I anticipated sadness the first time I entered an exhibition centered around exile. Instead, I discovered something more subdued and unfamiliar. A room filled with white items. A movie is playing on the back wall. Speaking in a language I couldn’t understand, two women were standing close to the entrance and pointing at a picture of an empty chair. No one was in tears. No one was explaining. I believe that what critics consistently overlook about this type of art is that the piece was slowly working on the people in the room.
Verbal language cannot travel in the same way as visual language. This is still true, as art historian Linda Nochlin pointed out years ago. A poem needs to be situated, translated, and footnoted. Without documentation, a sculpture, a smear of paint, or the absence of a figure where one should be can transcend national boundaries. Perhaps this explains why so many of today’s most influential artists are from places they are unable to return to. Rithy Panh, a filmmaker from Cambodia, lost the majority of his family to the Khmer Rouge. There isn’t much debate in his movies. They take a seat. They hold off. Before allowing the audience to comprehend the space, they allow them to feel it.
Katarzyna Grabska is a researcher who writes about the thinking-feeling approach, or sentipensar. Although it sounds scholarly, it really sums up what most of us do when we are faced with a task like Panh’s and are at a loss for words. First, you feel. Sometimes it happens hours later, and other times it happens while brewing coffee the following morning. She contends that traditional research relies too much on language. The temporal weight of displacement is overlooked. What bodies remember is missed.
You begin to comprehend Latin America’s colonial legacy in a way that no textbook can quite match when you stroll through Runo Lagomarsino’s installations. He makes use of drawings, sculptures, and leftovers. When the Louisiana Channel featured his work last year, the interviewer repeatedly asked him to sum up his work in a single sentence. He was unable to. Or wouldn’t. The visual language of exile seems to deliberately resist summarization. Compressing it would mean repeating the violence of compression.
In exile, the eye is trained to perceive absence as the most powerful presence in the visual field, according to a statement made by painter Joshua Hagler. I was reminded of that line. It clarifies why the spaces between objects are just as important as the objects themselves, and why these pieces frequently feel emptier than you might anticipate. Written by Water, a piece by Marco Godinho for the Luxembourg Pavilion, was created using blank notebooks drenched in Mediterranean water. Nothing was being written in the notebooks. It was the sea.
The way the market is catching up to all of this is difficult to ignore. Fifteen years ago, it would have been unimaginable that major institutions would regularly feature displaced artists. It is worthwhile to inquire as to whether that is absorption or recognition. If you give galleries enough time, they can flatten anything. Even so, it feels like a minor adjustment, if only a partial one, to see this work find audiences. Things have always been made by the displaced. At last, we are searching.
As I leave those rooms, I am struck by how little justification was requested. The argument was the art. The point seems to be that.
