LAAF: Port Cities – Reviewed

From the memories of oceans and those claimed by them, to the still burning embers of colonialism, in Port Cities, Mike Pinnington finds an urgent exhibition for our times… 

Ascending the stairs at Space Liverpool on Stanhope Street, you’re met by the rhythmic throb of Nadia Kaabi-Linke’s Undersea Heartbeats (below). An elegant and meditative three-channel video work, its metronomic soundtrack, intended or not, does a peculiar thing. Opening up the gallery to reflection, it slows your pace, encouraging a more thoughtful engagement with your surroundings; and, I dare say, a deeper consideration of the expanses of water it depicts, and of those who choose to embark on all too often perilous crossings over it.

The Tunisian artist’s work sets the tone expertly for Port Cities, an exhibition of newly commissioned work programmed as part of this year’s Liverpool Arab Art Festival (LAAF). Seeking to explore how such ports ‘have and continue to shape the character of cities and people’, the selected artists each spent residency periods in the city earlier this year.

Lebanese artist Siska’s Still Waters Run Deep takes on this exploration through the lens of host city, Liverpool, once, now infamously, referred to as second city of Empire, and the Gateway to the World. Today, of course, its role in this regard is diminished, and somewhat different, but Siska looks backwards to face the present (and future) of place by at first highlighting the many streets here named for slave traders, such as William Brown, a major importer of slave-produced cotton, in stark contrast to their now benign surrounds.

Hardly the first artist to draw attention to the fact, it nonetheless bears repeating in a city more often associated with its positive cultural legacies; this veneer should never occlude the truth that Liverpool’s riches were built on the trade, backs, and labour of others. Soundtracked by a choral version of Britney Spears’ hit me baby one more time to uncanny effect, it is a visual journey through and reminder of a shameful legacy. This is in part balanced, or at least leavened by, footage of a Free Palestine demonstration held here earlier this year.

As Siska’s work acknowledges, ‘water is both symbol of hope and a metaphor for failed journeys’, a point not lost on Egyptian Mohamed Abdelkarim, whose installation, Nobody Remembered the Ark, Said the Sea (top), speculates on the sea as a grave, but also as the site of a mythical, metaphysical world. Its audio element is delivered (as it should be) with the authority, and deep time memory of, the oceans:

I have seen their bodies merge with mine…

Their bodies pressed against the ark’s wood, I whispered to them…

I’ve cradled them within my waters…

Bodies entwined with corals…

Lost in a strong sea, they strayed…

Piled up between each rise and fall…

I have swallowed their dead bodies to preserve them…

Such lines put one firmly in mind of Drexciya, the mythical underwater realm of Afrofuturism, populated by the unborn children of pregnant African women who lost their lives – were, in effect, murdered – cast to the fates having been thrown off slave ships. Powerful and poetic, it envelops as it provokes, dominating your thoughts and imagination.

Punctuating the exhibition are the furry, tactile puzzle pieces of Moroccan artist Laila Hida’s Reversed Landscape (below). Each is part of a representation of the exoticism, by colonisers, of the other, especially of that found in the Orientalism rife during the Victorian period. And, on the far wall, a cyanotype-like image of Sefton Park’s majestic Palm House, first opened in 1896. Symbolic of Empire’s gatherings, arrogance, and the racism that extended even to botany – Victorian-era expeditions were sent to ‘discover’, name, and lay claim to ‘new’ species – it houses flora from around the world and, in some ways, amounts to an alternative picture of colonialism’s embers.

Quoted by Siska in Still Waters Run Deep, but applying to this exhibition as a whole, in his essay, Discourse on Colonialism, Martinican poet and author Aimé Césaire states: “that no one colonizes innocently, that no one colonizes with impunity either; that a nation which colonizes, that a civilization which justifies colonization – and therefore force – is already a sick civilization, a civilization which is morally diseased, which irresistably, progressing from one consequence to another, one denial to another,  calls for its Hitler, I mean its punishment.”

Written in 1950, it is, sadly, as relevant today as then, making Port Cities an urgent exhibition for our times.

Mike Pinnington

Port Cities is part of Liverpool Arab Art Festival, which continues until 20 July