On Another Note
Still, On Another Note, Two-Channel Video, 24’12”, HD, Color, Black&White, Sound, 2024
Through video and collaged installations that feature her mother’s
and grandmother’s photographs, stories, and prized things, Huda
Takriti meditates on the nature of familial memory and knowledge
production as women’s practice. She narrates the memories of
her mother and grandmother, as generational knowledge still
unfolding. Both her mother’s and her grandmother’s hands appear
again and again in the video On Another Note (2024), holding
scissors that cut fabric, turning the pages of photo albums, and
gesturing as they explain. Her mother’s hands, captured by her
daughter, link generations, bodies thousands of miles apart, and
the knowledge they carry.
Takriti draws from theorizations by the cultural theorist Edward
Said, who poignantly argued for the criticality of undermining state
narratives—particularly those of the colonizing state—through
counter-archives. While Takriti takes up this charge, her project
also tacitly acknowledges that “big stories”—the monumental
counter-archive—cannot account for histories yet unfolding. As
her family remains displaced and far from their home of Palestine,
and as the Nakba remains an ongoing condition rather than a
concluded proposition, what monumental story holds the weight
of a family’s look to an unrecoverable home? Perhaps the hands of
her mother carry such weight.
On Another Note navigates Takriti’s family’s histories even as
it obliquely addresses the unspeakability of the displacement
experienced by her family and other Palestinians. For as the
ongoing war reveals, the politics of erasure and visibility is
ongoing, not historical. As we think about migration and memory
in the context of the archive, then, let us remember that memory
is the fabric that enables a continuity with the lost home. As the
archive actively suppresses and erases its margins, and personal
and cultural memory are hyper-politicized, how is continuity
retained in the body and in the things kept by those forcibly
displaced?
Textiles made by Huda Takriti’s grandmother were lovingly found
and maintained by her mother. Her mother, in turn, was also an
artist of cloth. She crafted dresses and made a place for herself
in her adopted state of Kuwait. The textile is woven into Takriti’s
images as the substratum of her family’s history, and through tales
of textiles we learn of hopes, ambitions, and happenings. Their
images accompany family photos and pictures of her mother’s life,
in the vehicle of the family album in On Another Note. Functioning
as informal archives of the family, the family album is also the
loving work of her mother and grandmother, and the vessel they
chose to hold pictures so dear to them. The narrative the artist’s mother offers is contingent, private, and thoughtful. There is no
clear beginning or end to the story, nor an effort to inscribe a linear
moral arc to it. Her rejection of beginnings and ends is conscious.
Takriti observes that narratives are containers that exclude as they
preserve. She does so by drawing on work by the literary scholar
Albrecht Koschorke. “Especially in the narrative reconstruction of
conflicts, the choice of beginning is consequential, because so
to speak the meter of the injustice inflicted one of the conflicting
parties, justifying its resistance, is running from the specified
beginning onward.¹”
By keeping the historical and moral imperatives of narratives at bay,
On Another Note draws attention to the textiles, the clothes, the
stories, the places of life, and the wishes of the women in her life,
rather than to the roles in which a narrative can place them. There
are no heroes or villains, or moral arcs. Their symbolic meanings are
personal, opaque, and open-ended.
¹ Albrecht Koschorke, Fact and Fiction: Elements of a General Theory of
Narrative, trans. Joel Golb, vol. 6 of Paradigms (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2018), p. 45.
Text Excerpts from Rashmi Viswanathan’s exhibition text for the exhibition
(In)verso. Between the Lens and the Archive Exhibition text at Camera Austria.
Please contact me to get a preview link of the video.
Stills, On Another Note, Two-Channel Video, 24’12”, HD, Color, Black&White, Sound, 2024
A three-channel edit was made for the exhibition Rewinding(s). In Rehearsal at Kunstraum Lakeside