McBride Contemporain)
MONTREAL — A small and solitary watercolor painting of Aaron Bushnell in flames opens this exhibition of works made in the past six months by Nadine Faraj. Bushnell was a 25-year-old serviceman who self-immolated as a generative act of protest for a free Palestine outside of the Israeli Embassy in Washington, DC in February. This work, therefore, acts as a key to understanding Faraj’s complex vision of fire’s relationship to both violence and resurrection, from the ecstasy of heat-sparked bodies to the agony of a world ablaze in the throes of empire.
Deeper into the gallery space, for instance, a grouping of small paintings depicts state violence with Faraj’s signature visceral expressiveness. The central image, “A Disastrous Surrender,” depicts a female figure standing tall, a tiger draped around her shoulders. The tiger here could represent the burden of the 76-year Israeli occupation of Palestine: ferocious, oppressive, and unpredictable.
Faraj’s watercolor “I Don’t Get Tired of You,” evocative of Nan Goldin’s photographs, punctuates her explorations of large-scale nationalist depravity in its depiction of a survivor of domestic abuse with a black eye, smoking a cigarette, its end ablaze.
McBride Contemporain)
“Hear the Love Fire” deepens Faraj’s longtime explorations of the slippages between pain and ecstasy as she grapples with the idea of the body in the face of genocide from a position in which safety and pleasure are still a possibility. In it, a woman dancing rapturously in front of a campfire conjures the bodies eviscerated by the United States’s 2000-pound bombs.
Turning the corner, we enter “The Return of Inanna,” the artist’s second monumental interactive cave made with watercolor paper and paint. Within the walls of the cave, Faraj’s Inanna — the Mesopotamian goddess of love, procreation, and war — stands gigantic, her feet engulfed in flames, towering over the burning palm trees of Gaza and the wildfires of the artist’s native Canada in an invocation of both genocide and ecocide. Is this Inanna, we wonder, born of the fire, or here to douse the flames?
The cave’s womb-like space helps us confront our vicarious trauma of witnessing the sadistic mass slaughter of civilians in Gaza, the West Bank, and most recently, Lebanon, this past year. At the entrance, palimpsest of handprints, evocative of the ancient Cave of Lascaux, marks the space with our human need to be remembered — “we were here.”
The back wall of the immersive cave is filled with an arrangement of Faraj’s starkly painted skeletons, mimicking 18th-century Parisian catacombs. Seeing human remains portrayed at life size highlights the scale differences between adults and children, making us feel the horror of the over 16,750 children targeted and murdered in Gaza, according to a report by Human Rights Watch last month.
Indeed, three images of nude pregnant women with robust Venus of Willendorf-like bodies giving birth seem to connect us with the universal mother, our humanity and potential for growth. But they also evoke deep sorrow for the many parents who have lost their children.
After standing in the cave, immersing myself in its deep layers of painterly imagery while haunted by imagery of displaced Palestinians being burned alive in their tents, I needed to lay down to explore its domed firmament. As the full moon and liberatory, dancing martyrs above glowed radiant, I took a moment to sit with my own grief, feeling myself heal in that catharsis. This, I felt, was Faraj’s intention: to remind us of the ways in which we, too, may be playing with fire, and to provoke us to crack ourselves open and feel.
Nadine Faraj: Playing with Fire continues at McBride Contemporain (372 Saint-Catherine Street West Suite 414, Montreal, Canada) through October 19.
