Approaching a Liminal Space:
The Sea in Contemporary Art of the Middle East

1 Introduction

1For the peoples living on the shores of the Mediterranean, the sea has throughout history been a connecting link, a medium for cultural exchange and trade, and a location of both fears and dreams. But in recent times, this particular sea has gained a sinister notoriety. Unlike the Mare Nostrum of Roman Antiquity, the Mediterranean Sea has today become an almost insurmountable barrier, a place in which thousands of people lose their lives every year while trying to cross it. According to the “Missing Migrants Project”, since 2014, 26,668 people have gone missing in the Mediterranean Sea while attempting to reach Europe.¹ Each year thousands of people continue to lose their lives in the sea.

2Behind each of these numbers that we continue to count every year is a human being with hopes and plans for a better future. For people on the southern and eastern shores of the Mediterranean, the sea represents a hurdle that needs to be overcome to flee wars, conflicts and hardship, a space of both longing and danger, a symbol of the hope of a better life, but also of the risk of losing one’s life in the attempt. This role as a space situated between hope and despair has given rise to numerous art works, in which the Mediterranean serves as a medium for inquiries into issues of contemporary power relations and offers a powerful metaphor for the global divisions between North and South, rich and poor, privileged and marginalized.

3In this essay I will discuss the works of several contemporary artists from the MENA region (Middle East and Nord Africa), more specifically from Algeria, Egypt, Lebanon and Syria, in which the sea and its coastal regions serve as a recurring motif, as a way to articulate critique of social and/or political conditions. In these works, the sea becomes a space of freedom or its contrary, a place of extreme danger and death, a place to reflect on memories and feelings of longing, nostalgia and desire or delve deeper into the darker realms of unknown forces. In their multi-layered works, they make allusions to history, colonialism and mythology, as well as poetic traditions, and thus present works that move beyond simplistic readings.

2 The Sea and Seashore as a Metaphor of Fear and Longing

4In the mid-1960s, the Syrian-German artist Marwan Kassab-Bachi (or simply Marwan as he preferred) painted some of his most enigmatic works. Best known for his large-scale “Heads” paintings, a motif that he developed in the 1980s and worked on continuously until his death in 2016², paintings such as Untitled (1964) and Figuration (1963–64) seem to conjure up environments that appear as visions taken out of nightmares.³ In their desolation, the landscapes of these works remain difficult to define, but they resemble seashores, onto which bizarre, deformed creatures resembling heaps of meat have been washed up or discarded and left to disintegrate.

5We might see these settings as “borderlands”, a liminal and unstable space of a highly ambiguous character as it is described in literature of the uncanny or “gothic” (Packham 205–6). Here, unknown forces may be located, monstrous creatures and other things that has so far been hidden and kept out of sight may be washed up, turning the coast into a “meeting-point between life and death” (Packham 208–9). What may appear from the deep sea are metaphors for those fears, ghosts and histories that haunt the living, traumas that resurface, unexpected and unwanted (Alder 1, Packham and Punter 28). For Marwan, who had moved to Berlin in 1957 to study art, these paintings, situated somewhere between the abstract and the figurative, were some of his first experiments to move towards figurative painting again, after having practiced informal painting as a student of the German painter Hann Trier. At the same time, the paintings evoke dark, sombre associations and anxieties, that can be seen as expressions of the artist’s troubled emotional state at the time of their production.⁴ Marwan was suffering from feelings of loneliness at the time, struggling with the insecurity of being a foreign young artist in a city where most people were mainly preoccupied with the wish of forgetting the war and its atrocities. But the anxiety he was faced with was not only personal. On the political level, he was concerned with the deteriorating situation in his home country and the wider Arab world, where the promises of independence were left unfulfilled and authoritarianism, wars and conflicts were increasing.

6This role of the sea and seashore as spaces full of ambiguity, appears in the works of numerous contemporary artists. As liminal spaces, they occupy a place that may seem to promise freedom and a way to escape from hardship and life-threatening events. As I will discuss further below, they also present spaces that are fraught with dangers themselves. These dangers notwithstanding, the sea seems to have a particular attraction of its own, something which is also manifested in the dreamy quality, filled with nostalgic longing, that surround many narratives of coastal cities.

7Mayye Zayed’s Iskandaria (2012, 8 min) is a short, essayistic video that offers a kaleidoscope of found footage from older Egyptian films, all set in the Egyptian port city of Alexandria (Iskandaria in Arabic). In the history of Egypt (real and imagined), the city represents a cosmopolitan, urban identity that was gradually lost after the country underwent substantial reforms under Gamal Abdel Nasser in the 1950s. But while this cosmopolitanism of a city that brought together Greek, Italian and Arabic communities of diverse faiths (Jewish, Christian and Muslim) is lost to history (and may never have existed in the idyllic form it is often portrayed), it lives on in popular imagination and is often the subject of films and novels. The mood of Zayed’s video is melancholic, underscoring the notion of a “paradise lost”, memories—even when they are happy—appear painful, for the very reason that they are memories and therefore belong to the past. The video, produced when Zayed was studying at Wellesley College in Massachusetts, USA, combines the nostalgic atmosphere of the films with a reflective mood that seems rooted in the personal longings of the artist-filmmaker. Offering an image of Alexandria that seems closer to the Alexandria of imagination than a real city, the video explores the themes of memories and nostalgia and thus represents a reflection of exile. The city appears as a port of departure that offers hopes for the future as well as a port of arrival, of coming home, but also of reckoning.

8Even though many of the films from which the excerpts are taken do not necessarily convey an ideal image of the city, the excerpts chosen by the filmmaker recall a melancholic longing for a place that once was, but is now lost forever. The excerpts from a documentary film of sunken ruins off the coast underline this impression of a lost world that may seem better than contemporary realities. Nostalgia for a perceived better past or a ‘golden age’ is a common feature for a considerable part of artistic and cultural production that address the shortcomings and failures of modern and contemporary nation states in the Middle East, especially the failure of these states to assure the safety and livelihoods of their citizens and thus often force them to leave in order to sustain themselves.

9Movement has always been an integral part of the history of the Mediterranean and central to assure its vitality as a cultural space in history. More recently, movement has become forced and people divided into two groups: the wanted and the unwanted. Staying in one place has turned into a privilege, reserved for those with means, rather than a sign of stagnation. The French-born, London-based Algerian artist Zineb Sedira, has used her own personal history and that of her family in a series of works to reflect on these movements of leaving, arriving and leaving again. Memory, language and fluid identities are central themes in her work and a pensive mood of perpetual waiting underlies many of her video works. Thus, in Middle Sea (2008, 16 min), the camera follows a lonely man as he wanders about on a ferry and contemplates the sea, resembling a ghostly presence rather than a real person, an impression that is underscored by the slightly uncanny soundtrack in which electronic sounds and music is mixed with sounds of the boat’s horn and engine, as well as sounds of a party of other people who are never seen.⁵ Saphir (2006, 19 min) is another video work of Sedira’s which centres on persons who also appear to be waiting, possibly for other people or for some unknown event: as spectators we do not know which.⁶ The title Saphir refers both to the brilliant blue gem stone sapphire, which the blue sea may be seen as evoking, as well as the Arabic word for ambassador, in its very basic meaning a person who travels between places and is a representative of a country on the territory of another. The two protagonists, a man and a woman, who are not connected to each other, appear isolated in their seemingly purposeless activities (wandering around the port of Algiers, drinking coffee, while looking out at the sea and observing the ferries arriving and departing from the port). The protagonists may be seen as stand-ins for the scores of people, for whom their societies have no use and who are therefore condemned to a life of forced inactivity and hopelessness. In a country like Algeria with its long and difficult history of colonialism and authoritarian dysfunctionality, this situation drives great numbers of people away each year, in the hope of finding a better future elsewhere. Saphir does not offer a solution, however, at the end of Middle Sea the protagonist is shown loosening the ship’s rope from the mooring, allowing it to slip away. Maybe we may see this ending as an indication of a final arrival, not in a specific place, but in a peaceful state of mind, a way of coming to terms with one’s complex history of ‘in-between-ness’.

10Like the city of Alexandria, other cities around the Mediterranean were hosts to cosmopolitan communities in the past, that were dispersed during the upheavals of the twentieth century. Ismyrna, filmed in 2016 by the Lebanese artist and filmmaker Joana Hadjithomas in close collaboration with the artist and writer Etel Adnan, embarks on a search for both artists’ family histories connected to the Turkish city of Izmir, formerly Smyrna. Joana Hadjithomas’ paternal Greek family had been forced into exile after the fall of the Ottoman Empire, Etel Adnan’s Greek mother, who was married to a Syrian officer of the Ottoman army, was likewise forced to leave the city. At the beginning of their conversation, neither of the two women had ever visited the city; however, each of them had grown up with histories of what seemed a lost paradise.⁷ The film follows the search of the women through old maps, photographs and objects, a sometimes-painful search for the fragmented histories of a region full of conflicts and the suffering experienced at the loss of familiar environments. The peaceful sea, glittering under the sun that appears again and again in the film, stands in stark contrast to the violence experienced by people as they were forced to flee their homes and witness the death of their friends. But despite the violence of the stories of the artists’ families, the film ends on a reconciliatory note that allow both of them to close a chapter of their families’ history.

3 The Sea as a Place of Violence and Death

11As mentioned at the beginning of this essay, the Mediterranean Sea has become synonymous with danger and death in recent decades, something which has found its way into numerous works by contemporary artists of the region. The Lebanese artist Salah Saouli’s Crossing Mediterranea dates from 2009 but the issue it addresses is one that is still ongoing and has more recently reached an even more critical stage. Rather than decrease, the numbers of people attempting to cross the sea and reach Europe has increased substantially of late. In the late 2000s, this might have been mainly due to the desperate economic situation in many African and Middle Eastern regions, although wars and conflicts also played an important role in these movements of exodus. Since the mid-2010s, those fleeing wars, destruction and torture have grown dramatically. For Saouli, the lack of media coverage at the time of the work’s realization was an important motivation to produce the piece. While the situation has changed in relation to media coverage, the problem remains and there is no easy solution in sight. Conflicts and wars continue, also with the aid of Western arms supply, yet Europe continues to attempt to relocate the problem to other countries such as Turkey and Libya, despite knowing that human rights abuses are rampant in these locations.

12The Installation Crossing Mediterranea consists of seven square objects (two of which are no longer in existence), placed on the floor like over-dimensional floor tiles.

Fig. 1. Salah Saouli, Crossing Mediterranea, 2009. Wax, wood, plexiglass, textiles, 100 x 100 x 15 cm.

13The objects are made of wax and enclosed in each of them is a piece of colourful clothing. The translucent surface recalls the surface of the sea, the pieces of clothing remind the viewer of the human beings who have perished in the sea, trying to cross it to reach a safe place. The wax is a nod by the artist to the Greek legend of Icarus, who sought to fly with the help of waxen wings, but who fell into the sea when he came too close to the sun and his wings melted. In Saouli’s work, Icarus’ dream of flying may be seen as the equivalent of the lost dreams of those who try to cross the sea in search of a better life and safety from war and conflict. In a poetic language, Saouli draws the attention to the human costs of wars, destruction of livelihoods on the southern and eastern shores and inhuman policies on both sides of the sea.

14While the work was created as a reaction to the plight of refugees drowning in the Mediterranean, the pieces of clothing left floating in the sea may also serve as a reminder of the sea as a place of disappearance in another conflict, namely the Lebanese Civil War (1975-1989/90), a conflict that, as was the case for many Lebanese, led to artist’s own uprooting. Different militia during this violent and long conflict, used the method of kidnappings and forced disappearances to terrorize their opponents and create a climate of constant fear and insecurity. Unwanted (and unclaimed) bodies were often either buried in anonymous mass graves or dumped in the sea. As pointed out by Irene Depetris Chauvin writing about similar practices during Pinochet’s dictatorship in Chile, the sea was used to “drown the truth” (Chauvin 145).

15The disappearance of people and the state-ordered collective amnesia after the end of the Civil War is central to Walid Raad’s Secrets in the Open Sea (1989-2004).

Fig. 2. Walid Raad, Secrets in the Open Sea, 1989-2004. Ink-jet prints, 111 x 173 cm.

16The work consists of six large-scale rectangular prints with a central color field, each of a different blue or turquoise color, surrounded by a white margin. In the lower right-hand corner, small photographic portraits of groups of people appear. The series forms a part of the “Atlas Group” project, a fictional documentary and archival research project that allegedly collected material from witnesses of different events of the Lebanese Civil War. The “archive” is entirely fictional, from the collected material to the witnesses and collectors of material, it constructs historical material of an often-absurd character and thereby comments on the lack of any official attempt at consistent documentation and meaningful investigation of the events of the fifteen years of conflict (Korola 458). As stated on the project’s website and texts accompanying its exhibitions, the blue images were “buried under the rubble during the 1993 demolition of Beirut’s war-ravaged commercial districts.” After having been analyzed in a laboratory, the prints revealed “small black-and-white latent images…[which] represented group portraits of men and women.” As further stated, “it turned out that they were all individuals who drowned, died or were found dead in the Mediterranean between 1975 and 1991.” ⁸ As pointed out by Katerina Korola, the monochrome of these images may be seen in the context of how it “has troubled any easy boundary between the visible and invisible, the absent and present, the abstract and the concrete” (Korola 461). They represent “a form of presence that escapes the schemas of representation, which becomes particularly critical in relation to the fate of the thousands, referenced in the work’s provenance narrative, who were forcibly disappeared during the civil wars (Korola 462).

17Unlike many works that address water as locations of disappearance through the use of moving images, Walid Raad’s and Salah Saouli’s works about the sea are static. Thereby, Raad’s Secrets of the Open Sea shows us the different blue colours of the sea, serene and beautiful, oblivious to the traces of violence it covers. The small photos in the lower corner come as an after-thought, a reminder to the visitors not to be taken in by the superficial beauty of the blue sea. Saouli’s Crossing Mediterranea constitutes a Momentaufnahme, a moment frozen in time that attempts to capture one particular instance of importance, that one, in which a piece of clothing, its colours reminiscent of happier days, is seen floating after a boat has capsized. The wax objects serve as memorials to those people who lost their lives at sea, whether this happened during the attempt to reach a better and safer place or as a consequence of being at the wrong place at the wrong time, as was the case with the disappeared people of the Lebanese Civil War. Remaining without a grave at which their loved ones can grieve, they exist in a limbo of an unknown fate, having become “non-persons”, that “deserved no symbolic inscription” as Chauvin has written about the disappeared during Pinochet’s dictatorship (Chauvin 152). Used pieces of clothing as reminders of a human presence that has been lost are at the centre of several works by Salah Saouli, such as Oversite (2007), created together with another Lebanese artist, Khaled Sabsabi. In this work, presented at the Liverpool Regional Museum in coordination with Casula Powerhouse in Liverpool, New South Wales, Australia, the visitors were obliged to step onto a floor covered with 5000 pairs of shoes, if they wanted to fully experience the work. Developed as a reaction to the July War of 2006 in Lebanon, the work presented a reflection of the impact of the military violence on the lives of ordinary Lebanese. The shoes were deliberately placed randomly, and not arranged in pairs, thus creating an impression of coincidence, acquiring a “social life” of their own, as they indicate a presence no longer there, as if they had been lost as a consequence of their owners’ abandonment or possibly death (Bank 135, Cvoro 16).

18While Walid Raad’s and Salah Saouli’s works are reflections on violence from a distance, a work of a more recent date represents the subjective perspective of those who, at the risk of their lives, attempt to flee across the sea. Amel Alzakout’s Purple Sea (2020, 67 min) is in many ways a disturbing film, an actual eye-witness account of almost dying in the Mediterranean.⁹ Viewing the film, as spectators we are constantly challenged to the point of extreme physical discomfort, knowing that we are watching footage made at a moment when it was not sure the person filming it would survive or not. The film tells the story of an artist-filmmaker from Syria who in 2015 undertook the dangerous journey from Turkey to Greece to join her partner (Khaled Abdulwahed, also a Syrian filmmaker and co-producer of the film) in Germany. She was obliged to travel with the help of informal networks, crossing the sea on a boat organized by smugglers. In contrast, her partner had been able to travel legally to Europe. Alzakout decided to film her journey in order to keep the memory of it and be able to share it afterwards. As recounted during a Q&A session following the film’s screening at the Berlinale in 2020, it was not her original plan to produce a film using the footage. She was not expecting it to be of any particular interest to other people than herself. However, the boat capsized on its way to Lesbos and the camera, which was attached to the filmmaker’s wrist, continued to film while she and her fellow passengers were struggling in the water and continued to do so for more than two hours before they were finally rescued. It took some years, before Alzakout decided to turn the footage into a film. She wanted to show the reality of people fleeing across the sea, of what it means to struggle for hours in the water, not knowing if and when help will arrive. Making the film was a way to finally address the trauma she had lived through and a way to show a personal perspective of what has become known as the “refugee crisis” in European media.

4 Closing Remarks: Fighting for the Right to the Sea

19In this discussion on the sea in works of contemporary artists of the Middle East, the role of the sea has often remained ambiguous. A space of longing and dreams on one hand, the sea can also appear as a place of fears, dangers and even death. Several works discussed here, such as Salah Saouli’s Crossing Mediterranea and Amel Alzakout’s Purple Sea move in a complex political climate and seek to speak up about a pressing issue of our time, the so-called “refugee crisis”. Salah Saouli does this by applying a particular poetic language of his own, Amel Alzakout by showing a very real situation that she was fortunate to survive, but many others have not. Speaking about people who risk their lives crossing the sea as ‘illegal’ immigrants, the question of the right of access to the sea and what conditions decide this right arises. To conclude this essay, I will turn to one work, in which other issues of rights are in focus, namely the right to environmentally healthy and recreational spaces.

Fig. 3. May Kassem, Free Waves, 2017. Video, 69 min.

20May Kassem’s video Free Waves (2017, 69 min) is centred around the question of who has the right to access the sea as represented in activism to save public access to the last remaining public beach of Beirut.¹⁰ Ramlat al-Bayda (which translated as “White Sands”), is one of the last public spaces that are freely accessible and therefore affordable for ordinary, poorer Lebanese who cannot afford the high entrance fees to the private restaurants, resorts, hotels and beach clubs that have taken over a large part of the country’s seashore. In 2016, construction work by a private real estate company was begun at one end of the beach to build a luxury resort, and activists were fearful that this was only the beginning of a larger process and more construction would follow, leading eventually to a complete sealing off of the beach. The video mingles footage from the desperate (and ultimately unsuccessful) protests against this project with musings on wider global environmental issues and recollections from the filmmaker’s childhood experiences of the sea, the sky and the freedoms they seemed to promise.

21The mood of the piece moves between the pensive, melancholy and activist. Seen in the context of the rapidly deteriorating situation in Lebanon over the past years, where the widespread corruption and unaccountability of the political elite has made life almost impossible in the country and private and civic engagement is no longer able to offer relief, the video presents a bleak image of the future. With the city and country controlled by a corrupt political class, who seem unwilling to solve the dire social, economic and political problems of the country, the sea and its shores remained the last space of recreation, of imagination and dreams. And, as the video suggests, this space will probably soon disappear, sealed off and only accessible to the wealthy. In its dystopic outlook it shows parallels with more distinctly apocalyptic works that have been produced recently, such as the Palestinian artist Larissa Sansour’s video In Vitro (presented at the Danish pavilion at the Venice Biennale In 2019)¹² and the Kuwaiti artist Monira Al Qadiri’s Behind the Sun (2013), both of which address severe environmental disaster.¹³

22In this essay, I have attempted to trace the role of the Mediterranean Sea and its shores have taken on in the works of artists from the MENA region in the twenty-first century. That the sea as a metaphor for a variety of issues is not a new phenomenon in artistic production from the region is demonstrated by the works of the Syrian-German painter Marwan discussed at the beginning. In these works, the sea appeared as the location of the unknown, the uncanny and undefinable dangers, something which also appear in many works of a more recent date. In these works, the sea remains an ambiguous space, located between memories, hopes and fears. And, as is the case with much contemporary artistic production of the MENA region, critiques of current social and political issues often play an important role, something which turns these works into powerful comments on the contemporary moment.

Sources

1. Alder, Emily. “Through Oceans Darkly: Sea Literature and the Nautical Gothic.” Gothic Studies 19.2 (2017): 1–15.
2. Bank, Charlotte. “Give Sorrow Images: Trauma and Loss in the Works of Displaced Artists from Syria.” In Migrants: Art, Artists, Materials and Ideas Crossing Borders. Ed. Lucy Wrapson, Victoria Sutcliffe, Sally Woodcock and Spike Bucklow. London: Archetype Publications 2019. 130–40.
3. Chauvin, Irene Depetris. “Memories in the Present. Affect and Spectrality in Contemporary Aquatic Imaginaries.” In Liquid Ecologies in Latin American and Caribbean Art . Ed. Liliana Gómez and Lisa Blackmore. New York: Routledge, 2020. 144–59.
4. Cvoro, Uros. “Oversite: Walk With Me.” In Salah Saouli and Khaled Sabsabi.Oversite. Liverpool NSW: Casula Power House 2007. 10–21.
5. Korola, Katerina. “Blue like the Mediterranean: The Work of the Monochrome in the Atlas Group Archive.” Journal of Visual Culture 20.2 (2021): 455–77.
6. Packham, Jimmy. “The Gothic Coast: Boundaries, Belonging, and Coastal Community in Contemporary British Fiction.” Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction 60.2 (2019): 205–21.
7. Packham, Jimmy and Punter, David. “Oceanic Studies and the Gothic Deep”. Gothic Studies 19.2 (2017) : 16–29.