutout of the Saudi Arabian province of Medina.) The pieces’ uniformity enhances
the viewer’s sense of their arbitrariness. It is up to the viewer to rearrange them as she
sees fit, and there is nothing stopping her from whimsically reconstructing them into a
hypothetical ‘alternate’ map of this already-contested region. “Why not?” Toukan seems
to ask. “Who is to say Iraq can’t be placed below Libya?” Space becomes scrambled,
relationships inverted. Of the New(er) Middle East, Nat Muller reflects, insightfully, that
we can regard it as a “navigational tool which reminds us that the topography of our
decisions, and the meanings we create through them, is never innocent, as much as no
map is ever neutral.” Toukan seems to be reminding us that in a way, this is how we – or
outsiders, at least – have always behaved in the Middle East, drawing borders and
reorganizing territories according to our own caprices. But the title itself of The New(er)
Middle East contains another clue to the work’s interpretation, inviting any conscientious
viewer to reconsider any long-held assumptions about the ontology of the region.
Ice Cream Map (figure 2), a work by Egyptian artist Moataz Nasr, is a variation
on a similar theme. Ice Cream Map, unlike The New(er) Middle East, actually is a classic
jigsaw puzzle, painted over with a map of the Middle East where, in the tradition of
classroom maps, each country is painted with a distinct color. Thus, Algeria is violet;
Libya, green; Saudi Arabia, blue. In the areas of the map that correspond to conflict zones
– particularly those in Iraq, Palestine, Lebanon, South Sudan, Western Sahara, and
Somalia – the pieces are missing, leaving what from a distance appear as black splotches
“staining” the otherwise cheerful pastels of the map. (When asked about the missing parts
of the map, the artist said, simply, “I don’t think [they] need any explanation.”) One
might be tempted to observe that the medium of the piece –jigsaw puzzle – reinforces the
sense of the Arab and Persian Middle East being, on some level, as fragmented as a
shattered windshield, held together only by the remarkable, and delicate, feat of its
imaginative assembly. Nevertheless, on the whole, the work is strikingly uncritical of the
reality it purports to engage. Where Toukan and, as we will see momentarily, Hatoum,
seek through their work to reclaim a region that has historically been defined from
without, Nasr does relatively little to question this conventional wisdom. The missing
pieces of the puzzle, which “need no explanation,” come across as tired clichés. They tell
us nothing we don’t already know, and they do not, as far as I can see, challenge us to
revise our assumptions about the region.
The Palestinian origins of London-based artist Mona Hatoum are evident as much
in the medium of her work as in its subject. Present Tense uses as its “canvas” a floor
grid consisting of more than 2,400 bars of traditional hand soap produced in the West
Bank city of Nablus; onto that she inlays, with red beads, the contours of a future
Palestinian state as defined by the Oslo Accords. The resulting map resembles a vast
archipelago of disconnected “islands,” all overlaid onto the cream-colored, Cartesian grid
of soap. Thus the grid, it would seem, does not just stand in as a symbol of modernist
aesthetics, however strong this connection may be. It also reinforces the sense of
fragmentation already so poignant in any rendering of the Palestinian territories. Anyone
who has spent even a day in Occupied Palestine will understand the sense of spatial
fragmentation that seems to regulate virtually every aspect of life there. Checkpoints,
fences, walls: these are some of the most ubiquitous, and salient, motifs of contemporary
Palestinian life. Even the borders of each component “island” on Hatoum’s map are less
delineated than perforated, as if to subtly remind any viewer of their porosity, and
ultimately, their discontinuity. The de facto Cartesian grid, on the other hand, is not
perforated. It is cold, angular. It was long before the creation of Present Tense that Kim
Levin wrote this:
If the grid is an emblem of Modernism, as Rosalind Krauss has proposed – formal, abstract,
repetitive, flattening, ordering, literal – a symbol of the modernist preoccupation with form and
style, then perhaps the map should serve as a preliminary emblem of Postmodernism. Indicating
territories beyond the surface of the artwork and surfaces outside of art. Implying that boundaries
are arbitrary and flexible, and man-made systems such as grids are super-impositions on natural
formations.
Then again, maybe the “grid” in question is less an affirmation of modernist
values than it is, simply, a nod to local tradition and to a Palestine, an idea of Palestine,
that Hatoum was never able to live. Hatoum is in a sense, after all, a “double exile.”
Ancestrally Palestinian, she was born in a refugee camp in Lebanon, only to be forced
into exile by the Civil War. Today she lives in London. The materials are all Nablusi, and
for many, the texture of the work may recall not the ideals of Modernism, but rather, and
more modestly, the ubiquitous limestone brick facades of the region.
Present Tense was not Hatoum’s only foray into critical cartography, if we are to
label her works as such. Hot Spots, which the same artist exhibited for the first time in
2006, subtly deconstructs the associations many in the West draw, at times almost
reflexively, between the Middle East and violence. Hatoum began by constructing a twometer high sphere out of curved stainless steel tubes, like a spherical birdcage, or a
featureless Mercator globe. Then, she overlaid the ‘globe’ with red neon tubing, outlining
the world’s land masses. When illuminated, the neon glows with the intensity of molten
iron, as if to insist that “hot spots” are not limited to isolated regions but instead envelope
the whole world, which, according to the artist, “is constantly caught up in war and
turmoil.” The stainless steel gridding in Hot Spots is, of course, structural; however, like
in Present Tense, it also sets up a certain contrast, if not tension, with the more fluid
borders overlaid onto it.
While Steve Sabella’s suggestively titled In Exile series makes no pretensions at
mapping the contested geography of the Middle East as such, it does register the
fragmentation that characterizes so many “maps” of the region. In it, the distinction
between the mapping of geography and the mapping of the self is blurred. Images from
the series are photomontages of spliced images of monochromatic windows. The end
result is disorienting -- something akin to the reflection of a characterless apartment block
in a shattered mirror. Proportions are distorted and angles, skewed. In one particularly
striking piece from the series, the widows pictured are barred with a sort of wrought-iron
grating, as if to underscore the impermeability of the windows; we may look but not pass
through them. The work evokes the self-repeating geometry of much Islamic art. Sabella
himself says of his work: “The keywords are ‘disorientation’ and ‘dislocation.’” He
continues:
Living in a constant state of mental exile, I have become more conscious that the state of
fragmentation and alienation I have been going through can never turn into a whole or take me
back to a fixed point of origin. … I am assembling my own constructions – creating a new
structure or a new impossible reality of common shapes and forms that exist in my immediate
monotonous surroundings. However, I am not sure whether my ambivalent reconstructions are
making the world or my perception of it any simpler.
Thus while In Exile is not, unlike the other works described, a map of
geographical space as such, it uses the same techniques and describes similar
experiences. It too, is an attempt at mapping, quite literally, the artist’s monotonous
surroundings and his feelings of dislocation and disorientation.
In the United States of Palestine Airlines, artist Khalil Rabah imagines just that: a
Palestinian Airline, going so far even as to produces to-scale models of 747’s, painted
with the airline’s whimsical insignia. He decorates the tailfins of his fanciful fleet with
the better part of a map of Asia. The map, however, has been inverted so that the southern
hemisphere actually sits above the northern hemisphere. Not unlike Toukan or Hatoum,
Rabah is inviting us to revisit our own assumptions about the geography we have come to
take for granted. Palestine, which as much as any other country in the world is associated
with restrictions on the mobility of its citizens, is now claiming for itself one of the
ultimate symbols of mobility, cosmopolitanism, and, indeed, freedom: the airline. Salman
Rushdie, in describing some of the challenges he faces as an author, might also be
describing the work of Rabah. “I too … am a fantasist,” Rushdie once said. “I build
imaginary countries an try to impose them on ones that exist. I, too, face the problem of
history: what to retain, what to dump, how to hold onto what memory insists on
relinquishing, how to deal with change.” This, in a sense, is the work of any mapmaker.
Beirut Caoutchoc, a floor piece by Lebanese artist Marwan Rechmaoui, is a large
black floor mat in the shape of Beirut. Measuring roughly 56 square meters and made
from melted tires, it resembles a giant rubber stamp, with the streets and alleyways of the
city carved, like canals, into an otherwise featureless surface. It, like The New(er) Middle
East and Ice Cream Map, is a jigsaw puzzle, where each of its 60 pieces represents one of
Beirut’s neighborhoods. Visitors are invited not just to view it but also to walk over it,
and by extension, to claim in its entirety a city that for was so long known for its internal
divisions. (East Beirut is primarily Christian, while West Beirut is primarily Muslim.
Passing between the two parts of the city, especially during the civil war, was extremely
dangerous.) Otherwise, the work – the map – seems to go out of its way not to tell a
narrative, instead inviting the viewer to bring his own.
Moroccan artist Yto Barrada also seems to be drawn by the storytelling power of
maps. In Plate Tectonic, which she first exhibited in 2004, she attached wooden cutouts
of the earth’s continents to tracks on a blue base. Not unlike The New(er) Middle East,
the work encourages viewers to adjust the continental configuration of the planet -- in this
case by sliding the continents along their tracks -- as if to playfully suggest that even the
geographical arrangements we are most likely to take for granted are, in fact, subject to
change.
Another work by Barrada, Strait of Gibraltar, speaks to the author’s fascination
with borders. The work, which is a suite of photographs, contains a satellite image, faded
by the passage of time, of the Strait of Gibraltar and the two coastlines framing it. The
photograph is taken from such an altitude that it could almost pass for a map. Though
mostly featureless in the photo, the city of Tangiers is clearly visible, its hairline streets
converging on the central port. In one interview with Open Democracy, Barrada
described her fascination with borders:
The fact that the border is closed creates this situation of longing, desire to cross, and the violence
of that desire is that it's confronted to a wall. What I try to describe in my images is that state, that
situation.
The opposite coastlines in Strait of Gibraltar are virtually indistinguishable from one
another, a inevitable observation that sits uneasily alongside our knowledge of the
significance of the strait not just as a border between two states but as a border between
European and Arab, North and South, Occident and “Orient.” Strait of Gibraltar exposes
those binaries as facile and, ultimately, meaningless.
Conclusion
Each map I have described is, in a sense, sui generis. It might be argued that given the
diverse experiences and origins of each of the artists, grouping them as Arab artists, even
under the rubric of a unified theme, only serves to affirm the “categories” that many of
them have through their art worked so hard to dismantle. Perhaps the one firm conclusion
that can be drawn surrounds the expressive power of the map as a medium. The map is
never neutral, and as much today as in the Medieval era, it tells us as much about its
creator as it does about the objective physical realities it supposedly depicts. In the hands
of a capable artist, it can challenge the way we think not just about geography, and not
just about space, but about ourselves. As surely as “Winston’s Hiccup” altered our
relationship to the geography of the modern Middle East, so too, can – and so too should
– many of the maps previously discussed change our own relationship to the regions,
countries, and ideas they chart.
Sources
Amirsadeghi, Hossein and Mikdali, Salwa. New Vision: Arab Contemporary Art in the
21st Century (Thames & Hudson, London, 2009)
Anderson, Benedict. Imagined Communities, 2d ed. (New York, Verso Press, 1991)
Barrada, Yto. Personal Website (www.ytobarrada.com)
Gerges, Fawaz. “The Study of Middle East International Relations: A Critique British
Journal of Middle Eastern Studies, Vol. 18, No. 2 (1991), pp. 208-220
Levin, Kim Beyond Modernism: Essays on Art from the 70’s and 80’s. Harper & Row,
New York, 1989)
Paulston, Roland G. and Liebman, Martin “An Invitation to Postmodern Social
Cartography” Comparative Education Review, Vol. 38, No. 2 (May 1994), pp. 215-232
Sloman, Paul. Contemporary Art in the Middle East (Black Dog Publishing, 2009)
Watson, Ruth. “Mapping and Contemporary Art”, in The Cartographic Journal, vol. 46,
no. 4, pp.293-307 (British Cartographic Society, 2009)