Mona Kamal: Tracing Journeys

Mona Kamal, Reflections on Memory (2011)

A visual artist, whose origins are rooted in the Indian subcontinent, raised in Canada and currently residing in New York, Mona Kamal engages with photography, video, and installation to create contemporary multi-media narratives about migration, journeys, and identities. As she mentions, she creates fictitious exotic spaces that spark a feeling of nostalgia that tell a story of a lost culture due to immigration. These spaces function as both means to conduct dialogue as well as functioning as dialogues about leaving and recreating home.

What inspires you to create: a thought, image, concept or -ism?

The most basic way of answering this question is that my life inspires me to create. I get my ideas for my artworks from what surrounds me. A lot of it is from reading (literature, non-fiction and newspapers) and the Western perspective of my culture and religion. I feel that I often get ideas for my work based on responses/judgments that I receive in America about identifying myself as a Muslim Pakistani woman. My parents’ history additionally also has been a great inspiration as they, like most Muslims, were greatly affected by the partition of India in 1947 as not only was their country divided...but their family was also split between two countries.

My inspiration most recently comes from the rise of Islamism in South Asia and particularly Pakistan. I feel my art is a voice of resistance against religious fundamentalism and western stereotypes of Islam and South Asian culture and therefore, a manner in which I can preserve a specific history and culture.

You have worked in a variety of media such as installation art and video projects. What compels and attracts you towards each? Do the subject and content of your work influence your decision as to which particular medium you will use?

I remember when I was doing my BFA at NSCAD in Halifax, Nova Scotia, a graduate student told me that once you are confident in your practice and the concepts behind your work, you will feel comfortable about working in different media. I always felt that was a very strong statement: I do feel that an artist should work in different mediums depending on the meaning they are attempting to convey.

Both my video projects and installations are process based so that definitely has compelled me towards both mediums. I find video a unique medium because it captures movement whereas within my installations I am creating a space for the viewer to move about in.

Furthermore, my videos have a performative aspect and many times I am in the videos whereas my installations allow me to play with materials and construct structures. I am telling a story within both, creating spaces that are both physical as well as allowing for a dialogue about identity and migration.

Hot Mess Series, 2012 from mona kamal on Vimeo.
The 'Hot Mess' video series interrogates the expectations placed upon women of a certain color and not choosing to conform to societal expectations. Does gender play a crucial role in determining the trajectories of your artistic and personal lives?

Gender and race are both very significant components of my personal and artistic life (I don’t think my artistic and personal lives are separate).

I have mostly recently gained an interest in feminist writing written by women of colour; these readings have demonstrated the challenges that the 70s feminist movement faced due to their difficulties in perceiving the perspectives of women from the developing world and even visible women minorities in the West.

On Popular Representations of Radical Women and Girls

There's been so much on my mind lately as I am constantly torn between excitement and discomfort.  It is a constant unease -- a fantasy-based (but very real) suspicion that cultural identity is heavily abbreviated before making it into popular culture. It's been on my mind lately because I've been teaching a course on popular culture for a few months now, and with each course, it is consistently challenging to get a good conversation going. I experience ups and downs when I see any sign of critical thinking or closer examination of our ready-made subjects.

Deep down this worries me. What do we see?  Is it worth getting emotional about? Is it an overreaction, which will pass eventually in light of much more important -- and less self-centered -- communal goals?

In short, can't we get over ourselves? Is everything really okay? UH, NO. Here's two examples, which pose distinct problems -- the media coverage and overwhelming support for a fair trial in the Pussy Riot case, and the deceptively positive reviews of the recent film, Beast of the Southern Wild.  

How are these two examples connected? It's because they both stirred the same succession of emotions, and I knew later that was a sign of real danger.

When I first heard news of Pussy Riot's trial, a nostalgic admiration seeped into my readings of the various articles -- punk rock in Russia!?!?  As Melena Ryzik astutely noted in a recent NY Times article that examined Pussy Riot's "successful" protest appeal as follows:

It’s been a long time since music had the whiff of danger, and longer still since it carried the beat of political change, at least in democracies. Hardly anyone would’ve expected that to come out of Russia, where both the songcraft and the messaging seem outdated, vestiges of retro power-pop and a barely concealed propaganda machine.

She's right -- it's an underdog tale made for America. Popular culture is based on the cult of the individual -- the hero who sticks to his or her ideals. They beckoned and we answered -- even the Guerrilla Girls (many young artists' first dose of anti-establishment outing of the art world) spoke back. According to Ryzik's article in the NY Times, the revered art banditas expressed solidarity from a perceived safe distance.  Kathe Kollowitz, a member of the Guerrilla Girls, expressed her solidarity:

"Pussy Riot are our kind of girls: feminist activists in masks making trouble," Kathe Kollwitz and Frida Kahlo, pseudonymous Guerrilla Girls, wrote in an e-mail.  "But, they added, "we live in a very different culture where art is not as dangerous, and we can pretty much do what we want"

Kathe is right to an extent -- but this is the part where I feel a little crazy myself -- why don't I feel safe then?  As an artist, an educator, and a woman -- why can't I trust that whatever happens in the States is relatively lighter in fare? Is our popular culture more understanding about these revolutionary musings that possess us (sorry, bad hysteria joke!) ladies every once in awhile?

August 17 sentencing for Pussy Riot members.  Photograph courtesy of Natalia Kolesnikova/Agence France-Presse - Getty Images.

This question introduces the much quieter moments of rebellion that occur; they happen when everything seems fine and there seems to be no discernible struggle.  I felt this when I watched (and cried during) Beasts of the Southern Wild.