Outside Godsbanen, a creative hub in Aarhus with workshops, stage venues, and exhibition spaces, a jet-black flag flutters against the leaden sky. The flag proclaims that Eliyah Mesayer’s project Illiyeen (2019-ongoing) has settled here – temporarily, as its nomadic nature dictates. Illiyeen is Mesayer’s fictional state for the stateless, a group to which the artist herself belonged until she obtained Danish citizenship in 2020. Rooted in the artist’s own Bedouin heritage, the state of Illiyeen is an ephemeral entity that accumulates additional symbols of statehood each time it emerges in a new location. By this point, Illiyeen has a postal service, a uniform, a national anthem, and, as has been established, a flag.
In Godsbanen’s 1,200-square-metre exhibition space Rå Hal (literally ‘Rough Hall’, an industrial space formerly used for outgoing railway shipments), Illiyeen has established a proper encampment for the first time ever. Down the length of the hall, a row of round tents has appeared. Hovering ten centimetres above the ground like mirages, they are made of black satin adorned with tassels and borders executed with exquisite craftsmanship in the unmistakable dark aesthetic of Illiyeen.
On the end wall, Mesayer herself appears in a video work, emerging in the guise of a black-clad rider wearing a tagelmust (a traditional garment covering the head and mouth) and an oversized, uniform-like coat. She rides a huge black horse along a shoreline, while a poignant voiceover narrates the tale of how she arrived from the sea to the foreign coast of the land that is not of dust and stars.
The video is black and white, like the rest of Illiyeen, which is based on Bedouin colour symbolism where black represents courage and pride. The work is carried forward by a dramatic hymn with slow, steady drumbeats and a lofty narrative tone that clearly has links with Arabic poetry. There is a marvellous sense of otherness in Mesayer’s pathos-filled aesthetic – a distinctly un-Danish tone in a sentimental and intensely poetic visual language that always hits me right in the gut
Another thing that always strikes me when encountering Mesayer’s work is the longing to see her fictional state fully unfold. In this presentation (titled All Rise), she moves, as always, on the verge of the absolute minimum, using as few simple elements as are absolutely necessary to sketch out the contours of the world she is gradually creating. In Godsbanen’s vast space, these elements consist of the empty closed tents, the rider in the video, and her saddle, which has been lifted out of the moving images to inhabit the room. The result is both beautiful and sombre, aloof and unwelcoming like the land in which Mesayer’s stateless nomads have arrived.
The strength of this exhibition, like Mesayer’s previous ones, resides in the very idea of Illiyeen. No matter when or in what context the fictional state appears, the news media are always filled with current evidence of the enduring relevance of such a state. Right now, it brings to mind the war in Gaza and President Trump’s campaign promise to deport millions of people residing illegally in the U.S. Tomorrow, it will evoke associations of some other place on the globe where people live without papers or basic rights. Even so – or perhaps because of this – Mesayer’s overarching project can feel repetitive once you have encountered it in multiple exhibitions. On the one hand, you find yourself longing for some development; on the other, the project’s stagnation and slightly standoffish nature mirror the political reality surrounding the fictional state.
Illiyeen is a state we cannot access. Perhaps this is to protect the land that stateless persons must carry within themselves. Or perhaps this is to remind those of us who have a home of the loneliness and alienation suffered by those in exile. As observers, we may easily find ourselves dreaming of seeing the tents at Godsbanen – or the black parcels from Mesayer’s graduation project featuring Illiyeen’s postal service – open up to reveal the life behind the state’s symbols. Perhaps that is the whole point: Illiyeen exists only as a fragmented symbolic framework for longing – a mirage of desert dust and poetry.
