Camille Henrot. Grosse Fatigue, 2013 (video still); video installation (color, sound). Courtesy of the Artist, Silex Films, and kamel mennour, Paris.

Honoré de Balzac wrote: “Ideas are a complete system within us, resembling a natural kingdom, a sort of flora, of which the iconography will one day be outlined by some man who will perhaps be accounted a madman.” This passage was included in Camille Henrot’s writings about her video Grosse Fatigue (2014), now on view in Prospect.3, a sprawling biennial in both geographic and thematic terms. The “madman” in this quote might be Franklin Sirmans, the artistic director of Prospect.3; Sirmans attempts to create a cohesive exhibition in a city that is perpetually unhappy with easy definitions and straightforward thought. However, Prospect.3 has some stunning and kindhearted works that try very hard to carve clear connections to a place that is a constantly shifting landscape of one part earth and two parts water.

Prospect New Orleans has had an awkward childhood. Prospect.1, founded by Dan Cameron, opened in October 2008 with eighty-one artists from thirty-four countries in about thirty locations. Artistically, the biennial was a smashing success, drawing comments such as, “Prospect.1 takes the reprobate scallywag nihilists of the contemporary avant-garde and converts them … into goody-two-shoes bleeding-heart believers in the nobility of humankind.”[1] Unfortunately, Prospect.1 ended over a million dollars in debt, defaulting on the public’s trust. Then, unable to meet funding expectations, Prospect returned in 2010 with something called Prospect1.5, a mostly local affair that was as awkward as the first iteration was ballsy. Prospect.2 opened the next year in 2011, with a graceful mix of international and local artists, but was still significantly less exciting that the first iteration. Prospect.3 now has grown into early adulthood and has regained some of the energy that made Prospect.1 so great. This year’s iteration opened on October 25 with fifty-eight artists spread around eighteen locations.

Zarina Bhimji. Waiting, 2007 (video still); 35mm color film, HD transfer; single screen installation; 7:48. Courtesy of the Artist.

Tucked between a bank and a barbershop, the University of New Orleans St. Claude Gallery is an easily overlooked spot, but Shrine, the collaboration between the Propeller Group and Christopher Myers, is one of the most successful works of Prospect.3. Sirmans says in the catalog, “That one learns much about oneself in and through the Other is at the crux of this project.”[2] Nowhere can you see this as clearly as with the film The Living Need Light, And The Dead Need Music (2014), part of a collaborative installation with Myers. The film, which takes its title from a Vietnamese proverb, reveals the relation between the culture of Vietnam and New Orleans via the “butterfly effect of … non-locality whereby two distinct phenomena affect one another across a vast expanse of space and time.”[3] Replete with lush imagery of funeral rituals, characters such as a bandleader with a peripatetic orchestra lead us through marketplaces, streets, and into a marsh. Sprawling mourners and spiritual leaders crowd the frame. This film is accompanied by costumes and sculptures from the film (for example, a six-headed tuba). The Living Need Light unites two groups that, only one generation ago, perpetrated unspeakable acts on each other. The Vietnam War continues to leave deep scars that are only now beginning to heal in our current generation. It is deeply moving to see how uniquely spiritual and commonly human are our shared funerary practices.

Jose Antonio Vega Macotela. #331 (from Time Divisa), 2010; human hair and paper; 22.05 x 16.93 in. Courtesy of the Artist and LABOR, Mexico D.F.

One of the disappointments of Prospect.3 is the frequent lack of care for exhibition space. Works by Jose Antonio Vega Macotela, Camille Henrot, and Shigeru Ban seem to be stuffed into the corners at Longue Vue House and Garden. Macotela’s works, which explore the idea of proxy, were hung in an awkwardly small room off the side of the house. In Time Divisa (2006­–2010), the artist trades his time with Mexico City prisoners: The prisoners request Macotela to perform an act for them, such as visiting a grave, asking forgiveness from a family member, or spying on a lover. In return, the prisoner completes a work of the artist’s choosing: picking up cigarettes, writing down everything they did that day in chronological order, etc. Camille Henrot’s Grosse Fatigue, a film that moves through the history and systematization of the universe, was in an even smaller area. Shigeru Ban’s work was relegated to the gatehouse; any hope of a conversation between the works is unlikely. Similarly, William Cordova’s and Terry Adkins’ work at Dillard University is in two far-flung locations of the campus; Cordova’s work is stuck in what feels like a side room, and Adkins’ work seems pushed into a corner in the entranceway of a building. All of these works would command more attention if their presentation was made with greater care.

Overall, the curatorial concept is one of finding specific connections—through ideas, aesthetics, or traditions—to New Orleans. The majority of Prospect.3 artists are exhibited at the Contemporary Art Center.[4] Some of the works here are standouts—Zarina Bhimji’s film For Waiting (2014) is a stunningly beautiful series of scenes of a sisal-processing factory near Mombasa, Kenya. Sisal is a species of agave harvested for its fiber, which is used to make rope, cord, sacks, and carpets. Huge mountains of decadent white filament are piled up in an antiquated warehouse. Slow camera shots, rich textural shots, and quiet natural sounds add to a feeling of stillness and beauty. Yet I also felt a very clear sense of dread, possibly from a shared colonial history. Bhimji’s visceral film is entrancing.

In the opening of Invisible Cities, Italo Calvino wrote, “Only in Marco Polo’s accounts was Kublai Khan able to discern, through the walls and towers destined to crumble, the tracery of a pattern so subtle it could escape the termites gnawing.” New Orleans is a city suspended in space and time. Prospect.3 strives to describe, as Marco Polo does, a reflection the imagination, memory, artifact, and spirit of the world through the rippling mirror of New Orleans. Distortion of these ideas is a natural effect, but what new concepts and notions will be born from that distortion? These will be the true reward that Prospect.3 will give to New Orleans.

[1] Walter Robinson, “BLEEDING-HEART BIENNALE.” ArtNet. Accessed 11/2/14. http://www.artnet.com/magazineus/reviews/robinson/robinson11-7-08.asp

[2] Franklin Sirmans, “Somewhere and Not Anywhere” (Delmonico Books/Prestel Publishing: Hong Kong, 2014).

[3] Prospect New Orleans. Wall text from UNO St. Claude Gallery.

[4] Artists exhibited at the CAC are: Theaster Gates, Lucien Smith, Lucia Koch, Manal AlDowayan, Firelei Baez, Zarina Bhimji, McArthur Binion, Douglas Bourgeois, Mohammed Bourouissa, Thomas Joshua Cooper, Charles Gaines, Pieter Hugo, Yun-fei Ji, Glenn Kaino, Sophie T. Lvoff, Hayal Pozanti, Pushpamala N., Joe Ray, Analia Saban, Lisa Sigal, Agus Suwage, Entang Wiharso, and David Zink Yi.

Camille Henrot. Grosse Fatigue, 2013 (video still); video installation (color, sound). Courtesy of the Artist, Silex Films, and kamel mennour, Paris.

Prospect New Orleans has had an awkward childhood. Prospect.1, founded by Dan Cameron, opened in October 2008 with eighty-one artists from thirty-four countries in about thirty locations. Artistically, the biennial was a smashing success, drawing comments such as, “Prospect.1 takes the reprobate scallywag nihilists of the contemporary avant-garde and converts them … into goody-two-shoes bleeding-heart believers in the nobility of humankind.”[1] Unfortunately, Prospect.1 ended over a million dollars in debt, defaulting on the public’s trust. Then, unable to meet funding expectations, Prospect returned in 2010 with something called Prospect1.5, a mostly local affair that was as awkward as the first iteration was ballsy. Prospect.2 opened the next year in 2011, with a graceful mix of international and local artists, but was still significantly less exciting that the first iteration. Prospect.3 now has grown into early adulthood and has regained some of the energy that made Prospect.1 so great. This year’s iteration opened on October 25 with fifty-eight artists spread around eighteen locations.

Zarina Bhimji. Waiting, 2007 (video still); 35mm color film, HD transfer; single screen installation; 7:48. Courtesy of the Artist.

Tucked between a bank and a barbershop, the University of New Orleans St. Claude Gallery is an easily overlooked spot, but Shrine, the collaboration between the Propeller Group and Christopher Myers, is one of the most successful works of Prospect.3. Sirmans says in the catalog, “That one learns much about oneself in and through the Other is at the crux of this project.”[2] Nowhere can you see this as clearly as with the film The Living Need Light, And The Dead Need Music (2014), part of a collaborative installation with Myers. The film, which takes its title from a Vietnamese proverb, reveals the relation between the culture of Vietnam and New Orleans via the “butterfly effect of … non-locality whereby two distinct phenomena affect one another across a vast expanse of space and time.”[3] Replete with lush imagery of funeral rituals, characters such as a bandleader with a peripatetic orchestra lead us through marketplaces, streets, and into a marsh. Sprawling mourners and spiritual leaders crowd the frame. This film is accompanied by costumes and sculptures from the film (for example, a six-headed tuba). The Living Need Light unites two groups that, only one generation ago, perpetrated unspeakable acts on each other. The Vietnam War continues to leave deep scars that are only now beginning to heal in our current generation. It is deeply moving to see how uniquely spiritual and commonly human are our shared funerary practices.

Jose Antonio Vega Macotela. #331 (from Time Divisa), 2010; human hair and paper; 22.05 x 16.93 in. Courtesy of the Artist and LABOR, Mexico D.F.

One of the disappointments of Prospect.3 is the frequent lack of care for exhibition space. Works by Jose Antonio Vega Macotela, Camille Henrot, and Shigeru Ban seem to be stuffed into the corners at Longue Vue House and Garden. Macotela’s works, which explore the idea of proxy, were hung in an awkwardly small room off the side of the house. In Time Divisa (2006­–2010), the artist trades his time with Mexico City prisoners: The prisoners request Macotela to perform an act for them, such as visiting a grave, asking forgiveness from a family member, or spying on a lover. In return, the prisoner completes a work of the artist’s choosing: picking up cigarettes, writing down everything they did that day in chronological order, etc. Camille Henrot’s Grosse Fatigue, a film that moves through the history and systematization of the universe, was in an even smaller area. Shigeru Ban’s work was relegated to the gatehouse; any hope of a conversation between the works is unlikely. Similarly, William Cordova’s and Terry Adkins’ work at Dillard University is in two far-flung locations of the campus; Cordova’s work is stuck in what feels like a side room, and Adkins’ work seems pushed into a corner in the entranceway of a building. All of these works would command more attention if their presentation was made with greater care.

Overall, the curatorial concept is one of finding specific connections—through ideas, aesthetics, or traditions—to New Orleans. The majority of Prospect.3 artists are exhibited at the Contemporary Art Center.[4] Some of the works here are standouts—Zarina Bhimji’s film For Waiting (2014) is a stunningly beautiful series of scenes of a sisal-processing factory near Mombasa, Kenya. Sisal is a species of agave harvested for its fiber, which is used to make rope, cord, sacks, and carpets. Huge mountains of decadent white filament are piled up in an antiquated warehouse. Slow camera shots, rich textural shots, and quiet natural sounds add to a feeling of stillness and beauty. Yet I also felt a very clear sense of dread, possibly from a shared colonial history. Bhimji’s visceral film is entrancing.

In the opening of Invisible Cities, Italo Calvino wrote, “Only in Marco Polo’s accounts was Kublai Khan able to discern, through the walls and towers destined to crumble, the tracery of a pattern so subtle it could escape the termites gnawing.” New Orleans is a city suspended in space and time. Prospect.3 strives to describe, as Marco Polo does, a reflection the imagination, memory, artifact, and spirit of the world through the rippling mirror of New Orleans. Distortion of these ideas is a natural effect, but what new concepts and notions will be born from that distortion? These will be the true reward that Prospect.3 will give to New Orleans.

[1] Walter Robinson, “BLEEDING-HEART BIENNALE.” ArtNet. Accessed 11/2/14. http://www.artnet.com/magazineus/reviews/robinson/robinson11-7-08.asp

[2] Franklin Sirmans, “Somewhere and Not Anywhere” (Delmonico Books/Prestel Publishing: Hong Kong, 2014).

[3] Prospect New Orleans. Wall text from UNO St. Claude Gallery.

[4] Artists exhibited at the CAC are: Theaster Gates, Lucien Smith, Lucia Koch, Manal AlDowayan, Firelei Baez, Zarina Bhimji, McArthur Binion, Douglas Bourgeois, Mohammed Bourouissa, Thomas Joshua Cooper, Charles Gaines, Pieter Hugo, Yun-fei Ji, Glenn Kaino, Sophie T. Lvoff, Hayal Pozanti, Pushpamala N., Joe Ray, Analia Saban, Lisa Sigal, Agus Suwage, Entang Wiharso, and David Zink Yi.

Of course, Quincey’s opiate-fueled reflections of Asia as an imagined site of mystic sublimity have all the familiar trappings of a particular system of thought that has dominated Western representations of Asia in the past few centuries: the power of the gaze to fabricate and invent an eroticized and exoticized Other. For a large part, the rhetoric of Paradise Lost, the inaugural exhibition of the newly established Centre for Contemporary Art (CCA) in Singapore, plays to this outdated but still oft-studied dialectic with three major video works by Fiona Tan, Trinh T. Minh-ha, and Zarina Bhimji, all of which seek to question the politics of migration, cultural identity, and transnational boundaries.

Fiona Tan. Disorient, 2009 (film still); double-screen video installation; color HD installation, 5:1 surround, 2 HD-cam safety masters, 2 HD projectors, 2 computers, 2 surround amplifiers, surround speakers. Courtesy of Museum voor Moderne Kunst, Arnhem.

Fiona Tan. Disorient, 2009 (film still); double-screen video installation; color HD installation, 5:1 surround, 2 HD-cam safety masters, 2 HD projectors, 2 computers, 2 surround amplifiers, surround speakers. Courtesy of Frith Street Gallery, London. Photo: Per Kristiansen.

Fiona Tan’s Disorient (2009) is a two-channel production commissioned for the Dutch Pavilion at the 53rd Venice Biennale that contrasts discordant perceptions of Asia. The first video delineates a fictional but richly textured space curated to showcase objects found and gleaned from an exotic Other. Accompanied by a voice-over narration of Marco Polo’s travel accounts that were written at the end of the thirteenth century, Tan’s theatrical set—designed to emulate the exotic appeal of a cabinet of curiosities—imagines Polo’s lived experience of the material world, with shelves filled to the brim with figurines, taxidermied beasts, and other unnamed ornaments. But if the cabinet of curiosities is often meant to provide a visual narrative for the classification and analysis of the material world, Tan’s enormous Kunstkammer seems solely designed to disorient and to celebrate the act of collection for its own sake, highlighting perhaps the West’s centuries-old unilateral perception of the East. Yet the pursuit of capturing atavistic myth, so intricately drawn out in the first video, is dashed away by the jarring contemporary footage of the second video. The unsentimental, poverty-stricken urban landscape of East Asia, derelict and in disrepair, concurrently provides an ironic counterpoint to Polo’s romanticized configuration of these same regions, and bluntly questions the ideology presented in the first screen.

Zarina Bhimji. Yellow Patch, 2011 (film still); single-screen installation; HD Blu-ray and Dolby 5.1; 35mm film transferred to HD; 29:43. Courtesy of the Artist.

Zarina Bhimji. Yellow Patch, 2011 (film still); single-screen installation; HD Blu-ray and Dolby 5.1; 35mm film transferred to HD; 29:43. Courtesy of the Artist.

Zarina Bhimji’s Yellow Patch (2011) is a slow, delicious cinematic exploration of architecture, hinterlands, and destinations that utilizes the camera’s ability to create a disjuncture between image and referent. By carefully correlating the moving image to affective sounds, Yellow Patch eschews cerebral contextualization and factual presentation in favor of visual sensations created by mise-en-scène where interiors are merely obliquely equated with individual and collective memory. Like reticent sentinels of a time long past, monuments and buildings serve as Bhimji’s markers, which foreground the migration and movement of peoples and cultures in the British colonial subcontinent of the late 19th to the early 20th century. The passing of time is marked by abandoned buildings, peeling paint, and decaying walls, as the desolate urban landscapes—elegiacally softened by slow-moving shots and framing—carries the tumultuous weight of a nation’s history.

Trinh T. Minh-ha. Surname Viet Given Name Nam, 1989 (film still); 16mm; 108 min. Courtesy of Moongift Films.

Trinh T. Minh-ha’s Surname Viet Given Name Nam (1989) tackles issues of documenting, translation, and interviewing within the familiar territory of cultural voyeurism, identity politics, and the construction of memory. Through a series of montages, archival footage, voice-over narrations, obscure Vietnamese proverbs, and English subtitles, Surname Viet Given Name Nam uses the power of fragmentary storytelling to explore aspects of Vietnamese reality as seen through the lives of women in Vietnam and the United States. The camera shots are deliberately unsteady as though wielded by an amateur’s hand, yielding information that is only coherent enough to glean partial information of the injustices that women suffer. The staged quality of these “ethnographic” interviews becomes more pronounced as the film progresses, until we realize that Trinh’s deliberate intention is not for us to misconstrue their halting speech as shyness or them as people struggling to speak in a different language, but rather the uncertainty of amateur actors who are in fact Vietnamese women living in the United States. Surname Viet Given Name Nam redefines identity as an interview experience, a quasi-fictional way of encountering the ethnographic self through the act of speaking and recollecting. But Trinh’s feminist critical discourse also raises questions that strike at the core of identity politics: What is selfhood and how should (or can) it be represented?

Seen in this light, Paradise Lost does not merely showcase narratives of displacement but also validates the notion that encoded within people are an indeterminate amount of political and cultural selves. As a consequence, identity—whether personal or collective—is at best too slippery to be pinned down by a taxonomic and digestible checklist of authentication. Certainly, the exhibition makes a convincing case of the value of exploring diasporic perspectives and the global aesthetic influences that come into play, despite the recurrent eagerness of such exhibitions to assimilate the oft-explored hallmarks of post-colonial discourse. At every turn, we are constantly reminded that the show is an unrelenting exercise in probing issues of memory and identity (which seem to be recurrent obsessions of regions that have a colonial past), and of the artifice of such illusions. There are questions heaped upon questions, but no ready answers as we are left to ponder the politics of conflicting narratives and sensitivities in each installation. As acutely sensitive to such concepts as the exhibition has proven to be, perhaps the most unsettling realization it leaves is that representation—rewritten from the perspective of an object that has always been represented—obfuscates as much as it reveals.

Paradise Lost is on view at the Centre for Contemporary Art at the Gillman Barracks through March 30, 2014.