SWANA Feminist Praxis and Sensorial Archives of the War-Climate Continuum

• In Event: Artistic Praxis, Insurgent Futures, and SWANA Diasporic Archives

Abstract

This presentation examines the SWANA refugee feminist praxis of Iraqi-born artist Dena Al-Adeeb and Iranian-born artist Sholeh Asgary, focusing on their collaborative multimedia projects At the Edge of the Sea (2024) and Past and Future Forms (2020). Both projects take as their point of departure the 1991 Kuwaiti oil fires of the first Gulf War and the ecological, material, and personal impacts of the forever wars of U.S. Empire. Blending Iranian and Arab practices with moving images, electroacoustic sound, text, and performance, these projects reconfigure moving images from the film Lessons of Darkness (1992), through which German filmmaker Werner Herzog documents the oil fires. In Al-Adeeb and Asgary’s visual and sonic engagements with Herzog’s film, they evoke the sensory and material devastation of the Kuwaiti oil fires and the Gulf War through their SWANA feminist subjectivities. In the process, they (re)imagine the possibilities for survival and resistance within the racialized necropolitics of the war-climate continuum. I suggest that Al-Adeeb and Asgary’s performances subvert the (neo)colonial demand for visibility and surveillance by performing multisensory experiences that refuse to render themselves fully transparent or legible, an effect I call in this paper “atmospheric opacity.” Engaging specifically with the ancient Mesopotamian Epic of Gilgamesh as living indigenous knowledge, Al-Adeeb and Asgary envision liberatory anti-colonial futures that center the interdependency between human, ecological, and cosmological bodies. Ultimately, I contend, Al-Adeeb and Asgary’s projects undermine dominant archives of knowledge production about the greater “Middle East” through generating a “minor” archive of SWANA feminist epistemologies that center sensorial knowledge and cyclical temporalities in their critiques of U.S. empire and the forever war.

Author

• Heather Rastovac Akbarzadeh, University of California-Riverside