16 January 2007

Interview

LONDON: "I first felt paranoia in 1999 when I was in London watching the [NATO] bombardments of Belgrade on television," says Predrag Pajdic, curator of a new exhibition in London entitled "Paranoia." The Belgrade-born artist echoes what many Lebanese in exile experienced during the country's 1975-1990 Civil War: "I felt anxious, hopeless and useless."

After the attacks of September 11, 2001, the ensuing war in Iraq and the bombings of London's underground transport system, Pajdic became fascinated by the atmosphere of fear and hysteria that had become the stuff of everyday life.

"I concentrated on what was being broadcast on television," he recalls. "The pumped-up stories in the media were actually fueling this paranoia. Westerners were portrayed as liberators. Then what were all the other people? I tried to see the Middle Eastern side of the story as well."

The concept of a mixed-media exhibition of artworks reflecting on such subjects as distrust, suspicion, delusion, fear and terror began coming together. Pajdic also noticed that exhibitions inspired by politics in the UK were few and far between.

"Escapist art is so popular but it's disconnected from reality," he says. "It's not what I'd call contemporary art."

With dogged perseverance Pajdic hounded Arts Council England - the UK's national development agency for the arts - until he was given a grant. Other funding bodies, such as the Henry Moore Foundation, quickly followed suit. Some 40 artists from the United States, Lebanon, Israel, Palestine, Serbia and Bosnia submitted work interpreting the effects of recent events, resulting in an exhibition of digital technology, conceptual art, performance pieces, photographs, videos, installations and drawings.

"Paranoia" is now on its third and final stop in a traveling circuit. It opened in London last week to a packed house. And it wasn't just any house. Pajdic has tackled serious subjects with a twinkle in his eye. The Freud Museum, located in the last home Sigmund Freud lived in, is currently hosting the show.

Moreover, as if to prove Pajdic's point, the day before the opening London's widely read tabloid newspaper, the Evening Standard, published an article entitled "Film of 9/11 terrorists celebrating is displayed at art show." On the opposite page the headline declared "Mosque 'promotes fundamentalists preaching hatred.'"

The first article described in detail a video by Lebanese-Danish artist Khaled Ramadan in which he shows footage of Islamic propaganda. It also described a film by "Palestinian" artist Doron Solomons. For the record, Khaled Ramadan's video does not figure in the show, and Doron Solomons is an Israeli artist. Pajdic could not have invented a more perfect example of media manipulation to prove the necessity and timeliness of his exhibition.

The work that Khaled Ramadan has contributed to the show is in fact one shiny red raincoat, hanging casually from the loom of Freud's youngest daughter Anna (she was a keen weaver). On the back of the raincoat an inscription in Arabic reads simply: "I am an Arab." 

"As the world looks today, I can confidently say that I am an unidentified subject," Ramadan says. "That is the way it is, if you are an Arab living in the West, in a time where words have lost their meaning and significance, in a time where human rights means torture and egalitarianism means authoritarianism."

Doron Solomons' video, "Father," interweaves simple yet beautiful footage of his young daughter with chilling images of a military robot dragging a "terrorist" suspect to the side of the road, prodding and searching the man's body for bombs.

In the heart of the Freud Museum, Freud's study, where he worked and died and where his famous couch is aligned against the wall, another video installation by Serbian artist Tatjana Strugar is projected onto the ceiling. At first glance it is a lovely ballet of human bodies swimming, shot underwater from the bottom of a pool. A closer look reveals that the swimmers are all missing limbs - Strugar has filmed a physical therapy session for war victims.

Jerusalem-born Larissa Sansour's video piece focuses on instances of land confiscation and dreams. "I dream of being insecure," says one of her subjects, who has a recurring dream of a tank entering his house.

Several live performances were staged during the opening of "Paranoia," such as US-based artist Doug Fishbone's "Young Muslim Man in a Cage," and London-based artist Oreet Ashery's "Right/Left," which was presented on Freud's landing, from where he would often look out the window. In Ashery's interactive performance, two characters, a Muslim and a Jew, are seated on either side of another participant, massaging their right and left hands. Are they stimulating the right and left sides of the brain or indicating affiliation with the left and right sides of the politic spectrum?

Elsewhere in the course of the opening, three veiled women sailed in and out of various rooms, theatrically studying the installations, while visitors smiled nervously, some not quite sure whether they were staring at veiled women or performance art.

"Deeparture" is a stunning short film in which Romanian artist Mircea Cantor pairs a wolf and a deer in a stark, white room and records their reactions to one another. The wolf (who was well-fed just before the encounter) eyes the deer from a supine position, then leaps up and smells a spot where the deer has walked, then lies down again and licks its chops. The deer is obviously on edge but doesn't shrink into a corner as one might expect. While nothing actually happens, the slow tension building between them is extremely effective. The pure beauty of the animals contrasts with raw instinct.

American artist Jackie Salloum's film "Planet of the Arabs" is projected onto the wall in the Freud Museum's main entrance. It depicts the negative image of Arabs in Hollywood films.

If Predrag Pajdic has included a large number of Middle Eastern artists in the show, then it is not only because their work revolves around issues that are constantly in the news. The Middle East, says Pajdic, has "such an unbelievable contemporary art scene." Just as he felt it was time to shake up the UK art world with pressing political issues, he also decided the time had come to organize an exhibition on contemporary Middle Eastern art.

With London-based Palestinian curator Samar Martha, Pajdic is now in the process of pulling together another show, which will include 70 artists related in one way or another to the Middle East.

"Paranoia" is on view at London's Freud Museum in Maresfield Gardens through March 11. For information, please call +44 207 435 2002 or check out www.aionarap.org or www.freud.org.uk