Hope, communion and the future - An interview with Lara Baladi - June 2010
Image: Lara Baladi, ‘Chronologie’, Diary of the Future, 2010.
ChinarTree: Many of us in Dubai were first exposed to your work at Art Dubai 2007 (formerly known as The Gulf Art Fair) where you showed a kaleidoscope-installation entitled ‘Roba Vecchia.’
Your most recent photography exhibited in ‘Diary of the Future’ seems a far departure from this work both formally and conceptually. Can you tell us about the progression of your work over the last few years?
Lara Baladi: The work seen at Art Dubai 2007 was an outcome of a residency I’d done in Japan a few years before. The kaleidoscope piece (Roba Vecchia) was a major step towards my work, changing platform and moving to another level.
Whereas before, many images were brought together as narrative and were co-habiting in the same piece, this was a letting loose of all the narratives, making them completely flexible and more interactive for the audience.
Soon after that, I went into a kind of ‘pause’ where I focused on the last few months of my father’s life. In this time, I found a way to survive it and also to pursue a grounded activity - which was the work you saw in ‘Diary of the Future.’
Over the course of four years, what hasn’t changed is that my work is very conscious of the accumulation of images, photographs and archival documents.
CT: In the past your photographs have referenced your own reality, but with ‘Diary of the Future’ I felt a real shift. For example with ‘Chronologie’, one of the most openly personal works, there are clear references to your life and your family. Can you tell us more about that?
LB: It was a very conscious shift. You’re right, in the past there were always references to my life but I played with them - there was a lot of camouflage. This work talks about something very brutal and very immediate.
It goes back to the core of what it means for me to be an artist. I see it as a way to cope, to survive, to understand the reality that I’ve created and that I am a part of.
CT: I’m also interested in your use of other people, in a performance and ritual-based way, in the direct creation of your work. 1 How did this aspect come about?
LB: It was initiated by the experience of reading coffee cups with my grandmother when I returned to Cairo. It continued into the last stage of my father’s life and there was something basic in that act of sharing; dealing with the good and the bad, supporting each other. It was like a family communion.
On another level, the work brought together a situation of drama and a moment of creativity and lightness. You displace energy into something else by having another activity, around the activity of waiting for someone’s death.
Imagine a situation where all the windows are open, the room is filled with light - and then slowly it starts to get dark. There is no more escape and the walls begin to shrink. You see the same people come in and out, like a theatre play where there is only one stage exit.
Image: Lara Baladi, La Mere Noire, 2010
CT: And yet there is also this sense of hope in this series, as if this is not the end. There seems to be a sense of renewal too?
LB: Well, that was also the motivation behind the work. For me the only way to handle my father’s death was to imagine that life would go beyond it. That is what the reading of the coffee cups began to mean - looking at tomorrow.
I also did a piece for the Cairo Biennale called ‘Borg El Amal’ (Tower of Hope) which is an important work; it won the Grand Nile Prize last year. It was about the experience of waiting for my father’s death - if you look at it from a personal perspective - but it’s also a very social and local piece.
CT: So would you say the ‘Borg El Amal’ piece was a progression from the works in ‘Diary of the Future?’
LB: It was a work that was done in parallel. It draws from the same personal experience but shares it on a very social and urban level.
‘Borg El Amal’ took on a completely different platform. It is based on photography, but actually, the outcome of the work is architectural and sound-based.
CT: In these different works and media, are you conscious of creating a particular ‘Lara Baladi’ aesthetic?
LB: At first I was conscious of it, but now I’m not. It’s just the way my language has developed and the way I like to play with images. I pick images that mean something symbolically or that have potency during a period.
For example, a lot of the iconography in my latest works is from objects that were surrounding my father at the time. So they become the ‘artwork’ of that diary.
CT: What do you plan on doing next with your work?
LB: I have two more works that I want to show with this series - one is a sound piece that brings all of them together. The other is a book derived from the Tower of Hope. It looks at the outskirts of Cairo, the architectural form and social complex we call ‘ashwayat’. 2
I’ve also just come back from Pakistan where I did a residency for five weeks. I loved it. I started to document cultural aspects, as well as traditional and popular iconography. It looks at a notion of paradise. And of course, paradise and hope are closely related!
1 Baladi asked each of her father’s visitors to “drink coffee, turn the cup upside down, turn it around three times, tap the top twice and label the cup with name and date.” The artist then photographed these cups and presented a selection of the images in Chronologie. Rose, La Mere Noire and The Eye of Adam are these images assembled into patterns.
2 ‘Ashwayat’ literally translates as ‘weeds’ and refers to ‘informal settlements’ in suburban Cairo.
‘Diary of the Future’ was exhibited at Gallery Isabelle Van Den Eynde, Dubai, May-June 2010
(Images courtesy of Gallery Isabelle Van Den Eydne and the artist).
