This panel interrogates the nexus of feminist ecocriticism and environmental aesthetics within the context of SWANA region. How are artists addressing issues like water scarcity, extractive industries, toxicity, and climate-induced migration? Centering on the artistic practices of Kamala Ibrahim Ishaq, Monira al Qadiri, Marwa Arsanios, and Khadro Mohamed, the papers presented herein elucidate the ways in which artists from the SWANA region have navigated and continue to explore the complexities of ecological crisis, human-nonhuman entanglements, and both apocalyptic and imperceptible transformations of the biosphere.
Alan Mikhail contends that adopting an environmental perspective in Middle Eastern research not only addresses longstanding issues of geographic demarcation, but also introduces overlooked actors such as animals, microbes, and silt. Expanding on this premise, the art we examine challenges the prevailing notion of human centrality by foregrounding multi-species lifeforms and nonhuman ecologies in their work. Simultaneously, their creative endeavors critique the cataclysmic effects of perpetual warfare, capitalist exploitation, and colonialist interventions on these nonhuman ecologies.
The first paper examines Ishaq’s work in the context of the interdependence of human agency and environmental stewardship, fostering critical reflections on gendered ecological narratives. The second paper explores how al Qadiri's work constitutes a critical intervention into the ecological ramifications of petrocapitalism in the Gulf, particularly through her incorporation of nonhuman motifs. The next paper investigates Arsanios's documentary filmmaking and installation art as a lens into the politics of land use and environmental activism in Lebanon and its diasporic contexts to articulate multiple conceptions of and relationships to energy. The concluding paper investigates artistic reactions to the Christchurch attacks, scrutinizing the appropriation of gendered Indigenous and Muslim religious symbols. Additionally, it analyzes how Indigenous and SWANA diasporic artists circumnavigate settler colonial ideologies, fostering solidarity through depictions of natural imagery that convey gestures of hospitality and ecological embeddedness.
Drawing on Christina Sharpe's theory of the "wake," our panel explores how the wake of historical violence continues to shape contemporary realities, in relationship to colonialism, occupation, and extraction. Focused on transnational and diasporic artists, our inquiry investigates ecological imperatives inherent in current art discourses within the SWANA region, foregrounding the voices of women artists navigating struggles against dispossession and advocating for ecological justice. This panel argues that these artists, considered together, emerge as conduits for amplifying gendered experiences of environmental precarity and mobilizing solidarities toward transformative praxis.
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Dr. Danielle Haque
In her multimedia installations, Monira al Qadiri's work constitutes a critical intervention into the ecological ramifications of petro-capitalism in the Gulf region. Drawing on Salar Mameni's theory of the Terracene and Steven Mentz’s work on blue humanities, this presentation explores al Qadiri's artistic praxis as a means to disrupt capitalist discourses and evoke visceral responses to environmental precarity exacerbated by extractive industries. Mameni’s work historicizes the popularization of the scientific notion of the Anthropocene alongside the emergence of the global war on terror. His writing offers a pathway into the interconnectedness of the United States' engagement in multiple conflicts, contemporary theories of the Anthropocene characterized by exclusion, and the global oil industry (significantly conducted in maritime shipping routes). The blue humanities allow us to explore not only the surface of the ocean and its currents but also its depths and nonhuman life. Together, these frameworks illuminate al Qadiri's artistic portrayal of the tangible toxicity resulting from conflict and our reliance on oil, alongside the emergence of wet ontologies, immersive, and saturated imagery, transcending land-based analyses rooted in the nation-state and its borders.
For instance, in al Qadiri's artwork, she explores dinoflagellates, single-celled marine algae with a history spanning hundreds of millions of years, reproducing autonomously and generating oxygen through photosynthesis. Enlarging these organisms to larger-than-life proportions and illuminating them to mimic their bioluminescent properties, al Qadiri visually represents the impact of the petrochemical industry down to the molecule. In her piece "Gastromancer," she addresses the use of paint on oil tankers to deter marine organisms like algae, a practice that results in gender changes in Murex mollusks. Through this artwork, al Qadiri portrays these mollusks as narrators of their metamorphic journey. These works, coupled with pieces that evoke the iridescent, rainbow tones found in both deep-sea marine life and oil spills, facilitate a linkage between the aesthetics of the Terracene and immersive narratives of the oceanic realm. By submerging viewers in her installations, Al Qadiri presents speculative avenues, encouraging them to reassess their rapport with the planet and its ecosystems. This prompts contemplation on the interwoven dynamics of power and fragility inherent in our collective behaviors and their ties to the oceanic realm.
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Holiday Powers
This paper focuses on Sudanese modernist artist Kamala Ibrahim Ishaq and argues for the central importance of ecofeminism and gendered ecological narratives within her work. In 1976, Ishaq with four other artists released the Crystalist Manifesto, which presented a new vision of artistic practice in line with the changing political climate of the military regime, particularly in comparison to the artistic propositions of the Khartoum School. The artists insisted on transparency, duality, depth, and multiplicity in the place of essentialized and idealized clarity. In Ishaq’s work, this translated into distorted portraits of women inside of crystal cubes. Scholar Anneka Lenssen has described Ishaq’s connection to the Crystalists through her feminist interest in focusing on alternative forms of knowledge, and particularly interior knowledge. Ishaq’s work has also emphasized Zaar rituals, a cult of spirit possession practiced by women in central Sudan. Within these rituals, evil spirits are exorcised. Like in the crystal portraits, the portraits of the women within the Zaar images are similarly distorted. Yet beyond the formal similarity, these strands of Ishaq’s work can be linked in the ways that they specifically portray feminine experience as a source of powerful and alternative knowledge that is passed matrilineally through generations. Plants are present throughout Ishaq’s oeuvre and often physically connected to the women that are pictured, particularly within the last 15 years. For example, women involved in Zaar are shown as plants in Procession (Zaar) (2015) and women are held together by plants in Women in Cubes (2015). Women’s heads and bodies are surrounded by plants and linked to each other through their root systems, as in Two Women (Eve and Eve) (2016) and Four Faces of Eve (2016).This paper argues that Ishaq has developed a specifically ecofeminist practice, that links a long-standing interest in feminine knowledge with the roots and systems of plants. Plants function in her paintings as systems of knowledge and connection, as in Bait Al-Mal (2019), yet they are shown as primarily the purview of women. The presence of these plants, more than linking Ishaq’s portraits to a specific part of the earth, instead focus on the potential for ecological narratives that rely on gendered knowledge and experience.
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Damien Tissot
This presentation will explore philosophically the concept of “energy” in several artworks by contemporary Lebanese artist Marwa Arsanios that engage with ideas around land, women’s activism, and the commons. Through video, sculpture, installation, and research-based projects, Arsanios examines the complex notions of collective ownership, resource usage, and access to public goods. The presentation will focus on specific works including projects such as "Have You Ever Killed a Bear? Or Becoming Jamila" (2014), "Who Is Afraid of Ideology?" (2017), and installations which highlight issues of natural resource control, land privatization, and the exclusion of certain groups from public spaces or utilities. Through an ecofeminist framework, this presentation will more specifically explore the ways in which the concept of “energy” is mobilized in Arsanios’ work. Energy will be conceived of as a natural resource, a shared inheritance, and the figurative "energies" of politics, activism, and change. Projects such as "Have You Ever Killed a Bear? Or Becoming Jamila" examines the importance of collectively shared energy resources. Through the story of an Arab-Druze woman protecting her land from enclosure, installations like "Who's Afraid of Ideology?" nod to the energies of activism, protest, and campaigning at a grassroots level, and underline the struggle over electricity access and fuel sources in rural communities. This presentation will finally question the ways in which the struggles over natural resources and raw materials for power – be they oil or gas, for instance – can be articulated conceptually to the political and social energy of activism.
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Jameel Haque
This presentation looks at artistic reactions to the Christchurch attacks in New Zealand and the concurrent appropriation of Indigenous and Muslim religious iconography and rituals, reading these works as exemplifying Evelyn Alsultany’s “diversity patriotism.” It then explores how Indigenous and SWANA diasporic populations in Australia and New Zealand forge solidarities, exemplified by representations of natural imagery integrating ecological embeddedness, thereby extending gestures of hospitality alongside acknowledgment of the intrinsic value of place.
Australian responses to the attacks include a large-scale image painted by artist Loretta Lizzio on a 25-meter-tall silo in Brunswick, Melbourne, depicting New Zealand’s Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern embracing a Muslim woman in a hijab. Artist Pat Campbell redrew New Zealand’s traditional silver fern emblem to show Muslim worshippers in different stages of prayer in response to the terrorist attack. Najwa Majar writes about the “neoliberal revision” of Muslim women in US culture and politics where they are “increasingly touted as US civic and market icons,” meaning they are visibly Muslim because they wear hijab, but participating in secular state and market institutions (309). She highlights how this image intertwines patriotism with Islamic practice, even as the state exercises racial control over Muslims. Majar’s argument seamlessly applies to the appropriation of Muslim identity in these two images.
The appropriation of the silver fern as a symbol of the nation-state overlooks its original significance to Māori, who regarded the graceful form of the fronds as emblematic of strength, tenacious resistance, and enduring vitality. How do these artists and writers incorporate natural imagery differently, as a means of ecological continuity rather than dominance, and how do we read this in terms of national identity? As examples, a collective of women from the Anangu Pitjantjatjara Yankunytjatjara Lands, featuring Nyunmiti Burton, crafted artworks depicting the honey grevillea shrub, a native plant known for its winter blooms of yellow and green flowers, which they presented as gifts to Muslim communities in Adelaide and New Zealand. Further, the work of Wellington-based Somali poet Khadro Mohamed reflects the influence of the Somali oral tradition, enriched by her experiences on the coast of Te Whanganui-a-Tara. She draws inspiration from Islam and Somali culture, as well as her whakapapa, a reference to traditional mātauranga Māori knowledge. Mohamed’s use of this kind of ancestral layering in her poetry is only one example of diasporic artists bypassing white colonial cultures to connect with their Native and Indigenous hosts.
