On the 12th of July, Taqwa Bn. Ali will open her solo summer display The Tree Lover at SIGN. Michiel Teeuw went to visit Taqwa in her Beilen studio to get to know her process and practice.

1. The Studio

M: After a walk from Beilen station, through the industrial area with large factory buildings, and later through the residential zone where people today are wielding machines to shape their gardens, I arrive at the former school, now anti-squat building where Taqwa holds her house / studio. The large, near-square room holds different paintings on the wall, a small altar next to the bed lined with drained ostrich eggs, a pine cone, books, candles, a chain of cowrie shells, a dragonfly, a row of vinyls of stars like Miriam Makeba, Patti Smith, Aja Monet and Grace Jones, and a large studio area where five square 3m² wooden boards are positioned next to a slowly rotating fan. Flowers and plants are scattered throughout the house, and older clay sculptures lie on the floor, gathering a thin layer of dust on top of the clay. Exquisite shoes are lined up next to the house’s front door, and a metal rack contains a loosely curated capsule wardrobe. I look at the older paintings, at the way the canvas rumbles a bit, the way the canvas shows previous folds and the framing is visible behind it, the way some paints shimmer in the morning sun, the way the soft earthy colors clash with the hard greens, the way the chalk lays scrubbly on top of the smooth paints.

2. The Process

M: Can you describe what you are currently working on?

T: I’m currently working on an installation for SIGN, titled The Tree Lover. It’s an experimental piece, which hasn’t been the case for a while. For me, experiment is always entering something new, in a new light; being daring; slightly ambiguous; something that allows a discovery. I got the opportunity to engage with my paintings by focusing on the presentation style and the viewer’s experientiality, as opposed to just making paintings that are about what I am thinking or seeing. I have been longing to focus on the experientiality of the other in space for a while. How do I think about presenting a painting that can be experienced physically, stepping into the painting? 

We are working on a box, which is a combination of five paintings. You have to get into it in order to see the painting, so you become one with the space at SIGN, inside the space of the painting. I had to work on this completely from scratch, so I’m literally building a wooden room, becoming a carpenter. I knew I liked building before, and I have done installations, but now I’m realizing I can actually do math. With painting there is a bit more intuition, but now I’m working with dimensions, being very precise in calculation. I am agitated with small things, like small calculation precision issues at the edge, which makes things a bit tilted. I feel a lot of frustration, because it’s not what I’m usually used to call joy or include as part of my process, as a way of working. Sometimes I forget it’s not so romantic and shouldn’t be, because everything is part of the process – whether that’s a joyful moment you encounter or a difficulty. I’m slowly understanding all of that, the whole process. I often run away or get out of the space or do something else when I get frustrated. I think I should maybe sit with these things, now I’m sitting with them. I have not quite reflected on it, I don’t know if I should bring it to a place that feels good yet.

In comparison, the painting process feels like entering a box where the air is quite still; there is no noise, nothing I can perceive besides this particular thing in front of me. The process of painting unfolds itself — I don’t have a perception of time. In that moment, I’m mostly zoning into the interaction between me and the materials, the accidents which arise in the process. Now there’s a new learning: I have to adopt a new way of working. I don’t like to predict things, because it puts me in a space where I’m frustrated. I’m predicting an outcome and it has to happen exactly like that. In the condition of living life generally, I need to have that control a little bit. But in painting or working with another material, I don’t like that so much, because I feel like working with material is really just a collaboration. It needs to happen from both sides.

M: In their book The Minor Gesture, Erin Manning discusses the concept of agencement,

the concept best capable of carrying agency. Agencement, whose synonyms include “accommodation,” “adjustment,” “arrangement,” “composition,” “contexture,” carries with it a sense of a mobilizing- its movement- toward has an undeniable effect on the conditions of experience in their unfolding. (…) Agencement: the directed intensity of a compositional movement that alters the field of experience. [1]

I feel like this quote relates quite strongly to your practice, and the collaborations you forge with your materials as an important part of your process. 

T: I deeply believe in the agencement of materiality as living things with their own sort of consciousness. It has always been there, but I didn’t quite understand it in the way that I understand it now, but especially reading Jane Bennett’s Vibrant Matter has been quite extraordinary for me in opening up to what materials can offer. It starts with creating a foundation for believing that materials do have agency, and with that comes a lot of openness. Then it actually starts to happen, you start to notice it. Bennett talks about an encounter where a combination of seemingly random objects lying around.

On a sunny Tuesday morning on 4 June in the grate over the storm drain to the Chesapeake Bay in front of Sam’s Bagels on Cold Spring Lane in Baltimore, there was:

one large men’s black plastic work glove
one dense mat of oak pollen
one unblemished dead rat
one white plastic bottle cap
one smooth stick of wood

Glove, pollen, rat, cap, stick. (…) I was struck by what Stephen Jay Gould called the “excruciating complexity and intractability” of nonhuman bodies, but, in being struck, I realized that the capacity of these bodies was not restricted to a passive “intractability” but also included the ability to make things happen, to produce effects. When the materiality of the glove, the rat, the pollen, the bottle cap, and the stick started to shimmer and spark, it was in part because of the contingent tableau that they formed with each other, with the street, with the weather that morning, with me. For had the sun not glinted on the black glove, I might not have seen the rat(…) [2]

All of this drove her into the deepest reflection and realization.  She talks about the openness to receive these signs, the need to pay a particular kind of attention. I think attention is about an exchange with materiality around us. You create a possibility which actually does exist, you just have to create the space for it. For me, creating a space is deciding at the moment: OK, I’m going to make a painting, and that painting is the space I create for the possibilities to happen. Then I really sit there with an intention to understand what the materials try to communicate to me in that particular moment, how I can navigate around it. I make a puddle on the painting, I let it happen cause it had to go that way for some reason. I’m not interfering too much. Later, when it dries and it takes total form, I come with my agency and we move in that space. And it’s just a collection of interactions. 

I previously worked a lot with clay, and a lot of my work was to understand it as a manifestation of a living material. I dig and prepare it myself, and in the process of leaving it to rest and sink to the bottom, the clay is literally breathing. To me, this moment is just fascinating: it’s like there’s a fish under the water. I was obsessed with these bubbles. Why is this happening? Nothing is actually really dead.

M: The horizontal and relational way in which you engage with your materials highly contrasts with hegemonic understandings of painting as a “mastering” of the medium.

T: A Master — I think there should not be such hierarchy. In my core, I believe in the agency in materiality to also be conscious. My body is also matter, we do exist in the same line. To me, there is no higher position, just because I am speaking words, or because I can hold and move the material with my hand. I grew up quite close to nature, earth and farming culture — this is not far from my upbringing.  I don’t see it as mastering, maybe mastering my own capabilities to navigate that space with materiality, because it does take a lot of effort and work to get to a space to allow these things to happen. 

After I moved here two years ago, I was sitting right here in the studio and I was drinking hibiscus. At a random moment, and this is where Jane Bennett resonates strongly with me, I looked at the tea and thought: what if I give this a possibility? What if I just throw this pot of tea on this open canvas, while actually painting with acrylic on the side? So I let it happen. I go to bed, come back the next day, there are so many possibilities and I am confused but also surprised. If I had not looked at that material differently, this would have never happened. It is something that was always there — I just had to open up to it. This completely changed the way I perceive the hibiscus, the way I work with it, the way I consume it and the way I believe in it as a material and every other thing. My belief system towards materiality shifted to a complete solid belief. It made sense to me. 

3. The Material

M: In your earlier work The Liminal Space, in which you worked with local clay as well as Sudanese migrant communities, both in the Maastricht Area, you investigate the diasporic in-between position of the migrant, precisely by connecting to the local landscape. Dionne Brand offers a poetic description of diaspora as:

(…) marooned, tenantless, deserted. Desolation castaway, abandoned in the world. They was, is, wandered, wanders as spirits who dead cut, banished, seclude, refuse, shut the door, derelict, relinquished, apart (…) [3]

How was the process of making that work for you?

T: The project began from a space of personal experiences. I interrogated the position of the immigrant and conceptualized the space through that experience. Especially communities from Sudan in Maastricht are a deserted community, there is an abandonment that occurs. Especially when they’re brought back into the community after they’ve kind of, I don’t know, proven themselves to be fit to living here. There was a scattering of this community in very random spaces, social housing. There’s an attempt to dislocate these communities even further in the process of trying to locate them. Then you get an experience of actually being quite far away from the people or the space that you essentially came to be a part of. Simultaneously, you are far away from the space you were born in, where you come from. We’re not taken in fully, left loosely in between. 

It is often the newcomer who needs to perform cultural integration, while I believe it’s a responsibility of two parts to be open to this acceptance. Then it’s a collaborative exchange, to reimagine that space to now hold something new. Not the culture of the space the newcomers come to, not the culture completely of the newcomer, but a third space that can coexist and create something new and interesting. 

M: I am reminder here of Robin Wall Kimmerer’s notion of becoming indigenous to a place: 

It was through her actions of reciprocity, the give and take with the land, that the original immigrant became indigenous (…) living as if your children’s future mattered, to take care of the land as if our lives, both material and spiritual, depended on it. [4]

T: The intention was indeed to become indigenous to this space of Maastricht. For me, that was through materials and clay, taking its shape, molding it and imagining ourselves through that material, establishing a sense of presence in the space. If we are not taken in fully, we will take part anyway, and feel confidence in it: the right to be here as well in this space. 

M: Do I read correctly a kind of resistance to mastery by the forging of an alternative path of making-home that is not tied up with narratives of cultural assimilation? Such as Sylvia Winter describes, who in Yusoff’s words contends that the revaluation of black life and the resistance to dehumanization could only be made through the “creation of a counterculture through the transplantation of their old cultures onto a strange soil, its reinvention in new and alien conditions [5]?

T: Yes, I didn’t encounter that before but it’s pretty much what I had in mind. That’s what it felt would be the best way to engage. There is no way returning home. There’s no way after that effort of being part of this space and wanting to be part of that space. It takes a lot to be here. Knowing there’s only forward then, there needs to be solutions to that, and I think the work demonstrated the possibility of this transplantation. 

One work in the exhibition was called Garden. I brought clay in a complete organic form. I didn’t process it at all, and I laid it out in this two meter box, like a fresh garden bed you would plant on top of. Instead of planting, I sealed it with plastic to make sure it still stays moist and alive. People came to this place and interacted with that material, stepping into it. The material became a facilitator for this exchange between people and different cultures, this mutual effort of integration. Everyone comes in, steps into the clay and we saw lots of feet layered on top of each other, people indirectly stepping on each other’s feet, feeling each other. The material was still quite alive. At the end of the exhibition, when removing the plastic, I saw the organic matter sprouted, and then there were these little sprouts coming out of people’s feet. I had this really beautiful material  being a facilitator to the dialogue, we were not molding it so much, we were allowing it to be in the space. And it was allowing us to be on top of it, in this quiet, silent exchange. 

After that project, I felt a shift in the way I position myself in that space, being an artist who facilitated the space to allow a certain culture to emerge. I feel very much indigenous to that space as well. My effort is there and it is being shared, so I’m not just a passive immigrant being there – even though I think I should still have the right to be passive and just observe and be. To me, this is also a way of solidifying that indigenous nature, and I think it will continue as I go back to Maastricht again in the next 6 months. I will focus on expanding this idea of becoming further indigenous with that particular space and its landscape and the people, the culture I want to be a part of. I do believe it will become a space where we would live long term, so we need to treat it like that.

4. The Artwork

M: The work is still in the process of building up, in the studio part of the space, whose floor is covered by a dark green gray plastic tarp on the floor, which contains lots of material rests in red, sandy white, yellow and dark purple. In the front right corner there is a felt sheet with a mortar and pestle, a deep ceramic bowl and lots of hibiscus leaf piles at different parts of the process, dark purple, reddish, pink, completely pulverized and powdered or on its way to becoming so. Next to that, there’s a wooden plank with a scissor and scalpels and jars and small carpeting tools and a screwdriver. And some smaller material rests on paper as well. Besides that, there is an empty frame which hosts a lot of a4 pages with quickly scribbled notes.

On the tarp there are five wooden boards, and one small table of around 40 by 30 by 30 centimeters with thin legs and it hosts a large glass vase with different purple flowers. The different boards have a red undertone, some of them are a bit more red and some of them are a bit more purple. In that red there is a kind of waving, some various tonalities, and some really dark black lines as well. The grain and the nerves of the wood are still very much visible. They are partially covered in these gray, lavenderish blotchy amalgamations, which have very fibrous textures, and this either very dark or black or very soft kind of puddling throughout the different boards as well. At some parts around the amalgamations, there are these yellow, orange, ochre-y and sometimes even mossy-green blotches coming into play. There is a lot of rise and fall, a lot of curvatory growth happening, punctured by spotty highlights scattered throughout the plates. 

T: The idea for this work started with a poem, which is not usually the way I work. It’s about a relationship between a tree and a tree lover. So, usually I’m completely scared of heights or depths, being in the water or on top of a tree. But these are two things that I love so much and quite idealize in a way. Writing the poem was, I imagined being a lover to a tree. I would have to learn how to be with a tree, how to love being in far spaces that are very high, how to accept other fears that come beneath it, like falling or cutting myself. I don’t like getting wounded, bleeding or seeing blood. For me, it also relates to the experience of home, or leaving home and choosing to be in this space of so much uncertainty or constant seeking. Being very loose, unrooted and struggling to fit into a particular environment. I am in the process of learning that this is what I am supposed to love. I’m supposed to enjoy parts of the process like becoming a carpenter, the frustrations of having to deal with precision and calculation.  I sometimes throw away some of the things that I think I should take in, as part of an experience that I’m choosing to be in. In a way, the work is also a reminder to myself of the consequences of things we choose to be a part of. The work is not a literal painting of a tree, but literally all of the elements are from a tree. In a way it is a tree, but it’s just a box. I’m completely working with wood that is glued, there are no metal nails inserted between it. I’m using hibiscus plant dye to dye the wood, and then I use paper pulp, which is still the tree in a way. Lastly, I’m using tree bark. It’s important for me to create some sort of depth because hibiscus in different fibers takes a different color. I hope to introduce a new space of becoming, which is accepting all of these different elements within a process. I am starting to take position, being in a certain space. But it’s too soon to think about this — next time.

[1] Erin Manning, The Minor Gesture, 2016, Duke University Press, E-book

[2] Jane Bennet, Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things, 2009, Duke University Press, E-book

[3] Dionne Brand, Maps, 2019, e-flux Journal #105

[4] Robin Wall Kimmerer, Braiding Sweetgrass, 2013, Penguin Books, E-book

[5] Kathryn Yusoff, A Billion Black Anthropocenes Or None, 2018, University of Minnesota Press, E-book