W.B. Yeats’s poem The Second Coming (1919) is a despairing depiction of the Apocalypse. It was written while Europe was reeling from the First World War, during the outbreak of the Spanish Flu which nearly killed the Irish poet’s pregnant wife. The first stanza is an impressionistic image of a world in decay and upheaval. “Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold.” The novel by Nigerian author Chinua Achebe titled Things Fall Apart (1958), might be a more common reason why Irish-Palestinian, Bergen-based Nora Adwan’s exhibition title at Young Artists’ Society (UKS) in Oslo rings a bell. The novel is a monolith both in anglophone African literature and in general. The story follows the clan leader Okonkwo, who is torn between upholding tradition and the imperative to fight the British colonialists in Nigeria.
Adwan has worked with language, translation, exile, and diaspora through several exhibitions. The artist often constructs her works in sediments of discrete images and snippets of different languages. Her way of combining images and pregnant lacunae creates gripping stories without the use of traditional narrative techniques. Sang i et fremmed land (Song in a Strange Land) – a work the artist showed at the Astrup Fearnley Museum in 2022 – is a capsule the viewer can enter to watch close-ups of gesticulating hands and abstracted road trip footage, to a soundtrack of women singing lullabies in Arabic and Norwegian. Shifting Inheritance,exhibited at Hordaland Kunstsenter the same year, is a three-channel video work that shows maps and terrain from Palestine while a poetic text describes, like a fever dream, nightmarish scenarios about expulsion and exile over multiple generations. Generational trauma, exile, and dreamlike states are all key themes in the artist’s presentation of new work at UKS.
I rarely find myself thinking “this is beautiful,” at least as a first impression, when seeing an exhibition. Beauty is neither a criterion or necessarily a plus for art, of course, but I noted my reaction upon seeing Adwan’s installation. For those who are unfamiliar with the exhibition space, it is housed in an old theatre (and the set for the iconic Olsen Gang movies [1968-1981]). Six large pillars and a mezzanine on the second floor ensure a lot of visual distractions. After renovations, the space is neither a white cube nor a stage, but somewhere in-between. Adwan leans into the space’s theatrical matrix, and with simple effects, manages to transform the room and transport me to such a degree that I quickly forget where I am.
The mezzanine is covered with mashrabyyia, decorative lattices most common in Western parts of the Middle East. These provide privacy and filter the daylight, creating a play of shadow and color. The mashrabyyia are colourfully backlit, so every meter of the gallery space is ornamented with a lacework of arabesques and geometrical or vegetal shapes. Three large latex cylinders are suspended from the ceiling, projecting videos onto the floor. On the cylinders are prints of hands making various gestures, a reoccurring motif for Adwan, and an ambiguous image: the hand can provide comfort or deliver blows.
The prints are supposedly collected from video recordings of women sharing their experiences of exile. Speakers in polygonal MDF-crates hung from the ceiling play a hushed voice, almost at a whisper, reciting a poem authored by Adwan. It consists of broken sentences about tiredness, hands, breath, and encapsulation. Hexagons, like in a beehive, are recurrent in the exhibition: in the mashrabyyia, in the support structures in the cylinders, and in the video projections on the floor. As a whole, the installation elicits a feeling of being submerged and encapsulated. The poem and visual languages Adwan uses are ephemeral and toggle between past, present, and future, circling back again and again to maternity and childhood.
Encapsulation is an apt word for Adwan’s works in general, be it the cocoon-like exhibition design, or the bundles of different temporalities, sentences, languages, and fragmented video images. The voice in the sound composition in Things Fall Apart refers to the womb and the care mothers have for their children. Underwater sound recordings as well as what I assume is audio from contact microphones attached to a body create a soundscape that is maybe best described as situated inside another being.
Maternity and the cyclical nature of life – from birth to death – is a theme in Yeats’s The Second Coming. The poem’s last line describes a being arising: “its hour come round at last / Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born.” Despite the restraint with which Adwan treats her themes and means, Things Fall Apart stares at an ongoing, long-lasting humanitarian and moral crisis. It rattles us in our faith on behalf of the coming generations, their possible futures. And yet, Adwan’s exhibition instills in me a dogged optimism. Maybe you could even call it hope?
