Shibboleth
Pedro Barbachano Solo Show
New Gallery Calgary
In Arabic, the term “Tahrir” signifies liberation. However, within the complex socio-political landscape of the Arab world, certain terms and concepts often fail to realize their full potential due to prevailing contexts. Tahrir Square, ostensibly a space for the liberation of protesters from Egypt's historical dictatorship, paradoxically becomes a site of control, surveillance, and punishment. Here, the historical refers to the present moment. This present moment which started in 2010 and has not ceased to exist since. They call it spring for it is in spring when the process of burgeoning happens, allowing for the metamorphosis of the bodies, or the coming of new bodies which make up the living organisms that flourish.
In Shibboleth, Pedro Barbachano undertakes an anthropo-archaeological exploration, navigating between proximity and distance from the present moment. By drawing from both historical and contemporary methodologies, Barbachano excavates the Egyptian Museum in Cairo, situated in Tahrir Square, uncovering enigmatic archaeological artifacts that challenge established narratives. Within the context of Cairo, the museum, allegedly serving the state, becomes intertwined with the state's repression of protesters, both entities regulating and surveilling bodies within this contested space.
What neither the state nor the museum know, is that both the protesters and the sculpted bodies are witnesses. It is in this process of witnessing that the counter-revolutionary act happens. In witnessing, one identifies and consequently defines. Related to this notion of identifying through processual gazing is one of the artist’s concerns in studying queer bodies as part of a figurative panopticon. Figurative because it is incessantly extending beyond the tangible walls of the institution. In the realm of these counter-acts, processual gazing becomes an alternative for what representation is meant to fulfill. In this show, Barbachano asks: How do you build a historical narrative from evidence that is classified as criminal? Is representation as understood in its Western canon, truly at the service of queer bodies when existing in a militarized state?
His work alludes to a negation suggesting that queer thriving doesn’t pass through traditional methods of representation in this specific geospatial context. Instead, he explores the virtual realm as a space for the extraction of evidence, utilizing an array of nude selfies collected amongst his friends to create fossilized objects that are recontextualized. Taking a photograph transforms it into potential criminal evidence, with each image serving as a record that can be used against the individual depicted. In an attempt to counter-analyze evidence, this process speculates on the possible readings of these photographs as queer-coded objects whose history has been erased and to inscribe the queer body in a historical and eventually, archaeological register.
The work considers the selfie as the only possible tool for self-representation, allowing for one to self-frame themselves sexually and to exist on the virtual map of the city. In a militarized urban environment where individual profiles can be meticulously mapped, the right to visibility for queer individuals is paradoxically constrained by the omnipresent surveillance apparatus. Despite the proliferation of monitoring mechanisms inherent in the city's expanded panopticon, the right to exist freely and openly as a queer person is undermined and often denied. By reinterpreting these photographic gestures, the artist introduces, through speculation, an archival element into the constrained narrative, creating a space for the construction of a potential history. This archive is cultivated through the collection, dissection, and merging of various elements that draw from the mundane in Egypt, serving as a method of retranslation through which queer bodies are identified and thus witnessed.
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