In my grandmother's dining-room there was a glass-fronted cabinet and in the cabinet a piece of skin. It was a small piece only, but thick and leathery, with strands of coarse, reddish hair. It was stuck to a card with a rusty pin. On the card was some writing in faded black ink, but I was too young then to read.
- Bruce Chatwin
Diyar Mayil’s Houseguest at Centre Clarke contains a series of objects that conjure a domestic space. Its loosely legible objects (a clock, a broom, a medicine cabinet, a table etc.) are obscured by being covered with a thin, textured material that vaguely resembles skin. More explicitly, it seems like a representation of skin.
Before entering the narrow room where these objects are stationed, there is an accompanying text by Mojeanne Behzadi that provides a welter of trite cliches to guide you through:
Mayil invites you into a space of tension and vulnerability. She asks you, its guest, to consider your positionality and relationship to home, land, nationhood, borders and to hosting. As a Kurdish Alevi immigrant from Turkey living on stolen lands in so-called Canada, Mayil thinks broadly about the concept of a home and what this term signifies when your very identity and existence both at home and in host lands are subjected to hostility, and violence. […]Yet the domestic environment is ever-more important when what lies just outside the perimeters of its walls reminds you that you are unwelcomed, or tolerated at best. The intimacy of a home, its relative safety, is a space where freedom of expression flourishes and where the flavours and scents that represent a lost home can be experienced again through the senses, rituals and traditions. It is also where the toll of the world is exposed and can be made manifest.
Functionally, it is a show about the exhibitionism of tactility, one which is denied. If it is very look but don’t touch, it also lacks all the “flourishes” of home, participating in the olfactory sterility common to most of the city’s contemporary art spaces.
Even the booklet central to the show, copies of which you can take, is suspended and reserved with a sheet of skin over it, bound by blonde braided hair. The meaning of such a gesture, its denial to the guest of any contact while freely offering its contents from a bin, seems perverse.
I would not venture a guess as to the artist’s actual intentions, desires etc., in creating these works. Nothing on display answers such questions, in fact, it seems to befuddle, although the little booklet that you can take home blandly spells out that the show is about the resentful fantasies of the displaced.
In the text, this is mapped out to global proportions, but in the objects, it is entirely enframed by recognizable visual rhetoric that’s been institutional for nearly a century.
The works could readily be read as surreal fantasy, fetish porn, or body horror. In the treatment of materials, their selection, and juxtaposition, they participate in all these genres, deliberately or not.
It is true that taken all together, they do not simply suggest any of them, although it would require little to note the perversion of the utility of a broom into a jagged, perhaps wounding object; the parodically religious quality accorded to the book; the pornographic jokiness of the central clock, etc. each suggesting these directions. Indeed, you would have to be illiterate about the past century of art for such suggestions not to be strongly intimated by the plastic language of the exhibition including its modes of display.
Given the way the artist and the supplementary text frame the work, it would take little effort to read sadomasochistic fantasies into them, which is less dubious than the extremely vague pretenses to some kind of political context that the texts attempt (and which have been stock rhetoric for half a century).
The more jarring issue is why this space of potential indeterminacy is so firmly and neurotically taxonomized like a zoo creature by the cliches of institutional discourse. This is the function of its accompanying texts, which are the only thing really doing the work of “domestication” on display.
There is no clear line between claims like those in its discursive clothing and a table that has what resemble stumps for legs with a sheet of skin thrown over it. (It is also unclear why the "lumps" it seems to have had in the images on her website have mostly deflated.)
The works themselves suggest something far more ambiguous and potentially interesting. This ambiguity, it should be stressed, is not because they take part in "displacement," psychic, libidinal, or otherwise, but because they are so familiar tactically and materially.
It is also here that the humour (intentional or not) of the work is most evident in the contrast between its makeshift clockwork and the undermining of practical value for language, plastic and otherwise.