This essay was produced in conjunction with the exhibition Yara El-Sherbini: Forms of Regulation and Control, curated by Naeem Mohaiemen, on view at CUE Art Foundation from November 7 – December 15, 2020. This text is included in the free exhibition catalogue available at CUE.
Yara El-Sherbini, OCCUPIED/FREED, 2020. Plastic, metal, 2 x 3 inches. Photo by Erica Urech.
“Audience engagement is at the heart of my work,” artist Yara El-Sherbini tells me from her home in Santa Barbara, while I peer at her on a screen from my Los Angeles apartment. Even across the pixelated space, I know this to be true. As we settle into our first virtual meeting in the midst of the 2020 pandemic lockdown, El-Sherbini keenly asks me about my own creative practice before we’ve even touched upon the topic of hers. This kind of reciprocity is the driver behind El-Sherbini’s socially engaged works. Many artists have turned their attention to, as writer Ben Davis puts it, “the vogue of ‘social practice.’” [1] As art fairs, museums, and galleries take tentative steps towards work about institutional equity, racial justice, and climate change, the risk is that rather than structural change, these works require no more from the audience than a cursory glance. For El-Sherbini, there is always a demand for a deeper, slow immersion, whether as a solo artist, or as half of collaborative duo YARA + DAVINA, working with UK-based artist Davina Drummond on large scale public artworks. Drawing from an ever-expanding network of fellow artists concerned with the potentials of collectivity and community, El-Sherbini strives to center her viewers through humor, play, and social inquiry.
In the age of COVID, organizing an exhibition without physicality is a new mode many artists are having to face. El-Sherbini's attention to engagement still facilitates connection while managing to deprioritize touch. What sets El-Sherbini apart is the alchemy of touch present in all of her works, be it literal, metaphorical, or both. “When people become physically engaged,” she says, “it changes their interaction with the artwork.” This is apparent in videos and images of visitors smiling in delight and surprise as they engage with El-Sherbini’s interactive games. El-Sherbini’s Operation Brexit prompts audiences to extract Britain from Europe in ten seconds or less. Rooted in popular culture, the artwork converts something known, the children’s game Operation, and subverts it for political and social inquiry.
Forms of Regulation and Control, El-Sherbini’s current exhibition at CUE Art Foundation, hones in on the notion of control in a time in which the world feels uncontrollable. Focusing on social conditions most acutely felt in the age of COVID-19, like increased surveillance and police presence on the streets, El-Sherbini also asks us to examine other modes of surveillance and control that go largely unnoticed.
The exhibition begins with El-Sherbini’s signature mode of investigation: to disarm her audience in a series of brightly colored questions neatly displayed in frames on the gallery walls. Using the form of questions, El-Sherbini relinquishes any position of the artist as expert by turning her art objects into a query for the viewer. This wall of inquiry evades a one-dimensional point of view. The questions, directed at current events and social assumption, are equal parts humor and critical thought:
Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez was called a “fucking bitch” by Ted Yoho, a fellow member of congress. His apology included the lines “I cannot apologize for my passion or for loving my God, my family and my country.” How many times this year have you apologized but not really meant it?
Once
More than once
I never apologise
The framed questions ease audiences into the excavation of various social issues that they enter through El-Sherbini’s work. Nodding to much-circulated news clips and public events such as AOC's famed “I am someone’s daughter too” takedown of Yoho’s misogyny on the House floor, these questions prompt audiences to recontextualize iconic moments in contemporary history in relation to their own lives, habits, and relationships.
This means of investigation is reminiscent of El-Sherbini’s continuing series A Pub Quiz, in which a faux-bookish El-Sherbini decked out in thick glasses and black pencil skirt, clipboard in hand, leads audiences through an often hilarious, thoroughly enthralling trivia night that draws upon everything from pop culture to racial bias. These performative trivia nights, hosted in local pubs, trouble notions of knowledge acquisition through a set of provocative trivia questions pertaining to current social, global, and/or cultural contexts: How many squirrels has Iran arrested on suspicion of spying? By supplying answers for the quizzes, audiences are immediately animated, and integral to the work; it cannot exist without a community of people. These moments of real engagement activate the space and thus complete the art piece. Creating an entertaining and interactive environment, El-Sherbini asks audiences to examine how they know what they know, and why.
Yara El-Sherbini, Border Control, 2015. Plastic, metal, electricity, 9 x 30 x 40 inches.
Through the vehicle of play, El-Sherbini gives participants the opportunity to exchange, reshape, and widen their worldviews. She pushes creative practice beyond the artist’s private vision and into the public realm. In this way, El-Sherbini positions the artist as a service provider, generating dialogue and debate via creative production. Her works inspire a prismatic understanding of various political and social issues ranging from border control to institutional racism. Topics are never presented as absolutes, but rather, as starting points to re-examine our fixed ideologies and perspectives.
In many of El-Sherbini’s pieces, the moment of contact converts the piece from an object to an experience. Such is the case with Border Control, an experiential sculpture originally commissioned in 2015 by the Museum of Contemporary Art Santa Barbara, that reimagines the game BuzzWire as the act of crossing the U.S.-Mexico border. Armed with a magnetic handle, players have one minute to cross. If the metal of the handle touches the metal of the sculpture, warning sounds and lights are triggered. Through interactivity and play, the piece makes the ephemerality of borders accessible in a nuanced way. The piece evokes the precarity of the border, the fragility of the human lives risked to cross, and the power both wielded and implied by man-made demarcations. Facilitating touch in a touchless world, the piece reminds audiences of the invisible yet concrete ways we have been separated due to the often arbitrary delineations of nation-states.
At some point during a visit to El-Sherbini’s exhibition, audiences are bound to encounter the piece OCCUPIED/FREED (2020), though they may not know it. This subtle intervention re-configures the gallery toilet locks to indicate “occupied” when in use and “freed” when available, provoking questions of ownership and geopolitics. The piece identifies occupation of land as a form of control, and points to how a border is implemented to regulate the movement of people.
Other Forms of Regulation and Control (2020) serves as the centerpiece and namesake of the exhibition. The work spans the gallery’s main space and features three hygrothermographs. Unseen by most visitors, hygrothermographs are small machines used in all major galleries and museums to observe the environment of the space on a graph and control it to protect the artworks. These machines are often out of sight, on the periphery of the space, but here they are the artwork. Humidity and temperature are measured by inserting a piece of human hair into the machine. These particular machines use phenotypically Caucasian hair as the baseline for monitoring the space.
El-Sherbini displays the three hygrothermographs on pedestals. The charcoal grey and clear plastic machines, complete with delicate green graph paper, appear scientific in nature. Set in the middle of a quiet space save for a methodical ticking noise, the sole presence of three machines is unsettling and immediately elicits the question of what they are monitoring. In each machine the hair used has been changed to one of the three ethno-hair profiles based on race: "Asian," "Caucasian," and "African" (also classified as “Afro” in some studies). By supplying the machines with these three “scientific” classifications of ethnicity, El-Sherbini exposes racialized mechanisms in the everyday and invites the audience to monitor what happens to a space when whiteness is not the default.
Graphs documenting the environmental changes recorded by each machine will be cumulatively displayed, week-to-week. Moving the machines out of the shadows and into the spotlight signals the invisible forms of regulation and control within society at large. This alluring minimalism is a simple yet powerful intervention, changing the element by which we measure the world around us, and candidly displaying the results, thus raising questions about how we collect and interpret data.
Utilizing a machine that monitors temperature based on racial distinctions, El-Sherbini lays bare the racialization of science, and the way institutional power and authority are used to justify racial hierarchy. It symbolizes many fraught histories at once, an implicit reference to the myriad ways in which race has been used as a form of control, from Jim Crow laws to recent quantitative demographic “insights” on the impact of COVID-19 in communities of color. The piece inverts the fictions of biological racism, echoing writer Saidiya Hartman’s assertion, “Fact is simply a fiction endorsed with state power.” [2] Exploring these issues makes the piece profoundly current, revealing the layers of social regulation present in the treatment of COVID-19 and the tracking of Black Lives Matter protests.
Like so many of El-Sherbini's works, in Other Forms of Regulation and Control the audience propels the piece. The viewer literally controls the environment; the audience’s breath changes the humidity, and thus the machines’ readings, provoking a moment of change through being.
As the hygrothermographs are used by art conservators who often work behind the scenes, El-Sherbini has been engaged in critical conversations with art conservators about their role in determining what work is archived and shown in exhibitions. The piece invites a critique of the larger global environment, but also the hierarchies of visibility in the art world, further destabilized by El-Sherbini’s close consultations with art conservators as opposed to curators.
Extracting from the everyday, El-Sherbini upends broadly accepted assumptions about the world we live in. El-Sherbini’s exhibition opens up a wider conversation about historical and ongoing patterns of state surveillance and power. COVID-19 is unprecedented, but the social circumstances it sheds light upon are age-old. Under the guise of safety, certain freedoms are being restricted, from who has access to education, how we use public transport, and where we are permitted to go. This attention to the historical context of now invites audiences to rethink the invisible systems that separate us from ourselves and each other. Using critical forms of play, El-Sherbini highlights how these forms of control do not live in the abstract, but affect our daily lives.
1. Davis, Ben. A Critique of Social Practice Art, International Socialist Review, 1 July 2010. isreview.org/issue/90/critique-social-practice-art.
2. Hartman, Saidiya. Saidiya Hartman & Arthur Jafa, Hammer Museum, 6 June 2019. https://hammer.ucla.edu/programs-events/2019/06/saidiya-hartman-arthur-jafa
This essay was written as part of the Art Critic Mentoring Program, a partnership between AICA-USA (US section of International Association of Art Critics) and CUE, which pairs emerging writers with AICA-USA mentors to produce original essays on a specific exhibiting artist. Please visit aicausa.org for more information on AICA-USA, or cueartfoundation.org to learn how to participate in this program. Any quotes are from interviews with the author unless otherwise specified. No part of this essay may be reproduced without prior consent from the author. Lilly Wei is AICA’s Coordinator for the program this season.
Rosa Boshier is a writer living in Los Angeles. Her short fiction, essays, art criticism, and creative nonfiction have appeared in or are forthcoming in Joyland Magazine, The Offing, The Acentos Review, Guernica, The Rumpus, Hyperallergic, Literary Hub, Vice, Los Angeles Review of Books, The Guardian, and The Washington Post, among others. She has taught writing, Latinx cultural studies, and art history at The California Institute of the Arts, Otis College of Art and Design, and Pacific Northwest College of Art.
Mentor Dawn Chan’s criticism and journalism appears in theAtlantic.com, Bookforum, the New York Times, NewYorker.com, New York Magazine, the Paris Review, and the Village Voice, among other publications. She also frequently contributes to Artforum—where she was an editor from 2007 to 2018—and her essays have been anthologized by Whitechapel/MIT Press, ITI Press, and Paper Monument. The recipient of a Warhol Arts Writers Grant and a Thoma Foundation Arts Writing Award in Digital Art, Dawn is currently visiting faculty at Bard’s Center for Curatorial Studies.