Curator, Jefferson Godard, addresses Orientalism, a theory published by Dr. Edward Said which offered up a challenge to how Western culture often misrepresented SWANA people, their practices and culture. SWANA, or Southwest Asian and North African, is an updated term for the ‘Middle East’ and includes some twenty-seven countries such as Egypt, Iran, Israel, Libya, Palestine, and Syria. This blog relates to the exhibition, Forms of Relation by Ghazal Ghazi at Salina Art Center.

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This list of literature is from our August Lunch and Learn with the Salina Public Library. The Lunch and Learn featured library staff Portia Montoy and Glory Benacka. They discussed the power of literature to nurture empathy and understand the Immigrant experience.

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In her essay juror Ksenya Gurshtein discusses the “Nature” and “Culture” galleries as being fluid. Stating that “since the works suggest, both subtly and unsubtly, the ways that things that are ‘natural’ -- food and diseases, for instance -- intrude upon the human lived environment while the ‘human’ -- pervasively present in everything from built environments to resource extraction to endless plastic trash -- intrudes on ‘nature.’”

Her words, written before Covid-19 closures affected museums and artists, seem prescient and urgent, and are reflected in the works on view.

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With landscapes, as with all types of art, there is a larger meaning beneath the surface of the image. Most of the romanticized images of the West were fundamental to perpetuating the idea of Manifest Destiny; the belief that this Eden was waiting to be tamed and developed by European settlers. This is a particularly masculine activity, as women would not have been considered capable. The idea of “taming” unfortunately also included the indigenous populations that have existed on this land for generations. The romantic and sublime depictions of the West and indigenous cultures make up the Colonial Gaze (more gazes!), or the idea that we are consuming the landscape through a particularly white, male, European lens. The romanticized idea of the West still plays an influential role in our culture today.

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If you don’t post it did it actually happen? What is the role of photography in our digital culture? Ksenya Gurshtein writes in her essay for the Biennial, “in a world full of selfies and casual documentation of our lives in myriad digital snapshots, portraiture as an art form still remains singularly powerful.”

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As juror Ksenya Gurshtein points out in her essay for the Biennial, it is important to note that many of the pieces featured in the Our Bodies, Ourselves gallery are created by women, “for whom the process of shaking off various patriarchal expectations and fully discovering their bodies and emotionally complicated selves on their own terms remains unfinished and urgent business.”

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As institutions make decisions about what is canonized in art history, what stories are we leaving out? Who are we forgetting? Why is representation necessary? Lack of representation can allow already marginalized groups to disappear.

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