Okkoota’s Ghosts
Liang Luscombe
‘An ideal society should be mobile, should be full of channels for conveying a change taking place in one part to other parts. In an ideal society there should be many interests consciously communicated and shared.’
— Dr Babasaheb Ambedkar
How might we apply the principles of the anti-caste movement in the context of Naarm/ Melbourne, Australia, in a way that reflects the possibility of cross-cultural affinities and solidarities? To begin answering this question, we might ask ourselves another question: How have diasporic artists utilised colonial histories of war and conflict — when the social fabric of society breaks down — to reflect on how their communities continue to live with these ghosts? In the works of Phuong Ngo, Lara Chamas, Moonis Ahmad, and Eugenia Lim, we find a range of strategies that employ the language of the counter-monument, which aim to bring to the fore and critique what is forgotten, scrubbed out or silenced by a society concerning its own history – in the official narratives of the past. Within Okkoota, we see how Ngo and Ahmad’s kinetic sculptures centre the hauntings of gaps and absences in our historical memory; Chamas casts objects from her mother’s kitchen in order to describe the enmeshment of war in Lebanese diasporic identity; and Lim creates a dedication to the public infrastructure of the transfer station in order to reimagine labour relations. Though varied in their artistic approaches, a politics emerges that allows us to centre the complexities of cultural memory and class consciousness as key to its political power.
Scattered across the exhibition is Phuong Ngo’s installation Loss in the Aftermath (2018), a series of empty red hammocks that rock hauntingly back and forth. The hammock, as described by Ngo, is “a ubiquitous object in Vietnam, from rocking children to sleep to rest stops and bars on the side of the road; hammocks are a part of daily life, even making their way to refugee camps following the fall of Saigon”. These sculptures are contrasted by a series of grainy and blown-up black and white archival portraits of Vietnamese people attempting to flee by sea, mounted high above the viewer; their distressed faces provide a glimpse into the perils faced by those two million people who escaped Vietnam via boat following the fall of Saigon in 1975, many of whom perished on the journey. Upon each encounter with the automated hammocks, we are immediately confronted with the absent body that should be resting inside. In this way, Ngo creates a counter-monument that actively negotiates the complexities of representing both the horrors of war and a diasporic community that attempted to escape via boat. In the hammock’s continual movement, Ngo gestures toward the irresolution for survivors, the Vietnamese diaspora who continue to live with the horrors of the Vietnam War, left still rocking many empty hammocks.
Nested within the armature of Ngo’s installation and spilling out into Arts House’s foyer lies a series of fruits, kitchen tools, and weaponry – pomegranates rest against ammunition; while dates, olives, figs and grapes are offered up by a pestle that resembles an anti-tank grenade and a mezzaluna knife, all cast into bronze and wax by the artist Lara Chamas. There is a strange intimacy in the items selected from her mother’s kitchen and placed in such proximity to weapons of war; the collection brings the texture of her parents’ experience fleeing the Lebanese Civil War and migrating to Australia into sharp focus. Here, Chamas works with the slippery medium of translation and the kitchen to discuss the complexities of cultural identity enmeshed in war. She draws on her family’s intermingling of Arabic, French and English words in their day-to-day conversation in her sculptures, the French language introduced during the colonial rule of Lebanon by the French government from 1918-1943. In Pomegranade and other ammunition (2021), the translation of the word ‘pomegranate’ becomes a material to work with: the French word for pomegranate is ‘grenade’, a weapon used in the Lebanese Civil War, and whose destruction comes from its tiny seed-like pellets. Chamas physically draws out this translation by placing a pomegranate fruit (rich in its own cultural history and religious symbolism, it is grown across Lebanon with its sherbets and molasses as regional delicacies) alongside shells from the 2006 Israel-Lebanon War. The casting of her mother’s kitchen tools also acts as an intergenerational bridge; the curved blade of the mezzaluna knife used to chop parsley was gifted to her by Chamas’ grandfather. The artist uses bronze casting to imagine her grandfather’s hands assisting her mother to cook for her own family after immigration and memorialises her family’s diasporic lineage.
The act of translation is also employed in Chamas’ communal meal project ಒಟ್ಟಿಗೆ Ottige (together) (2023) created in conversation with the exhibition’s curator Vishal Kumaraswamy for Okkoota. Here, Chamas takes the premise that food can be used as a form of social control, drawing on the cross-cultural similarities between Levantine peasant and wartime foods and dalit foods. Contrary to popular belief, Indian regional cuisines have been developed not solely of flavour, spice or ingredients but are also expressions of adherence to caste-based exclusionary measures, dictating the ingredients used for cooking and segregation of castes when eating. Dalits traditionally ate millets, where the upper castes ate wheat; broken corn or red rice rather than white rice, intestines rather than shoulder or breast meat; animal fat in place of ghee, the list goes on.
Overflowing platters of red rice with buttered nuts and sultanas, okra stew, lentils in dill and beef and eggplant stuffed with pine nuts in tomato sauce are brought out for those sharing Chamas’ communal meal in Arts House’s basement. Instead of attempting to replicate Dalit cooking, Chamas’ research drew on her familial knowledge of peasant food in Lebanon. During conversations with Vishal, she found that these accessible foods, home-cooked stews and soups that she grew up with had similar ingredients to marginalised caste foods in the subcontinent. Her childhood favourite, the Levantine dish Mujadura, which is simply made up of lentil, rice or bulgar wheat, and caramelised onion, is a cheaply made, carbohydrate-heavy meal, and something her family would eat when her parents were homesick. In this case, her translation occurs through the elevation and incorporation of ‘poor’ ingredients that refer to cross-class and cultural affinities, transforming them into a feast to be shared.
How can a monument reflect the act of disappearance itself? In Moonis Ahmad’s kinetic sculpture Almost Entirely Sisyphus (2021), we are presented with such an object: a ghost typewriter, sitting on a blood-red velvet shelf, without paper, yet typing away. A bureaucratic device turned into a surreal autonomous memory machine; it documents the names of those disappeared in various conflicts across the world. With no paper in the typewriter to record the names, the record becomes mute and takes on an almost ghostly presence,[1] creating a series of unregistered marks. Instead, Ahmad turns the bureaucratic object of the typewriter into a counter-monument, memorialising the impossibility of historical commemoration for those disappeared.
Piles of tricycles, chairs, ovens, sheets of corrugated iron, and old couches – Eugenia Lim’s video Shelters For Kyneton (triadic transfer) (2022) opens with the very material textures of Kyneton’s transfer station, or ‘tip’, that sits in the industrial outer-part of the town of Kyneton. From here, the camera takes us inside the portable office of the transfer station’s sole worker and manager, Steve Boulter, where we find photocopied notices hanging on the pin boards, a poster that reads ‘THINK LESS LIVE MORE’, an Australian flag, a kettle, and stack of paper cups for instant coffee. In the video, Lim slowly presents us with both a portrait of and a dedication to the transfer station, a site of public infrastructure that provides the essential service of recycling and waste management for the entire town, and whose many residents likely fail to grasp its integral role in their lives. Lim takes inspiration from Mierle Laderman Ukeles’ Work Ballets, which derived from collaborative artistic interventions with sanitation workers that revealed the operations of the New York Sanitation Department and the vital role of sanitation work in the life systems and maintenance of the city. In Shelters For Kyneton (triadic transfer) (2022), Lim performs in gold mylar suits with the town mayor’s Jennifer Anderson and Boulter in a series of work routines on the site which include sweeping, processing objects from recycling, and culminates in the attachment of each performer’s costumes to one another to form a series of conjoined movements between the three performers. By highlighting the working-class maintenance labour through the participation of both the transfer station’s manager and the town’s mayor, Shelters For Kyneton (triadic transfer) recalls Dr Babasaheb Ambedkar’s hope for an ideal society – one with open and mobile channels of communication between its citizens. She attempts to instil a suspension of usual class and worker dynamics between the three performers by foregrounding the playful choreography that already occurs in Boulter’s work day at the transfer station.
Finally, we return to the deceptively simple and communal act of inter-dining – of different castes eating together – which demolishes hierarchies and restrictions inherited by the practice of caste endogamy. Here in the artistic works gathered for Okkoota we might also find speculative openings and solidarities that make visceral the power structures that dictate how we collectively remember, so that we may organise the table differently.
Top banner: Almost Entirely Sisyphus – Moonis Ahmad, image – Matthew Staton.
Gallery: Loss in the Aftermath – Phuong Ngo, image – Matthew Stanton; Pomegranade and other ammunition – Lara Chamas, image – Matthew Stanton; Almost Entirely Sisyphus – Moonis Ahmad, image – Matthew Stanton; Shelters for Kyneton (triadic transfer) – Eugenia Lim, image Matthew Stanton; Ottige, image Jacinta Keefe.
