We Are Already Here: Positioning Ourselves in the World of Absurdity

Kim Nam

The work of Christina Barrera and Xinan (Helen) Ran offer various ways to position and identify oneself in an irrational world. Over the past year, the ills of our society have been made plain. With the horror of a global pandemic and the tumultuousness of a political transition, the true fact of our ever-existing bigotry and distraught sociopolitical state became unignorable.

Intangible Borders

Everyone’s awareness of enforced separation increased during the pandemic. Through the guise of a supposed “immigration crisis,” the act of “othering” at the institutional level has intensified. The grid patterns that recur in Barrera’s works reference international borders and the symbol of the border fence. Barrera’s gridded patterns not only comment on the demand for the US – Mexico border wall (which was never fulfilled), but also on reclaiming the repetition and rhythm of fences as a symbol of the intangible issues, such as the cultural, systematic, political, and personal.

The repeated inscription of the word “FUZZY BORDER” on Ran’s sculpture  Let’s Gasp Together (2021)(Figure 2)  references arbitrary division in a humorous way. The absurdity of constructing a physical barrier is materialized by the two pillows, filled with air. While the air from both pillows is connected through tubes which conjoin the piece, the encased air is made separated from the air we breathe. The transparent plastic is an invisible, yet tangible border. As the title of the work suggests, the piece initiates a dialogue on the universal human experience with the Covid-19 crisis, a disease which ravaged the respiratory systems of thousands. 

Ran’s work acknowledges the irony of previous calls for the separation of marginalized people, to the politicized refusals to isolate, which have prolonged the pandemic in ways we can not measure.

Claiming Space and Visibility 

With the existence of borders, we are reminded of the possibility of penetration. There is an interesting tension between the visual elements and the grids in two of Barrera’s works. In Ponga Ojo (Keep an Eye on It) (2020) (Figure 3), the eye ball-like motifs seem to be piercing through the grid. In Si Te Caés Te Caigo (Aún Si Fue Mi Culpa) (If You Fall I'll Come Down On You [Even if it Was My Fault]) (2020) (Figure 4) the fluidity of the ink permeates through the physicality of the woven jute, stating the text that is also the title of the work. Craft has been a tool for Barrera to examine her hybrid identity, as a US citizen whose parents moved to the country from Colombia. The history of craft has a long and complicated history, having been appropriated and fetishized by the Western world’s colonial gaze. The presence of an artwork, which uses craft as medium and references South American textile subverts such a gaze, reclaims the space and recognizes the problematic history of US imperialism and European colonialism in South America.

All three of Ran’s pieces, Know Tomorrow Know (2019) (Figure 5), Let’s Gasp Together (2021), and Too Late Two (2021) (Figure 6) resemble domestic items, such as pillows and blankets. Their materiality and size, in relation to human scale, hint at the possibility of  human presence in the gallery space. This sense of domesticity and privacy may also generate a feeling of intrusion. While they claim the space before the viewer one might ask: Who sleeps in those objects? Are they here or absent now? Do they exist only when we acknowledge the existence of the work?

Are We all Nomads?

In his novel Exit West (2017), Mohsin Hamid describes a perspective of a local woman, who has been living in a same place for her entire life, witnessing the change that occurred with people moving in and out of her neighborhood: 

…when she went out it seemed to her that she too had migrated, that everyone migrates, even if we stay in the same houses our whole lives, because we can’t help it. We are all migrants through time…[1]

This segment offers a new angle on the notion of migration. Not only the ones who physically relocate from one place to another, but also the migrants who, in many ways, are  in a state of flux. 

Both Barrera and Ran’s pieces carry nomadic qualities. The weightlessness of Si Te Caés Te Caigo (2020) by Barrera, and the collapsible and packable characteristics of Ran’s works, speaks to migration, departure, and physical distance as metaphorical objects which are meant to be carried along through  moments of transition.

In this time of crisis, the dichotomy of “migrant” and “native” has reasserted itself into public discourse. Though this binary is hardly new,  both Ran and Barrera probe themes of otherness and identity, demonstrating different cases of external and internal, or physical and psychological transitions in space and time. With timely inquiries, Ran and Barrera invite viewers to consider who is defined as a migrant and who isn’t asking, “Are we all nomads in different ways?”

Footnotes

 [1] Exit West: a Novel, by Mohsin Hamid, Riverhead Books, 2017, pp. 209.