The absence of images | Making the Mirror Project

Part of the idea of a residency is that what you go with as an idea becomes changed. Did that happen to you when you went to Kabul?

In terms of the structure of my residency, I didn’t have any particular idea of what I wanted to do in Bamiyan, but my residency was structured so that I had about two and a half weeks based in Kabul at the Turquoise Mountain Foundation. Primarily I was there to do the art workshops for the contemporary art prize, so I was spending a lot of time with young Afghan artists, and the staff from Afghanistan, Germany, the UK and North America who were manning the Foundation. The really great thing about a residency is this idea of reconnaissance, of subtly absorbing influences, so I had two and a half to three weeks for this complete cultural and experiential bombardment. Just getting used to the security arrangements and having the mobile phone and getting security updates about not going to certain areas, and feeling a little bit tentative about moving about town... spending a couple of weeks hanging out with the Afghan workers and going to restaurants and witnessing life in Kabul. Seeing first hand the vibrancy of Kabul but also the horrific poverty and infrastructural damage. So I felt I absorbed a lot of that. And what that did in terms of going to Bamiyan was it gave me the confidence… if I’d gone straight to Bamiyan I would have been really scared to wander up to the mosque, or to understand that if you walk on the white side of a painted stone you're safe, but on the red side you might get blown up by a landmine. The Mirror Project is a project about me walking around, it tracks my movements around Bamiyan.

Did it also focus what you were trying to do?

It did because during the day I was doing the workshops and then in the evening I was then carrying on a bit of research about Bamiyan, and what became apparent was that I was there for a fairly brief time and in a simple way I didn’t have time to make an artwork I could impose in the place. So the artwork had to be very responsive to me being in the situation. In that sense the artwork had to come up from the form of documentation, of absorbing the influence rather than being more assertive. And that’s when the land art thing came about, so you’ve got Smithson's Mirror Displacements. You’ve also got Richard Long documenting a walk photographically, so just thinking of the idea that if you’re in the landscape but you don’t have much apart from yourself and maybe a camera…

Baudrillard's idea of “war porn” is that images become banal in modern conflict. The Taliban clearly didn’t think the images of the Bamiyan Buddhas were banal, they almost thought they were hyper-charged.

What Baudrillard is saying  is that we’re exposed to so many images every day, on the telly and on the internet, and they become banal because of the repetition. And the terms that are used in war become banal too, like “collateral damage”. What does that mean? It’s such a euphemism. So we’ve become anaesthetised by all these images. In a way what I was trying to do was to revisit these Buddhas. We can re-look at them. That’s part of what I wanted to do, to go there, and to look at them completely outside of the media context.

Our images of the Bamiyan Buddhas were controlled by the Taliban. There was no independent corroboration that they had been destroyed.

I think they invited the journalist Tayseer Allouni, from the television company Al Jazeera along as well. But you’re totally right. I was thinking about this this morning. There is a war on the ground but there is a conflict of images as well. The destruction of the Buddhas was the opening salvo of the image wars as well, something that culminated in 9/11, which was horrific, but at the same time was a spectacle as well.

When I was looking back at the YouTube footage of the destruction of the Buddhas there are then other links going back to 9/11. I hadn’t watched any footage of  9/11 since then. It’s one of those images you don’t want to look at lightly.

You were also interested in the idea of the “absence of imagery” which the Buddhas seemed to represent.

It was Emma Ridgway who said that the writer Bruno Latour has written a lot about this idea of the absence in the book Iconoclash. But also I went to the Documenta 11 and saw the Alfredo Jaar [Lament of the Images, 2002].I think that was the 2002 Documenta and I was really impressed by it then and absorbed it. You go round the exhibition and you see the descriptions of images being censored or controlled by governments or multinationals and then you walk into the final installation, which you’re bombarded with white light and you think, yeah, he’s really talking about the power and the facileness… and the absence. But I was also aware, because I lived in Holland, in Amsterdam, for a while, of an artist I met there, Aernout Mik who did a project (Raw Footage) again based on the Bosnian war where he obtained all the ITN and Reuters footage of the Bosnian war - hundreds and hundreds of hours of it - the footage that ITN deemed too boring to screen. The thing about TV images is that they have to have an entertainment value; the news is a form of entertainment. Aernout Mik showed very potent images of people just milling around while a plane went overhead to bomb a neighbouring area. The media don’t really show those sorts of images. And very disturbing images of a van going around with soldiers picking up dead bodies that had rigor mortis and putting them in the backs of vans and just tootling along as if they’re just picking up rubbish, or the Royal Mail. For people in a war torn area, war unfortunately becomes part of the fabric of their lives.

But going to Afghanistan allowed me to try and bring something of my own practice to what I’ve seen what I’ve read about the discourse and artists whose work I really respect
For an artist the idea of control of imagery is an incredibly provocative idea respond to. Controlling imagery is very counter to art practice. Was there a how-dare-they level?
It was more inquisitive, but I don’t want it to sound too detached. A lot of journalists are very angered by the banality of CNN or Sky or certain media outlets. When I initially read the chilling quote that you can’t see anything [of Afghanistan] because all the image rights have been bought up [by the US military], that’s chilling. Because that’s something that goes under the radar. The Taliban controlling media images by blowing up the Buddhas, that’s something that is a spectacle. That's extrovert and designed to bring attention, but the American army controlling so many of the images of the war situation so that they can then control the way the media report civilian deaths.

You remember when Donald Rumsfeld and Colin Powell showed satellite images to show how precise their laser guided missiles were?. “Look, we can destroy a military base, even if that’s 50 yards away from a school, we can be that precise.” In reality that didn’t happen,

A mirror makes explicit what photographs are doing. They give yourself a distance from the object.

I think that’s really crucial. There is also the idea of a hall of mirrors, of subterfuge, smoke and mirrors, pulling the wool over people’s eyes… those sort of ideas of the mirror not always being so trustworthy. The other thing the mirror did is it gave me a prop. It was a way of engaging. The mirror also encourages vanity and playfulness. A lot of young Afghan kids were coming up to me and some of the time I had to wait a long time for the kids to stop peering into the mirror so I could take a photograph. That actually made me feel much more confident about being there as I was able to be less detached from local people.

The mirror became an intermediary, almost.

Exactly, yes. And it’s also an intermediary in the sense that I was becoming aware about Bamiyan as a town defined by these Buddhas. When I take the photographs I've always got my back to the Buddhas and I'm looking around to see what else is in Bamiyan. It's a rural community getting back on its feet after Mullah Omar's decree to destroy the Buddhas. So it's directing a mirror back on Bamiyan where there is now a really good trade in poplar trees which people are using to build their houses, on all the crops that grow in this fertile area. There are bazaars. It's a bustling, self-contained, vibrant community, though it is really poor. It's something that exists apart from the Buddhas as well.  

You made art which is very comprehensible here in the UK. Did it articulate with the artists you met at the Turquoise Mountain Foundation?

That’s a really, really good point. It’s part of the reason I want to go back. One of the seminars I did there was a talk called "Absences In War Imagery" where I showed Alfredo Jaar, Aernout Mik, Goshka Macuga's work at the Whitechapel with Picasso's Guernica to Afghan students who were all in their early 20s. There isn't much formal art education, so I was really heartened by the meaty debate it produced. A lot of the students were really feisty in the way they were challenging me about the work. I think they seemed very intrigued and quite supportive about the idea of me doing this but for example, when it came to some of my other work which is a bit more conceptually-based, we had a lot of discussions about the idea of craft within practice, and it actually made me think about the preconceptions I had about art coming from  the western environment -  that craft isn’t so important in comparison to the concept. Craft means you’re an artisan. But in Afghanistan, they were involved with Mughal miniature paintings or Nuristani carvings are very highly skilled, but they were also super smart conceptually. So they were probing what they saw as a weakness in the Western art I was presenting to them. In the best possible way it was very aggressive, particularly when I gave a lecture at Kabul University, which was to a massive audience – hundreds of staff and students. An elderly professor gave me a really hard time about some of my conceptual work saying that it was really rubbish. I was being a bad influence. But the students were going, “No, we think it's alright.” It caused a massive argument in the lecture theatre. This rocky introduction has led to discussions with Aman Mojadidi, Director of Culture at Turquoise Mountain Foundation, about running a series of workshops and reading groups on contemporary art at the University to continue this debate.

>> Bamiyan Mirror Series