Jala Wahid: Pretend History

“Generally, it’s difficult to acquire an object without employing at least some violence. I reckon that half the objects in your museum were stolen”

Richard Kandt to Felix von Luchuan, Deputy Director 

of the Ethnologisches Museum Berlin, 1897

Jala Wahid’s new exhibition ‘Pretend History’ deals with the intimately violent relationship between colonialism, archaeology and appropriation through the lens of British empire and Kurdish history. A series of sculptures and a video work are the result of continued and ongoing scrutiny into the way that the western museum is built on colonialism and conquest, not simply through their collection but also in the narratives they present. Wahid’s investigation into displaced ancient Kurdish histories began with combing through the thousands of objects removed from Mesopotamia and digitised in the online archives of the British Museum and Louvre, the national museums of the two Imperial powers who divided up what had previously been the Ottoman Empire after its fall at the end of World War I, culminating in those powers’ refusal to grant a Kurdish state.

Wahid subsequently arranged visits to the study rooms at the British Museum where researchers are allowed to handle objects. There, she had access to objects such as a clay baby rattle, an alabaster doll with movable arms and legs, a lapis lazuli bull-man and a clay ram on wheels. Like so many other artefacts and objects of colonised countries, these objects had been ‘collected’ by the museum, classified and then put in storage. The role of museums in reinforcing the legacy of colonialism has been unpicked by art historians and writers over the last few decades, a process that started with critiques of western museography in general which has developed into to studies that look at the complicity role that western museums have played in keeping the narratives of empire going, long after those empires have crumbled. 

It has become increasingly accepted that western museums are not neutral spaces for considering visual cultures from around the world but in fact dependent on the power and riches that colonialism brought and subsequently active agents of promoting a viewpoint mired in colonial histories. As the art historian Donald Preziosi would succinctly put it: “The art of art history and aesthetic philosophy is surely one of the most brilliant of modern European inventions. and an instrument for retroactively rewriting the history of all the world’s peoples.” (Donald Preziosi, ‘Globalization and its Discontents’) 

Yet the key thing here is that this is not something that happened in the past during museums’ collecting policies in the 19th century, this is a fault that is played out every day; as Dan Hicks has powerfully written in his book ‘The Brutish Museum’: “Each morning, this morning for instance, as these museums are unlocked, the alarms tuned off, the lights switched on, the doors opened to the public, to tourists and to school groups, this loss and violence is repeated again”

How then might we answer this repeated, daily act of colonial violence? For Wahid one solution was to try to re-imagine both a past and a present for these objects freed from the bounds of western, colonial museology. Many of the objects Wahid looked at seemed not to be designed as art objects but instead were made as living components of a specific culture, to ward off illness, promote fertility for instance. To mark rites of passage of a particular people whose cultural identity has been under the threat of erasure since the early twentieth century. Using those objects as her source material, Wahid’s answer was to create new objects that are contemporary iterations, filled with a playfulness, spirit and life that colonial appropriation had deadened. And perhaps through this process, there is a possibility of glimpsing the emotions and intentions of those original makers.

Wahid’s sculptures then are not objects that can be easily classified by the coloniser’s dead hand of curation, instead they escape ownership and revel in colour and materiality.  Wahid’s visual strategy that is indulgent, maximalist and playful to counter the western museum’s cold, clinical classification and presentation of these objects. A cat and a brightly coloured sleeping calf gesture at all the animal artefacts that Wahid encountered. 

Here though the cat has an incongruous dice collar and the calf is painted a vivid purple colour and sits on a multicoloured faux-fur pillow. Each undermines the supposed seriousness and high-mindedness of the colonial museum, offering a present-day iteration that gloriously escapes the artefacts’ museum captivity. 

A bunny rattle is a deliberately cartoonish take on a rattle that Wahid found at the British Museum, bringing out the function of play that again is lost through its western appropriation and classification. This act of conceptually bringing the artefacts into a present moment might be understood as an attempt to bring agency back to their makers, to loop back the present so that Ancient Kurdish culture comes alive again bypassing the deadening hand of colonialism. A bright blue paw with iridescent purple claws entitled ‘Hot Grab’ has become an object in its own right rather than a looted fragment.

Accompanying the sculptures is a film titled ‘I Love Ancient Baby’. In it, the artefacts are presented in a way that is wildly different to their museum lives, against a dance soundtrack and a hot pink background with phrases and text written over the succession of images. These images include playing cards which were handed out to American soldiers during the invasion of Iraq that featured monuments that they were supposed to avoid destroying. A second section changes tone, with text recalling a dream encounter some years previously with her father who passed away before making the film. Here the objects serve a different purpose; to suggest that time perhaps is not linear, that the past be alive in the present. That notion is heightened by Wahid’s reference a second family member, her then unborn child, whose anticipated presence echoes the rebirth of hidden away artefacts through contemporary iterations. The last section of the film brings us back to those sculptures, which live again in a way that is full of colour, texture and movement, filled with multiple possible new meanings, finally freed from endlessly repeating the violence of the colonial encounter.