A Space For Art: Nasser Al Yousif And The Origins Of Bahraini Art

Art history does not designate places or outline maps. What do you see in a map? Coastlines, water depths, or other information of use to navigators. They serve to create an optic illusion about the world: Space is built strictly along geometrical lines and from here we derive the notion that all space precedes us. ‘It has always been there’, one would be tempted to say. There was a time when art history mapped certain things of the world; species of spaces, trajectories, traces of physical places. These apparently linear sequences can be easily replaced with dots – moments in time that emerge sometimes simultaneously in different places, defying the traditional notion of geographical mapping.
The question of how space is really configured when we dwell in it isn’t only a metaphysical commodity, but rather, it provides a framework for art and history to occupy a room of their own. French writer Georges Perec asks the obvious: ‘What does it mean to live in a room? Is it to live in a place to take possession of it? What does possession of a place mean?’ And perhaps the answers are not necessarily satisfactory.
For Perec, acquiring or appropriating space is a form of knowledge, a making sense of the world, and one could say also, bridging the gap of the Kantian distinction between knowing the world and having a world. Space appears and manifests in its reality as our gaze travels through it and gives us the optical illusions of distance. In Perec,’The surprise and disappointment of travelling. The illusion of having overcome distance, of having erased time. To be far away.’ But he is also audaciously careful to note that, ‘My spaces are fragile: time is going to wear them away, to destroy them.’ The arresting sense of time that we derive from his proposition is a warning for the instability of geography.
When you travel to a country without an established art history that can map the contours of modernity, how does art help you to make sense of the world from that place? If you want to really absorb a place, to take it as a whole in one stare – in the same way one admires paintings, without ‘reading’ – and circumventing the illusion of historical knowledge, one needs to learn how to stare rather than simply seeing things ordered hierarchically and chronologically. Susan Sontag instructs: ‘A stare is perhaps as far from history, as close to eternity, as contemporary art can get.’ Eternity here is not identified with the unrestrained and total consciousness of God but with a distinction between memory and history. In the words of Pierre Nora, ‘memory as a perpetual actual phenomenon, a bond tying us to the eternal present and history as a mere representation of the past.’

The Kingdom of Bahrain is one of those fragile places where the historical viewpoint only distorts visual possibilities: Even a brief contact with the land will show you the extent to which a map is only an enclosure rather than merely a physical boundary. Whatever is understood as memory in the visual culture of Bahrain is more often than not a strict framework of reference not to the singular ease with which tradition overlaps with lived moments but rather to the enormous burden of an abstract past that needs to be immortalized, memorialized and monumentalized. This dislocation of time finds its shape in the spatial topography of art as a fast-forwarding movement rather than as a self-reenacting remembered present.
A singular exception to this practice is the work of early painter Nasser Al Yousif (1940-2006) who is to be counted among the pioneering figures in the art movement in Bahrain and in the Arabian Gulf. The Muharraq-native artist whom I discovered while researching the early beginnings of art movements in the Gulf region represents what is now absent from the visual culture of the Arabian Gulf and one of the explanations for the cultural crisis that plagues the identity of local artistic production, perhaps not in terms of galleries, collectors and exhibitions but in the making sense of local space (what is one’s own?) and appropriating it, to which Perec refers. Space in Bahrain remains not only an unstable notion but an unfinished patchwork in which different types of modernities, histories and counter-histories convene chaotically.
Todd Reisz speaks about space and public space when trying to visualize Bahrain: ‘Even while it has urbanized, Bahrain has consistently challenged the legitimacy of architecture. Its urban centres remain defiantly stretched out on plains of un-delineated space. Open space is not park or public space. Open space is vastness, non-distinction, void. Bahrain expresses a resistance to fill every void.’ Space is not an orientation or horizon of the gaze as much as an amorphous field of ungraspable geometric isonomy.

And why would one travel thousands of kms to an island in the Gulf armed with no other navigation maps than some vague indications about its art history to hear the stories of Bahrain from a painting hanging on a rustic wall in a house in Janabiyah? To take hold of a present that is not a historical tense but something concrete: What is present, and what is present, never ends. Or, in the words of Perec, to remember that the earth is a form of writing, a geography of which we had forgotten that we ourselves are the authors.

By Arie Amaya-Akkermans

Originally published in The Mantle – A Forum for Progressive Critique