Feb 23, 2012 | 02:53
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Jan 19, 2012
An artistic partnership that transcended borders
Two Afghan women work together on one of Alighiero Boetti's Mappa. Randi Malkin Steinberger, who shot this photograph, was commissioned by the artist to visit the refugee camp in Pakistan where the women lived to document their lives because he, as a male outsider, wasn't allowed to visit. © RMS Photo: Randi Malkin Steinberger. Photo courtesy of the Fowler Museum.
Alighiero Boetti was an Italian artist from Turin and well-known in the international contemporary art world for his provocative work.
In contrast, his collaborators were anonymous, veiled, largely illiterate women trying to survive in impoverished Afghanistan by using their hands and their skills at needlework. With little understanding of Boetti’s highly cerebral art, they were hired by the artist through Afghan middlemen to "color in" with thread and dense stitching his intricate designs.
A child looks on as his mother stitches a Mappa. The mother holds her veil in her teeth to keep it from slipping while she is being photographed by Steinberger. © RMS Photo: Randi Malkin Steinberger.
Although Boetti never met many of the more than 500 Afghan embroiderers, their working relationship lasted 23 years, beginning in 1971 and ending with his death in 1994, and produced hundreds of diverse pieces.
Today, many regard Boetti’s Afghan embroideries as his most iconic and lasting contribution to the arts, said Roy Hamilton, senior curator for Asian and Pacific collections and a textile expert with the Fowler Museum. And while a surge of interest in Boetti’s work in recent years has spurred top museums, including the Tate Modern in London and the Museum of Modern Art in New York, to mount major retrospectives, the Fowler in February will become the first museum to focus on his work from a cross-cultural perspective and examine the collaborative nature of his art.
Among the embroidered works to be displayed in the exhibition, entitled "Order and Disorder: Alighiero Boetti by Afghan Women," are "Mappe," large-scale maps of the world — similar to what a geography teacher might post in a classroom — filled in with the colors and symbols of their national flags. Boetti’s maps reflect a changing geopolitical world from 1971 to 1994, a period that included the collapse of the Soviet Union and the fall of the Berlin Wall.
"Mappa," 1990. Embroidery on fabric. 118 x 229.3 cm. Private Collection, Rome. Photograph by David Regen, New York. © Alighiero Boetti Estate by Artists Rights Society (ARS) and Società Italiana di Autori ed Editori (SIAE) 2011. Courtesy Fondazione Alighiero e Boetti, Rome.
Boetti also commissioned the women to complete "Tutto" (Italian for everything), elaborate assemblages of a plethora of tiny, interwoven shapes, representing everything from sunglasses to a Hindu goddess, that fit together like a jigsaw puzzle.
In a third category of embroidered work, colorful grids of lettering spell out phrases in Italian and Dari, one of the official languages of Afghanistan related to Persian. Blocks of letters that range from 16 to hundreds have been arranged to spell out words in complicated ways, said Hamilton,
Tutto, 1988. Embroidery on fabric. 100 x70 cm. Collezione Alessandra Bonomo. Photograph courtesy Bonomo Gallery, Rome. © Alighiero Boetti Estate by Artists Rights Society (ARS) and Società Italiana di Autori ed Editori (SIAE) 2011.
In addition to these pieces, the Fowler will also illuminate the role of the indigenous artisans who helped Boetti create these works. Included will be the only known documentary photographs taken of the women, who, after the Soviets invaded Afghanistan in 1979, fled their homeland to settle in a refugee campus in Peshawar, Pakistan, where Boetti reconnected with them through middlemen and continued to give them work to embroider.
"The Fowler is not a museum of contemporary art, and we would not have done an exhibition only about Boetti and his work," Hamilton said. "There have been many exhibitions around the world that have done that. This is our way of getting at the transnational, collaborative production of these works and all the questions that relationship has engendered — the controversies, the dilemmas, the challenges and rewards."
One question looms: With Boetti’s work currently fetching millions of dollars at art auctions, did he exploit these women who were desperate to earn money for the survival of their families?
Boetti looks at the new "Mappe," which may have taken a few years to complete. Photo by Steinberger. © RMS Photo: Randi Malkin Steinberger.
"You can find in the body of criticism about Boetti’s work every possible point of view," Hamilton said. "You see everything from praise that he created this wonderful transnational community made up of people so different from himself to the argument that this was exploitation of women who lived in poverty and exile — and still may to this day – while these pieces sell for millions of dollars on the international art market. What you read about Boetti tells you more about the point of view of the author than it does about the nature of the collaborative process."
But one woman who knew Boetti and gave the world a glimpse through her photographs of these unknown collaborators and the conditions under which they worked believes this was not exploitation.
"This was something that grew out of his love and appreciation of their culture. He spent several years living in Afghanistan until it no longer became possible for him to stay there," said Randi Malkin Steinberger, whose photographs will be in the exhibition.
As part of her own art-making, Steinberger, who now lives in Santa Monica, spent several months in Italy photographing Boetti in his studio. Frustrated that he wasn’t being allowed to enter the camp to meet the women because he was male and an outsider, the artist asked Steinberger to gain access to these women with the help of the middlemen and photograph them at work.
"It was an exciting opportunity for me," Steinberger recalled. "I loved his work, and here was a chance for me to go to a place I had never been to before to see this part of the process." But when she arrived at the camp, she was told by the middlemen that she wouldn’t be allowed in because of an unrelated incident that had occurred the week before.
Steinberger was allowed to photograph the women for only a few hours before being told she must leave.
She was devastated and frantic. "I was kicking and screaming, ‘This is why I came!’" The men finally relented. "They didn’t want to disappoint Boetti because so many women and families depended on his work to make a living. And they respected him — he was a kind of mythic figure to them."
Wearing the traditional veil and Afghan garb under which she hid her camera, Steinberger passed an armed checkpoint where she was questioned and then entered their homes, without an interpreter and alone.
Clicking away, she saw women working in sparsely furnished mud homes. Some sewed together in open courtyards while their children played. Young girls learning to embroider were given smaller pieces to work on.
"There was something almost romantic about the way they worked together in this stark environment. There was a will to survive, but there was also a sense of joy on their faces as they worked," said Steinberger, whose book of photographs, which Boetti helped select, was recently published.
The Afghan women were not the only anonymous collaborators that the artist sought out. "He loved to work with things that left his hands and became transmuted in some way before they came back to him," Hamilton explained. "He loved things that worked as a process beyond the edges of his control. So while he was frustrated that he couldn’t have a more meaningful, personal connection to these women who were doing the work, he also accepted this as part of the art-making process."
The Afghan women were not the only anonymous collaborators that the artist sought out. "He loved to work with things that left his hands and became transmuted in some way before they came back to him," Hamilton explained. "He loved things that worked as a process beyond the edges of his control. So while he was frustrated that he couldn’t have a more meaningful, personal connection to these women who were doing the work, he also accepted this as part of the art-making process."
For one well-known series of work, Boetti intentionally mailed letters off to fictitious addresses. When post offices mailed them back to him as undeliverable, he made note of what was written or stamped on them. Then he would put that envelope into a bigger envelope and repeat the process, expanding the scope of his art.
"He liked games and the idea of putting rules out there for specific work he was doing and then watching how others approached it," Steinberger said.
In many instances, Boetti gave the women some artistic freedom. He allowed them to choose the colors reflected in his pieces — the ocean, for example, in "Mappe," which comprise about 150 pieces. He also left the borders of the maps blank in his later work. And these were filled in by the women with quotes from historic poets or phrases given them by the middlemen.
In a few instances, the borders became a way for the women and other Afghans to convey political messages during a period of resistance to Soviet occupation.
One such message read: "Muslim mujahedin who have lost their lives like butterflies at the front and resisted the brutality of the cruel Russians and thousands of groups have suffered direly."
These messages were probably not composed by the women themselves, but dictated to them by the middlemen, said Hamilton.
"Some of them say, ‘By the unknown women of Afghanistan,’" the senior curator explained.
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"Order and Disorder" runs from Feb. 26-July 29. On Feb. 25, the Fowler will host a conversation with Steinberger and guest curators for the exhibition, an opening party with sounds from Afghanistan, Italy and Pakistan, and an after-party.
