‘Unfinished Business: The Work of Medina Hammad’
In the work of Medina Hammad, there is evidence of unfinished business. Ordinarily, we may think of this as a negative assertion, denoting something as being unresolved or even confused, but not in Hammad’s case.The sense of ‘unfinished business’ is an integral part of her work. As Hammad has herself declared, “self exploratory work does not often form a conclusion, more a realisation of simply how things are”. In Hammad’s painting, the sense of the ‘unfinished’ manifests itself in both formal and conceptual ways simultaneously. Whilst a resolutely figurative style, Hammad’s art maintains a distinct brashness, in terms of its mark making and adept use of colour, which at times draws it toward abstraction. Such an approach not only belies the industry of her work, but equally the gravitas and complexity of her subject matter.
Having been born and brought up in England, Hammad has in the words of Eddie Chambers, “found unusual, fascinating ways of exploring what it meant for her to be born of a Sudanese father and an English mother”.[1][2] Importantly, as Chambers has also observed, Hammad has sought “…to establish an intelligent and respectful proximity between herself and her ‘Sudanese ‘heritage…[and her] “Sudanese/English background”.[3] In considering this critical facet of Hammad’s work, we should be mindful of thinking of the artist as exploring her ‘mixed-race’ identity. Although the term ‘mixed race’ may now seem a more acceptable and less offensive term than its predecessor ‘half-caste’, it is still imbued with profoundly pejorative associations. For it implies that those who do not ‘appear’ to be ‘mixed race’ are derived from some ‘natural’ undiluted stock. Taking a holistic view of Hammad’s practice, which spans more than fifteen years, we can witness something that is far more engaging and meaningful than terms like ‘mixed race’. This approach has resulted in compelling and humorous work that eschews simplistic notions or formulaic ways of exploring ‘identity’.
In unpacking the certainty of her Sudanese and English parentage, Hammad has sought to foreground about the often unspoken vagaries of identity, which exist not so much as fact but as memories and observations garnered from a range of social and domestic situations. We can see in Hammad’s work from the early 1990s a desire to acknowledge the nature of memory, as something which is not only personal, but also prone to revisions and sentimentalism. Hammad explains, “I try to find the most intensive, concentrated means of representing a moment. During the act of remembering the scene alters. The focus shifts, some material is lost; some imagery intensifies as it takes on greater relevance”.[4] In the painting Portrait of My Father (1995), a figure dressed in a purple robe and wearing a yellow bracelet assumes an awesome presence. Yet this figure, Hammad’s father, remains strangely transient, as if at any moment he may disappear. It is as if the painting were in a stage of metamorphosis. Is the figure coming out of abstraction into representation or visa versa? The ghostly nature of Portrait of My Father is a poignant image; its celestial tone alludes to something profound, yet the execution of the composition makes it decidedly fragile.
The lineage of Portrait of My Father can be traced back to earlier works like Corner of My Father’s Room (a mediation) (1992) and Harrods Arab’s Sweeties (1992). These paintings possess all the intimacy one might associate with Hammad’s reminiscences of childhood and her discreet observations of Arab women whilst working as a chambermaid in Park Lane. Such works epitomise Hammad’s distinctive use of colour and form where objects and figures are portrayed with empathy and subtlety yet occupy a turbulent pictorial space that is often compressed. This compressed and turbulent pictorial terrain is indicative of Hammad’s desire to articulate the contradictory nature of memory. In this earlier work we get a sense that Hammad’s brash painting style, is more than simply a stylistic device. It becomes a metaphor for the nature of memory itself, something which can be as provisional as it can be poignant.
Notably, it is in some of the work produced following her first (and to date only) visit to Sudan in 1995 that we see the emergence of a different side to Hammad’s painting. In the series Sudanese Stories, whilst her brash brush strokes are still evident, there is in many works, such as the evocative The French Djinn (1997), a less cluttered sense of pictorial space. Although this shift in spatial dynamics represents Hammad’s reaction to what she saw and experienced in public and private settings, it also speaks of the artist’s awareness of her status, as both tourist and daughter of a Sudanese Arab visiting her father’s homeland. As Hammad has explained: “The journey to Sudan became an investigation into my father – looking at his history through my present. These works explore the many layers within this complex process”.
In the painting Orange Telephone (1997), three blocks of colour describe the spatiality of the room, whilst a picture in which two figures are just about discernable hangs in the background, perhaps denoting a domestic or office space. The orange telephone in the foreground is just that, an orange telephone. Yet, it is so much more. The telephone is striking not merely because of its vivid colour, but also because of its age. These telephones with their rotating dial mechanism are now rarely seen Britain, but would have been a part of Hammad’s, (as indeed many of her peers’) domestic environments in childhood. This may explain Hammad’s fixation on the telephone, which also features in the work Salam (1997). As such, Orange Telephone represents a poignant allegory for the past and present. A past (as Hammad puts it) she “never fully comprehended” of her father’s “dilemma during his lifetime” of being “too Arab to be English, too English to ever be completely Sudanese again”, and a present in which her “understanding had come full circle”, as to where her father was ’coming from’ both literally and emotionally.
Following Sudanese Stories, Hammad turned towards the narratives of The Arabian Nights to make the fascinating series of small gouaches, Arabian Nights Sequence. This gravitation towards The Arabian Nights revealed interesting and subtle parallels between a literary genre in which, as Hammad describes, “a story will appear within a story of a story” and her fluid approach to visualising narratives of identity. In his translation Hussein Haddawy describes this literary genre as one of “fables, fairy tales, romances, or comic as well as historical anecdotes, [which]… interweave the unusual, the extraordinary, the marvellous, and the supernatural into the fabric of everyday life”.
As an oral tradition dating back to the ninth century, the Nights were initially transcribed into Syrian and Egyptian from around the thirteenth century. Haddawy explains how “the stories were modified in the process of telling and retelling, to conform to the general life and customs of the Arab society that adopted them and to the particular conditions of that society at a particular time”.[5] Haddawy also notes that, as a literary form, The Arabian Nights has been subject to many translations, which have over the centuries reflected the different social, historical, cultural contexts from which they derived. Notably, since the eighteenth century, this has resulted in translators “taking liberties with the text” by either shying away from or exaggerating, “passages or words that not only lend the Arabic original color and piquancy, but also reveal the spirit in which it was written”.[6] This narrative of authenticity and translation is a somewhat ironic tale, of how thenumerous literary mutations of The Arabian Nights has itself become a story within a story. Given this, Hammad’s gravitation towards this literary genre might be seen as a further appropriation of its narrative, but also as an allegory for identity itself. For as The Arabian Nights represents a story within a story of a story, Hammad’s art and more specifically her exploration of her identity represents a continual process of discovery, in which ‘authenticity’ and ‘truth’ are fundamentally tied to the subjective terrain of interpretation.
Following her visit to Sudan and the production of Sudanese Stories and the Arabian Nights Sequence, Hammad has once again re-evaluated the ways in which she explores and questions the disparate elements of her Sudanese and English background. The paintings Raylea’s Request: The Red Trousers (2002) and The History of the Black Dress (2002), are indicative of a modified approach. Where the former is about seeking identification with cultural tradition, the latter hones in on Hammad’s life in England. In Raylea’s Request: The Red Trousers a figure looms as if caught in suspension, whilst in the background an archetypal palm tree is portrayed mirage like on the distant horizon. The abstract form which dominates the painting’s foreground is suggestive of a figure, but also acts as a counterpoint to the painting’s more figurative elements, suggestive of something intangible. Raylea’s Request: The Red Trousers refers to Hammad’s great-grandmother Raylea, who as told by her father practiced the ritual Zar,[7] which Hammad experienced during her visit to Sudan. Raylea’s Request is a fantastical and eerie work, where the tensions between the figurative and abstract allude to both the tangible and elusive aspects of memory and experience.
The History of the Black Dress represents an altogether different need for catharsis, resulting from a particularly unpleasant encounter between the artist and a male acquaintance at a social gathering in which Hammad and her black dress were at the receiving end of his lewd sexual behaviour. Unsurprisingly, this is a more sombre work. Here, abstraction has no foil. It is a device used to symbolise the unspeakable, the feeling of being compromised in a professional environment. The cathartic nature of this work is epitomised by the evocative title, which with a certain ironical tone acknowledges the impossibility of turning the clock back. The History of the Black Dress recognises that the need to take control of a terrible moment from the past is the only way of purging the demons of its memory from haunting the present.
As an artist, Hammad has consistently sought new ways of approaching her identity, challenging her own assumptions as well as those of her viewers. Conscious of the pitfalls in staging work which explores the intricacies of her English and Sudanese background, Hammad’s deals with her identity in provocative and humorous ways, which eschews simplified notions of identity that pander to romanticised and marketable ideas of ‘difference’ and the ‘exotic’. As such what has previously been attributed to Hammad still holds true today:“Some may look at these paintings and consider the work to be about ‘Medina’. But others, perhaps being more perceptive, will see within this work mechanisms and devices that will prompt them to look afresh at their own lives.”[8]
Whilst Hammad’s desire to speak through the autobiographical remains undiminished, it is the formal and conceptual shifts which have taken place in her practice which reveal the ‘unfinished business’ in her work. The painting Raylea’s Request epitomises this approach, where formal relations within the work, like the figurative and the abstract, or the iconographic versus the oblique reference, play against each other, creating intriguing pictorial tensions. Such an approach not only makes for compelling images, but crucially, these formal tensions become a metaphor for the exploration of identity. Hammad’s narratives accommodate the inevitable ups and downs of such a process, revealing both the moments of identification and those of alienation. It is these ongoing tensions which transmit this sense of the ‘unfinished’ in Hammad’s work. This is a measured state of ambivalence which appears to be the most appropriate form of resolution.
[1] Eddie Chambers, New Work by Medina Hammad exhibition brochure for Sudanese Stories, Usher Gallery, Lincoln, 1997
[2] Hussain Haddawy, The Arabian Nights Volume II, Introduction, Everyman’s Library, 1998, xiv
[3] ibid. xvii
[4] As Hammad explains, “Zar is an ostensibly female activity, a group catharsis involving dancing, possession and trance…For women, Zar permits a torrent of emotional outpouring, with no retribution. Men are wary and remain apart for its duration”.
[5] Eddie Chambers, writing in the introduction to this catalogue.
More +This essay was commissioned for the catalogue which accompanied the exhibition
Medina Hammad: new and recent work organised by the Edward Wilmot Blyden Project,
4 Victoria Street Bristol, 2002