Dialogs: Pablo Helguera

Pablo Helguera (Mexico City, 1971) is a New York based artist working across disciplines including installation, drawing, socially engaged art and performance. Helguera’s practice covers diverse ground from ethnography and sociolinguistics to humour and music. He has exhibited or performed at venues such as the Museo de Arte Reina Sofia, Madrid; ICA Boston; RCA London and the 8th Havana Biennial, PERFORMA 05. This interview is really important to me. Pablo Helguera’s practice has been a huge influence on how I view art, especially the importance of dialog in his practice has stuck with me over the years. In this interview we talked about how he considers the viewer in his work and the role language plays. It’s really exciting to share this interview with others because I genuinely feel anyone can benefit from hearing how he approaches his practice the considerations he makes when making works.

During the April lockdown, you did a project called Pablo Helguera: The Grand Central Singing Telegram Co. Singing seems to be a recurring motif in your work. Could you talk about that?

I come from a musical family. My sisters and many of my relatives are classical musicians. It’s interesting growing up in a place like Mexico and hearing Mozart and Bach being played from different rooms of the house. I was always interested in music; I wanted to be a singer at one point when I was a teenager. Although my interest in painting and visual arts eventually took over, music never left me. I feel that is why I gravitated towards live performance art. I also realised later on that the notion of scoring was very important within my practice. The idea of sequentiality, whether in narrative format or a concatenation of experiences. From the standpoint of being an educator, an artist and a writer, everything you produce needs to follow some kind of structure or score. And that has manifested in many different ways in my work. Music is present in everything I do.

As an artist that has been involved in socially engaged practice from very early on, one of the issues that I face is the challenge of creating socially engaged art in the context of a pandemic where social distance and isolation is essential. I was discussing this with John Spiak, an old friend and curator at Grand Central Art Center in California, and we decided to do something that would help people connect. Everyone feels isolated in this moment, and the initial lockdown was particularly severe. I decided to revive my old project, The Singing Telegram. It’s a format that was invented in the 1930s during the Great Depression by Western Union, the telegraph service. I had already done one performance, and we thought it would be interesting to update the format and do it over Zoom.

I offered to become a messenger for people. They could pick from a selection of songs that I knew, and I would sing to the recipient of the message on Zoom. There were roughly 60 songs to choose from, ranging from Broadway tunes and Frank Sinatra to opera and Mexican folk songs. It was a really powerful experience; we had no idea how people were going to react. I ended up singing to dozens of people in different countries as far as New Zealand, Hong Kong, Singapore, Turkey… People of all ages from all walks of life.

I was a complete stranger sharing these very personal messages from someone who may have been a significant other or a mother. The basic message behind the songs were, “I really miss you. I love you, and this song makes me think of you.” Often the recipient would start shedding tears and become really emotional. I felt so grateful for being able to facilitate that. It was a very simple way for people to connect. As artists, we need to think about ways of creating closer communication through the power of art.

There is a very particular archival aesthetic to your work. Could you talk a bit about that?

There is an aspect of me that I cannot escape, which is my obsession with the past. This fascination is not necessarily a matter of nostalgia. Nostalgia is an interesting and, in many ways, problematic concept. In contemporary art in particular, it is seen almost as a weakness; you are afraid of looking forward and so, you aim for an imaginary past. But psychologists who study nostalgia have claimed that it’s a process of establishing relationships with things that have happened which can in turn, restore your identity and shape your outlook on the future.

It’s also very connected with the immigrant experience. I’m an immigrant to the US. This process of reconstructing your reality through memories and finding some way of actualising this dual reality in the present – it’s a creative process that parallels immigrant experience. This is why immigrant versions of the foods or traditions from the motherland differ slightly from the originals. Italian-American food or Mexican-American food, for example, becomes something else in that process of recreation which is like an artistic process. I’m interested in that.

That process plays into Librería Donceles, the socially-engaged project where you created Spanish language bookstores in gallery spaces. Can you tell us about the impetus behind that project?

I grew up in Mexico City in a family that was literary as well as musical. When I was a kid, there was no internet. Books were my internet. I would go to my dad’s library in the house to do my homework and look at these huge encyclopaedias. Now everyone has Wikipedia. Books were like friends to me. They calmed me. By the time that project premiered in 2013, we had already witnessed the global dominance of Amazon and e-books, and brick-and-mortar bookstores were closing at an alarming rate. At the same time, I also noticed the lack of availability of Spanish books in New York City, a city home to two million Latinos. So, I proposed this eccentric idea of turning the Kent Fine Art LLC gallery into a bookstore. I went to Mexico to campaign for used book donations. Though the plight of Mexican immigrants in the US is painful, it’s something that Mexicans at home don’t really know what to do about it. On the other hand, middle-class and working-class people in Mexico usually live in the same house across generations, and accumulate stuff like old books, trashy novels and textbooks. As a result, we end up with a 20,000-volume inventory and customers were invited to pay what they wished. It was less about the money than the experience and the recognition of the value of literature in Spanish.

_{Libreria Donceles,Installation shot (2013)}

In Librería Donceles, we had 70 different categories, from anatomy and agriculture to horror and children’s books. Anything you could imagine. It was a great entrance to a different culture for people. I modelled the design after second-hand bookstores that I loved, especially those I experienced as a student in Chicago. I find it fascinating that bookstores can resemble their owners’ personalities, and sometimes look like someone’s living room. It’s not a typical person that decides to run a used bookstore. Many of these people are hoarders. I’ve lived near a bookstore that you could barely walk through. If you pulled a book from the shelf, the whole arrangement would fall apart. Librería Donceles was supposed to last two months but it has been running now for seven years. The project has travelled to 14 different cities in the US. I always think that each iteration will be the last but someone new inevitably shows an interest. It’s just such a wonderful experience to deliver this project throughout the US.

Many of my works are inspired by stories. I made a work in Milan in 2013 called Vita Vel Regula [Rules of Life]. It takes the form of a game involving 50 other participants that will last for the rest of my life. 25 strangers who had attended the project’s opening and 25 close friends and family, all of which are younger than me. Everyone receives 16 sealed envelopes labelled with specific opening dates and instructions. On the first day, the first envelope is opened. Two days later, the second is opened. The third is opened on the fourth day. Then eight, 16, 32 – the waiting time doubles between participants until years and ultimately decades pass between each opened envelope. The project will conclude in 2097, when I will definitely not be alive. My daughter, who was three at the time, will be in her 90s. She’s the youngest participant.

_{Vita Vel Regula, Installation shot (2013)}

The piece is inspired by a short story by Dino Buzzati called “The Seven Messengers” about a king who explores the confines of his kingdom only to realise that it has no end. He has seven messengers to keep him abreast of what’s happening back at the palace. The further he travels, the longer it takes the messengers to make the trip and deliver the message, to the extent that he might never see them again. It’s a story about how we communicate with one another over time. This relates to my interest in merging the experimental and the exhibitionary. The work becomes a record of those relationships in those particular instances. It’s about creating a collective experience.

This connection of language and documentation is evident in other projects like Dead Languages Conservatory…

Dead Languages Conservatory directly ties into my interest in ancestry and living history. There are close to 60 languages still spoken in Mexico. It’s a country with a rich history, and there are millions of people speaking dominant indigenous languages like the many Mayan languages, but numerous languages are dying out. This is important because it relates to the changing environment of our world. Biodiversity facilitates diversity of language. People who lived in the mountains spoke one language, and those in the valley would speak another. The way we settle in a particular environment influences the culture that develops there. What is really wonderful about countries like China, India or Mexico is that they have different climates that give rise to different languages. That is also changing very fast because of migration to cities, which results in the homogenisation of language. The homogenisation of language influences the homogenisation of culture, creating greater cultural centres.

_{Installation shot Dead Languages Conservatory,Installation shot (2004)}

We’re looking at a future where only four languages will be in use. This project reflects on those places and people that have managed to retain a particular culture. Instead of using the typical digitisation approach, I documented this research using the earliest recording technology which is the wax cylinder. The wax phonograph cylinder is a really attractive object invented by Thomas Edison in the 1870s which picks up sound with a diamond needle. The idea of giving a 3D presence to these immaterial voices was very meaningful to me. The interviews with some of the last speakers have made their way into various installations including an interview with a woman in her 80s called Marie Smith Jones who was the last speaker of Eyak. Eyak, is a language that was spoken in Alaska. I also interviewed Cristina Calderón, a woman who lives in Puerto Williams – the world’s southernmost town, located on Navarino Island in Chile. She is the last speaker of Yaghan, the language of the indigenous peoples of Tierra del Fuego.

Does your work as an educator influence your artistic practice?

There is an educational element to it. I try to really caution art students to be careful that their practice doesn’t become an illustration of someone else’s theories. The worst thing we can do as artists is to open a book by Deleuze or Derrida and try to make a piece of art solely from that. You become a poor illustrator of an idea that you might not have understood to begin with. Don’t get me wrong. It’s very important to engage in the discourse of a period and understand the history but your practice is something separate. It will naturally seep into your practice anyway. As an educator, I am trained to think about the audience. That is the number one question I must ask myself: who is my audience? Who am I working with and how do I produce discourse with a particular group? Language must be used differently depending on an audience’s familiarity with the subject matter. You have to be open and transparent, and treat your audience with respect by tailoring the language to them. An important thing I learned was to avoid talking down to your audience. When working with a community, my process is one of listening, not dictating ideas. We are creating a dialogue – an exchange of knowledge.

You can find out more about Pablo Helguera work through his website link below

thank you Meadhbh McNutt for your work editing

You can support Painting in Text through Patreon, link below

https://www.patreon.com/PaintinginText

Video

Ways of Communicating : Moza Almatrooshi

Moza Almatrooshi, photo courtesy of the Muslim Sisterhood

I’m really excited to share with you the work of Moza Almatrooshi. She is a multidisciplinary artist based out of Sharjah in the United Arab Emirates. For me, the goal of Painting in Text has been not only to show artists with interesting outlooks on their practice but to create awareness of art happening outside of our own spaces and hopefully create connections through that. It was an absolute pleasure talking to Moza about her practice. She was very generous and open with her answers, which I really appreciated. The depth of thought she puts into each aspect of her work is astonishing and I hope from reading this you gain as much from the interview as I did.

How important is writing in your practice

For me, they are one and the same. I would say all of my moving image works have required writing. There hasn’t been a video piece where I haven’t written something that really framed things. There is movement to text. In Arabic, alphabetics [a practice of writing which focuses on the representation of spoken sounds by means of letters] looks like this. It is not what you would call text-based work; it focuses on what the Arabic alphabet itself can do. As much as I would like to explore language in that direction, I’m very much still in a mode of explaining my work with text as narrative driving something forward. For me, text is an element in which I can play in exciting ways, where I can use my writing in Arabic in an almost childlike way, to express myself. For example, the narrative of To Whom the Sun May be of Concern is expressed in this fable form which was evident in the video piece. It seems like something that could be read or spoken to a child but it has this kind of dark ending that’s not appropriate. I like that it comes across as very unalarming – something that takes a formal language. Arabic in its classical form is very formal. I feel like this style of story writing is disarming, and that’s why I rely on it to pair up with the other works although it can also stand alone.

There is a prominent use of subtitles in To Whom the Sun May be of Concern. Could you talk a bit about that?

I made To Whom the Sun May be of Concern at a time when I was thinking of the idea of access purely in a linguistic sense. I’m not claiming that English is not a poetic language or anything but I couldn’t exactly match the poetics of my language within English without sounding a bit off. Things get lost in translation. So, I made the conscious decision to keep the English subtitles as basic and to the point as possible. And I use Arabic in an ornate way with different colours assigned to the different characters that come into play. There is no third-person narration just characters that speak.

Still fom Moving Image - To Whom The Sun May Be Of Concern 2019 1

To whom the Sun May be of Some Concern, (2018), still

The yellow subtitles translate what I’m voicing in the film. I played with different fonts In one scene, the subtitles were symbols. In another, there is a kind of stylised Arabic font. At that point, I was making the work for an exhibition in Sharjah, and I was playing a lot with political slogans specific to the situation here in the United Arab Emirates. I thought it much more important to push forward language that the people living here could pick up on because it was made for them to view. But within all my work, there is a dense layer of vagueness. I try to find subtle ways of working ideas into my practice.

Still from Moving Image - To Whom The Sun May Be Of Concern 2019

To whom the Sun May be of Some Concern, (2018), still

You speak multiple languages. Does that affect your writing and visual practice?

I wouldn’t say that I’m bilingual as much as I would say I have this kind of duality in my mind because I think in both languages constantly. I feel like I dream in English. I was working with an editor while writing something for a publication, and when she looked at my text she said, “I could tell that you had translated from English [into Arabic] in your mind.” I didn’t know how to respond to that! It happens both ways where sometimes I might think in one language and translate it into the other, and vice versa, to see what works. This is going to sound clichéd but sometimes I feel like [the texts] write themselves. It surprises me more when that happens In Arabic because, although it’s my first language, I speak Emirati. Nobody speaks classical Arabic in a colloquial sense. It just doesn’t exist in that way. It’s used in the Quran and formal settings – on the news or in formal letters.

Your recent work, Glaze features in this year’s Lahore Biennale. How did Glaze come about?

I was doing a residency in Cairo around Autumn 2019, while working on a commission for a five-minute film as part of the BBC New Creatives scheme. I went to a bakery that makes Western pastries. What is fascinating about them is I don’t know how to explain this better they make Western pastries in an Arab twist. For example, the croissants were rolled differently and their éclairs are really huge. The resulting work [Staff of Life] is my experience of not only documenting that but working with a sound designer and other artists who lended me their voices for the narrative. It was so amazing but I had that restriction of five minutes. From that, I wondered how I could do that again but in Sharjah. That way, I could take my time with the process. So with Glaze, I focused on the different kinds of spaces in Sharjah that make desserts.

Staff of Life, (2019), still

What was great about this project was that I was working with a sound designer to create noise as a form of language that went along with movements similar to those in Staff of Life. The focus of Staff of Life is on the hands of the bakers as they make or decorate something. Usually, they’re using big machines to do something very traditional, which was interesting to see. The way they move their hands while preparing or pouring; I thought, why don’t I translate these movements instead of narrating in my usual way? Why don’t I translate these everyday gestures into sound?

Glaze, (2020), still

Glaze has arrived at a version which very much fits the teahouse in Lahore, Pakistan where it’s being shown. The Pak Teahouse is one of the locations of the Biennale, and it’s supposed to be a significant space for people to gather and discuss politics. I felt that the location worked well and that whoever goes to see the work will be able to absorb everything that is said. It is very much a version that I would like to revisit and do something a bit different with down the line. But at the moment, it’s a moving-image work with sound created for the visuals that tell a story. Using the Tea House as a venue allowed for additional elements to the work such as a menu which itself was a translation of the story. The staff of the teahouse helped with what they could access within their work limitations. With a few adjustments, the work can be consumed as a meal or a tea, or a coffee.

Glaze showing in Pak Teahouse Lahore, (2020), photo courtesy of Lahore Biennale Foundation

For me, Glaze was about these visuals that lure the viewer in – the fuzzy feelings people get while watching sweets being made. All of these things that are so beautiful to look at. Even without all the layers I’m injecting into the work, on an elementary level, these things being made are bad for you but it is so easy to be seduced by them. That was basically what I was trying to do.

Food is a common theme in your work. Could you discuss the motivation behind that?

All the food that we eat has heavy symbolism within Arabian culture. Foods like pomegranates, dates, honey, flatbread all have symbolism associated with them – not just in what they represent but also how they are consumed – and this is just as important in pre-Islamic Arabia. Some of my work is about how these rituals in Islamic culture have been appropriated from Pre-Islamic times. That knowledge is important.

Moza performing Evergreen, (2018), photo by Meera Alqasimi

Evergreen was born out of the frustration of having to translate everything I did. This realisation that when I write or communicate something through any of my works that use text, it must be in English – even here in the UAE. Obviously, it’s because it is the dominant language and there has to be a common language but I couldn’t help but think about this in terms of access. Why does art have to be English to be accessible? That coupled with the experience of being asked really frustrating questions in art school like, when I would be working with ceramics: “is this a response to ISIS?” Completely out of nowhere! As if I’m supposed to have these prepared answers about something because of my cultural or religious background.

When picking materials, I choose foods well known for their symbolism. The pomegranate is significant to a lot of cultures, and both Eastern and Western cultures. It could be something for everyone, regardless of what it means to me. From that starting point, the performance then became about an interaction with a guest through a gestural rather than. To eat the pomegranate after I had sliced it in front of them and went through all that labour; how do they respond to that? How much do they take? Some people just ate one little bit, some took a handful, some people shared their plate, and that was the idea behind it. I found that after that, everything I wanted to say could be said with food – whether a cooking method or a [visual] element. That is why I’m now going to culinary school. I feel I can actually use that, integrate it into my practice and also create some sort of financial stability for myself.

Evergreen, detail, (2018), photo by Meera Alqasimi

Evergreen was a performance within a larger performance from a group that the Arab Art Salon formed with friends at the Royal College of Art. Basically, we decided to use a domestic space to do a series of performances for one night and invite everyone from the neighbourhood plus our course mates – everyone we could fit. So, it wasn’t just the typical audience you would encounter in white cube spaces. I think as much as I’d love to say the space was very considered, it wasn’t. We were all pleasantly surprised by the way in which people absorbed the performances in a domestic space. That was what the Arab Art Salon was all about; we were just together at a particular time expressing our concerns to one another. We all more or less came from the Gulf States and there are certain things we can’t discuss in these countries (and in London, to a lesser extent). So we felt that it was so important to have this kind of space. It wasn’t about critiquing each other’s work as much as it was about sharing. We thought that a domestic setting would be the best place to accomplish that. These kinds of initiatives that bring people together in person are so important because I don’t think it can be achieved in the same way online.

Your practice involves so many different processes, it would be interesting to see what a day in the studio looks like for you.

Most of my work is research-driven, so you would see a lot of research. I’m still trying to excavate knowledge that has been lost, particularly around pre-Islamic heritage. Much of that information has been destroyed or was never really recorded well enough to begin with. It’s tough to identify how reliable the sources actually are with the very little information that is out there. The past few months have been like a loop of trying to find reliable information or important myths, and figure out how these can also feed into works.

When I’m not researching, I’m just really reactive to what is going on here in UAE, and that drives a lot of my thinking. In the meantime, I’m graduating from culinary school in autumn and I will hopefully have my new studio set up before summer. I’m going to have a kitchen where I will host artists and create exchanges around how they work with food or other materials. The artistic community is really small in UAE; it would be nice to have a space here that is outside of any institution. When we gather and organise ourselves as artists, and really talk about things that matter, it’s much more organic. It’s not trying to be anything other than what it is. I’d like to cultivate that.

You can find out more about Moza Almatrooshi’s work through her website link below

About

thank you Meadhbh McNutt for your work editing

You can support Painting in Text through Patreon, link below

https://www.patreon.com/PaintinginText