Should Curators Resist Over-Explaining Art?

I'm torn on this question

Alia Farid, Chibayish (2022). Still from the film.

Here’s a question. How much explanation should we be given about artworks in a gallery? It’s something I think about a lot when I visit exhibitions. This week I went to the National Museum in Cardiff to see the biennial art prize Artes Mundi. I have to say I walked quite quickly through the presentations of two of the three shortlisted artists on show there. And that’s because there was very little context provided to interpret their work, and nothing about it grabbed me visually.

And then I reached Alia Farid’s installation. Farid is an artist who works across different media, and her presentation consists of a sculptural installation of over-sized plastic water containers and a 15 minute film.

Installation view, Alia Farid, In Lieu of What Is (2022)

Gallery-goers are given this explanation of her work:

Sculptural works investigate the mismanagement of natural resources and the impact of extractive industries on the land, ecology and the social fabric of southern Iraq and Kuwait, while video works create intimate portraits of individuals as they weave together social connections to resist and overcome adversity within these contexts and the rise of a new materialism created by an oil-centred economy.

OK. So a vague bit of context. No detail of who these individuals are. No detail of what the mismanagement of the local resources have been. No detail about the efforts to resist adversity. My gallery companion and I sat down to watch the film, and I can’t even begin to describe how mesmerising it was. There was footage of water buffalo submerged in water and making their slow way along the banks; young people singing and dancing on a woven mat in what looks like a sort of tent made of rushes; a boy yodelling amongst the reeds on the banks of the waterway; a young girl splashing around in the water whilst her older brother rides on the backs of their buffalos as he drives them along. It’s beautiful.

And then there’s some dissonance in the film: grey CGI imagery of used plastic bottles floating up steps towards something unknown, and a large pipe of brown effluence spilling into the waterway. Here are a few snippets that I filmed (although they don’t do the beauty of it justice):

The rhythm of the sounds and voices are part of the power of the film, but the language spoken is Arabic and the subtitles are in Welsh. So neither of us understood what was being said. But it didn’t matter: the film communicated ideas of beauty, simplicity, joy and some sort of threat. It was so compelling that we watched it twice through - and on the second watching the subtitles were in English. They didn’t add anything though, because there was nothing really being said. What I took from it was something about a way of life and a community beyond my experience or knowledge that is struggling with the issues of pollution that we all face on this planet.

Does it need any more explanation than that? Maybe not. But I needed to know more. It really stayed with me. Who are these people? Where do they live? What is their relationship to the water buffalo? What’s going on that is endangering their way of life? And what I found out from my own further research when I got home has added so much more to my understanding and appreciation of Alia Farid’s work.

The title of the film is Chibayish, which is a place in southern Iraq in an area known as the Mesopotamian Marshes. It is located between the Tigris and Euphrates rivers and is one of the world’s largest inland deltas. Historically it has had a rich ecosystem that supports hundreds of thousands of Marsh Arabs living in the region, and even more people beyond who benefit from the agricultural products that are farmed in this area. Alia Farid’s family are from here, although she has moved away now.

In the early 1990s Saddam Hussein took a first whack at this region, when he deliberately drained the swamps in order to punish the local population for protecting political dissidents against his regime. It was ecocide on a mass scale. But after Saddam was toppled, the Iraqi government pledged to preserve the marshland communities, and the area was inscribed as a UNESCO World Heritage site in 2016 because of its biodiversity and ancient history.

Now the community and the area is under threat again because of several years of drought due to climate change and because water has become a premium resource in the wider region. Upstream dams in the neighbouring countries of Iran and Turkey have reduced water flow in the marshland rivers significantly and there’s nothing the local population can do about it. We are into the terrain of the international politics of water resources, which will only become a more potent issue in the coming years.

Without fresh water to flush out the sewage and agricultural chemicals from farming that drain into the waterways, the marshlands are becoming increasingly more toxic and saline. And the water buffalo and fish stock that this community now rely on for their livelihoods are struggling for survival.

But it’s not just this immediate community that is affected: it’s the whole of Iraq and the wider regions around it. Lack of water and the destruction of the rich biodiversity of this area means displacement of people, less capacity for independence, more poverty and tensions over increasingly fewer resources throughout the region. National borders become irrelevant when people are fighting to live. So the film is really about the way in which power and violence are meted out on landscapes and people.

Here is Alia Farid talking about her installation, variations of which she has showed in other venues in Europe and the USA over the past couple of years:

All of these rich layers of meaning are bound up in this spellbinding film. And it’s so much more than what you can understand without this context being provided. I’m sure this is also the case with the other artists exhibiting at Artes Mundi whose work I skipped past before I got Alia Farid’s work. But without very much guidance I just wasn’t engaged in their work. And my question is, how much should artists or curators explain art to gallery goers? I’m sort of torn on this because on the one hand I think it’s important to allow personal responses and meanings to emerge for viewers. But I also always want to know more about the artist’s intention and the story behind the artworks. Should artists and curators resist over-explaining art?

As always I’d love to know what you think. And please do share links in the comments to art that you’ve seen this week.