“Love is the subversion of / death. Our survival depends on / the capacity of
the real to escape / the assault of language.”
—- Etel Adnan, Return to London.
“If we continue to speak in this sameness— speak as men have spoken for
centuries, we will fail each other. Again... Words will pass through our
bodies, above our heads, disappear, make us disappear.”
— Luce Irigaray, When Our Lips Speak Together
So Expansive
Raya Kassisieh understands the essence of language as a speech-act, as a
performative, identity-affirming tool, an embodied position against one’s
own dissolution. So much of the artist’s practice is concerned with the
unspeakable, with transmuting the languages of the body into a graphite
trace, a stitch on metal, a sculptural movement.
Fragments of her writing form the titles of her works, including that of her
first solo exhibition: So expansive, you and I become null. These are words
that attempt to encapsulate a multiplicity of feeling that goes beyond other
givens such as being born Palestinian-Jordanian or identifying as an artist. It
is as if she is asking, how do you contain the uncontainable? One wonders if
it is the same as asking: how does one speak the unspeakable?
For Kassisieh, the body she carries is not singular, linked as it is to a lineage
of land and loss that preceded her. She has also carried different bodies
over time, wildly varying in their density. In a constant negotiation of her
own corporeal boundaries, she questions the extent to which the ‘self’ is
entangled, the extent to which an individual is embedded in their family,
and the depths to which we can sense the group — their violations, losses
and joys. While she performs her own body in this work, it is often through
an undifferentiated physicality, the kind of expansiveness that is not
restricted to a single image or boundedness of being-in-the-world.
Kassisieh’s work is best understood through repetition and reiteration,
hence this solo exhibition in three parts. In the maskings of body parts in her
practice — skin pressed against glass, stuffed stockings, emptied bodysuits,
vessels modeled on her torso becoming ‘body vases’ — there is an
understanding of different levels of distortion that come with magnification,
on the one hand, and fragmentation on the other. In her constructions, she
draws attention to scale through anatomy.
A case in point is her 1950s vintage corset from Amman’s Friday flea market,
which can be seen as a bodily extension or a clever disguise. Within this
2024 work entitled Do you see her? a UV-printed archival image of
Kassisieh’s paternal grandmother Claudette appears against a dark
background like lush foliage. Claudette’s figure is ghostly, a form made in
negative space — her face slightly more defined. Kassisieh holds this picture
within a structure, in which the corset becomes an encasing that holds the
torso together. Incorporating the archive reveals a desire for permanence,
for fixing the image on a body. In this memorial Kassisieh paints the murky
nature of loss, grief that the artist grapples with, with the sharpness of
Claudette’s features bringing that image into focus. To the artist, this is an
icon of the most forgiving, nurturing figure whose acceptance was
unconditional.
By conceiving her grandmother’s likeness on a corset, a shell we wear
temporarily, Kassisieh is referencing the body as an ephemeral shell we
contain. It is almost as if she is responding to Irigaray’s question: “How can I
touch you if you’re not there?”
Irigaray’s feminist philosophy and psycholinguistic approach has formulated
a theory of language from a feminized point of view. In her aforementioned
essay, When Our Lips Speak Together, she states:
“Absent from ourselves, we become machines that are spoken, machines
that speak. Clean skins envelop us, but they are not our own. We have fled
into proper names, we have been violated by them. Not yours, not mine.
We don't have names.”
A body is attached to a name. What does it mean to lose one’s grandmother
whose family name is missing from ours?
You and I become null.
In her palm-sized bronze sculptures, Close, Closer and Closed (2024)
Kassisieh features 3D-scanned full-length renditions of herself holding a
body pillow in three different poses. They are less portraits or mirrors and
more states that connect life to the lifeless, a poignant embrace of the lost
parts of oneself. The latter is modeled on an image made from wrapping
and duct-taping her own body, a temporary skin of her physical existence at
a precise moment. This very tender embrace of self with self-as-form
contrasts with another set of three sculptures of lying bodies in differing
numbers. One of them, Stacked, a mound of us (2024) shows figures flung in
a pile, like carcasses.
For Kassisieh, the works emerge from the indelible image of a father
carrying his son’s remains in a plastic bag during Israel’s ongoing genocide
against Gaza. Her preoccupation is with what it means to couch a life so
dear and precious in an everyday disposable garbage bag, reduced to
Agamben’s notion of a ‘bare life’ but also literally, a life made bare. As Hal
Foster wrote in Brutal Aesthetics (2020) “at essential moments — when we
sleep, when we have sex and when we die — we return to the horizontality
of the animal.” This outrage translates into a manipulation of flesh in
material and bodies as multiples within which she inserts the need to cherish
and hold. This means reducing loved ones so they sit in the palms of your
hands.
By controlling the gaze on form and figure in this way, she evokes the idea
that one cannot adequately encapsulate the tumultuousness of living inside
a body. For this perhaps you would need eyes at the back of your head. Her
self-portrait Bad Dreams (2024) embodies a resistance to any fixed
perspective. With eyes closed, a 360-degree turn captures a sequence of
angles in one instance. Bad Dreams defies the hegemonic regime of
looking, of holding a viewer’s gaze “captive” as filmmaker Chantal Akerman
would say. Rather than being focused on the viewer, it is confrontational
from all sides, yet the viewed does not look back. As a gesture, it reverses
the act of open-eyed witnessing characteristic of our times, where those
who are watched on screens and social media channels cannot return the
gaze. Here the witnessed are also blind to the mediation of life, which is a
form of sublime terror.
If Kassisieh’s Man-hours (2020-22) series of graphite drawings posits the
relentless erasure of all witnessing, an act of flattening what we can see, her
tapestries are body-length unconscious drawings of flora-inspired
movement, abstracted from outdoor experiences of the natural world and
its riches. Inspired by something at the edge of horror and love, the scenes
draw from ungraspable mountainous terrains or a growing despair around
the erosion of ancient sites like Tabaqat Fahil in Jordan.
This sense of awe — for nature, the family, a lover, a people, a world — is
always mixed with the bittersweet pain of transience. It is also a devotion so
deep it is self-annihilating. Perhaps it’s the pain that comes with the
profundity of absence — for nothing remains constant. For Kassisieh, it’s an
out-of-body kind of knowing.
To borrow again from Irigaray: “Removed from our own skin, we remain
distant. You and I, divided. You? I? That’s still saying too much. It cuts too
sharply between us: ‘all’”
Her rose sculptures, which include the life-sized You are more than the world
to me, my eyes will never tire of seeing you (2024), become an offering and
ode to her grandmother, who always surrounded herself with flowers and
embellished her clothes with them. Towering like a totem, the rose in steel
presents a Nature Morte. The artist contemplates how a cut rose may live.
In her poem, The morning after my death, Etel Adnan writes:
I know flowers shine stronger
than the sun
their eclipse means the end of
times
...
without their presence
my mind would be an unmarked
grave.
Kassisieh often reflects on what she calls the ‘mortality’ of the sun, its warm
feeling on skin in the waning hours of the day. She talks about how the
sunset cannot be controlled or delayed. “You just have to stand still. Within
40 seconds it completely disappears and it’s no longer within reach.
Throughout, you are stationary; you are where you are... I’m physically still
but everything around me is changing status. It’s like transitioning on a
spinning pedestal where your gaze is being forced to change while you
remain the same.”
It is like her self-portrait. “It’s almost like a training for my eye to see what
there is and what could be,” she continues. “[Through] the departure of
something beautiful from my gaze, knowing that it will shine for someone
else somewhere, but for me it has come to a close, I love that feeling.”
It is truly that all-encompassing sensation that exists between eros and
annihilation, and born from a deep longing from which Kassisieh’s practice
emerges. As she has written:
That space of spaciousness so expansive you and I are null. Where flesh
comes apart, broken down dissolved in matter till it turns light. A yearning to
leave the body, the body, so lived-in.
