SADIA SHIRAZI

Tracing Foreclosure

Today the term foreclosure is often associated with the collapse of the subprime mortgage market. Caught in a cycle of crisis that grips us individually as well as collectively, the instinctive reaction is one of paralysis and a search for solutions in the same institutional logic that produced the problem.

Foreclosed: Between Crisis and Possibility counters this paralytic reaction by beginning with a critical reevaluation of the term itself. Foreclosure refers not only to a forced eviction from a home but also to a rejection particular experiences, memories, and narratives from dominant forms of representation. It evokes processes of exclusion, a shutting down of recognition, reflection, and debate. We embrace this expansive meaning of the term as a primary field of investigation; our curatorial approach aims to crilically examine the systems that produce crisis rather than represent the consequences of it. Cutting across the psychic and the spatial, we explore artistic practices and discursive strategies that investigate the ways in which everyday experiences of displacement, threat, suppression, and loss are embedded within specific social contexts. How are certain narratives or subjectivities foreclosed by particular political, economic, and historical conditions? Through work in photography, film, video, installation, and performance, the artists in this exhibition challenge the politically paralyzing rhetoric of crisis by posting and negotiating alternative imaginaries.

Using a multilayered curatorial strategy that integrates the gallery space with a series of public platforms, this exhibition elaborates an understanding of foreclosure as both a very real phenomenon that demands critical evaluation, as well as a versatile term that can function as a tool for insight and analysis. Taking this second mandate as a point of entry into the first, we recuperate alternate meanings of foreclosure by tracing the term through its incarnations in psychoanalytic and postcolonial theory. By locating the idea of foreclosure within the mind, the psychoanalytic approach helps to uncover the ways in which crisis is experienced on both an individual and collective level as a trauma or break. This approach asks how foreclosure is embodied psychically, physically, and socially. Postcolonial theory helps us develop an understanding of how Western cultural and intellectual discourse forecloses the voices and narratives of the Other. Our decision to address the foreclosure crisis in an artistic context is not an attempt to speak for anyone or provide a platform for visibility. Rather, it is our hope that by elaborating the complex mechanisms of foreclosure as a system of invisibility and exclusion, we can facilitate a critical awareness that is, in itself, a strategy of resistance.

This generative excavation of the term foreclosure recasts our understanding of the current financial crisis, of which widespread property foreclosure is both an extremely tangible effect and a highly potent symbol. The dominant belief in neoliberalism as a system of victimless wealth accumulation forecloses countless stories of marginalization and oppression. By framing the current crisis as the result of complex processes embedded in global networks that are shaped by histories of disruption-a reorientation brought about by tracing the term itself-the artworks in this exhibition provoke an examination of the relationships between micro-narratives of threatened home loss and the broader economic system that such narratives reflect.

This dialectical integration of system and subject structures the exhibition's concept and design. Spatial and economic visualizations, on the one hand, and psychic or subjective repsentations, on the other, set two limits for a field of exploration within which artists interrogate the resonances and points of intersection between these seemingly oppositional foci. Taking on the challenge posed by the phrase "The consequences are easier to depict than the system itself," from Alexander Kluge's epic film News from Ideological Antiquity: Marx-Eisenstein-Capital (2008), the first pole of the exhibition focuses on the economic, spatial, and architectural systems that underpin both the current financial crisis as well as broader structures of qlobal capital. Claude Closky's wallpaper is composed of numbers and letters taken from NASDAQ. Begun in 1971 at the dawn of neoliberalism, NASDAQ is a computerized information system that facilitates the fictions of instantaneous exchange and harmless wealth accumulation. By inscribing his art within this model, multiplying its so-called logic to an extreme degree, Closky interrogates the loss of meaning caused in part by the proliferation of signs; at a certain level of saturation, statements of value become no more than decorative items in a frieze.

Allan Sekula's photographic and written work responds directly to this imaginary geography produced by global capital. Fish Story (1988-1994) is an expansive documentation of the effect of international cargo shipping on the socioeconomic spaces of individual ports and cities. It reveals the inescapable materiality of these international processes of exchange, as well as the everyday lives of the maritime world's often displaced or marginalized inhabitants. Harun Farocki's video installation Comparison via a Third (2007) similarly examines the technologies of production and the social conditions of labor, as reflected through the manufacturing of bricks. By juxtaposing footage from Burkina Faso, India, France, Germany, and Switzerland, this work examines the materiality of the brick in relation to different construction practices.

Moving from the systemic to the psychic, the second pole of the exhibition interrogates how such overarching narratives are registered on a personal or collective level. This focus on the subjective experience of foreclosure not only refers to the threat of home loss but also to instances of political, economic, and geographic exclusion. Kamal Aljafari's film Port of Memory (2009) addresses the daily behaviors of a family living under constant threat of displacement. By revealing and unraveling a state of suspension-caught between paralysis and repetition-Aljafari interrogates the experience of psychic and social foreclosure. His installation In Praise of Bystanders (2011-) similarly focuses on the cinematic occupation of Jaffa through an endless process of reframing and rephotographing the Palestinian bystanders accidentally "caught" in the frames of Israeli dramatic and Hollywood action films shot on location in the city.

This interrogation of the precarious conditions of everyday life also informs the work of Yto Barrada, who explores the border space between Morocco and Spain. Her revelation of the tension between the immediate and harsh reality of the Strait of Gibraltar and the projected dreams of Tangier's inhabitants evokes ideas of suspended desires and foreclosed possibilities. While operating in a radically different medium, Tania Bruguera's Immigrant Movement International (2011-) similarly explores the notion of physical embodiment within contested territories. In this project, which began in Queens, New York, Bruguera uses her position as an artist as a point of articulation in the attempt to form a social and political movement encompassing various immigrant groups. Responding to crisis with a sense of possibility, this project aims to expand notions of belonging and citizenship by promoting a sense of solidarity independent of class, nationality, ethnicity, and gender. This transition between crisis and possibility, a thread that runs throughout the exhibition, is further emphasized by David Shrigley's dual-sided sign It's All Going Very... (2010). Capturing the instability that distinguishes the present moment, this work suggests the rapid fluctuation between optimism and pessimism in times of rupture.

Much as our exhibition concept began by tracing the term foreclosure through various modes of critical thought, our curatorial strategy attempts to push the idea of foreclosure to its limit by means of an active occupation of the gallery space. In this space, a series of public platforms and performances interrogate ideas posed by this exhibition, countering processes of foreclosure through both structure and subject matter. These events are termed "platforms" because the word evokes a cacophony of voices—a raised site for action and debate. The participants in these events are called "respondents" because each event is catalyzed by a set of questions that helps create a unified sphere of investigation for practitioners from disparate disciplines. These events are shaped as productive sessions that seek to work through challenges posed by real-life conditions. Through a collective critical exercise, we rethink such problems from diverse perspectives and address urgent questions at varying levels of complexity. To further elaborate this curatorial approach, the three-part diagram that immediately follows this introduction helps visualize this field of inquiry as a site for the creation of cultural discourse.

Each of the three platforms presents a different interpretation of the term foreclosure: the economic/systemic, the psychic/social, and the spatial/urban. The first platform, Forgotten Spaces is a screening of Noël Burch and Allan Sekula's film The Forgotten Space (2010), followed by a discussion between Sekula and the geographer David Harvey. The second platform, Foreclosure/Foreclosed, examines connections between the subprime mortgage crisis in the United States and the psychic, or social experience of home loss. The third platform, City as Stage, looks at urban space as a site of contestation and possibility. Together, the platforms unpack the complex ramifications of foreclosure, as well as reflect our ongoing curatorial process of intense collaboration and discussion. By pressuring the temporal and spatial boundaries of traditional formatting, we hope to generate knowledge that will persist beyond the life of the exhibition.

The primary questions and overarching concerns of each of these three events are discussed in greater detail in a later section of this catalogue, which also incorporates the participating respondents' perspectives through excerpts of their previous research. In addition, this catalogue includes a section that elaborates on the work of the artists. exploring the nature of their practices as well as the relevance of specific works to our understanding of foreclosure. Finally, each of the curators contributes a critical essay that further expands upon these artistic practices in the context of the exhibition framework.

In Estuaries of Thought, Jennifer Burris articulates the discontinuities of capital through an analysis of works by Allan Sekula and Yto Barrada. The split structure of this essay formally manifests the relationship between artistic practice and the economic, political, and social contextualization of such work. It also reinforces the dialectical polarity of the exhibition's structure, which examines systems that produce crisis, on the one hand, and the tangible effects of crisis in lived experience, on the other. Sofia Olascoaga's Staging: Experiments in Social Configuration addresses conditions of possibility and presents a conceptual framework focused on the notion of staging as a way of analyzing the artistic field as a testing ground for social models. Taking as its point of departure Tania Bruguera's project Immigrant Movement International (2011-), this essay investigates the strategies through which her artistic practice enters the public realm and establishes direct relationships with members of particular communities. Sadia Shirazi's essay, Construction/Destruction in Cinematic Spaces, considers the counter-narratives produced through films by Harun Farocki and Kamal Aljafari. Her analysis of these works is premised upon an understanding of construction and destruction as two opposed but mutually informed positions Concentrating on works by Claude Closky, Allan Sekula, and David Shrigley, Gaia Tedone's essay Abstract Patterns, Material Conditions interrogates the ways in which artists either expose or challenge the narratives produced by the neoliberal myth. These narratives include the role of information as commodity, the elusive modes of circulation of financial capital, and the paralyzing rehtoric of crisis.

Together, these four essays highlight the multiple meanings of the term foreclosure as both a generative concept and a curatorial strategy. By engaging with the idea of foreclosure within these expanded processes of cultural production, it is our hope that this exhibition will provide a platform for critique, while also creating space for interdisciplinary investigations into possible futures.

We derive our understanding of foreclosure, which cuts across the economic, the psychic, and the postcolonial, from the following texts:

David Harvey, The Enigma of Capital and the Crises of Capitalism (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010).

J. Laplanche and J.-B. Pontalis, The Language of Psycho-Analysis, "Foreclosure (Repudiation)," trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith (London: The Hogarth Press, 1980), 166-168.

Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, A Critique of Postcolonial Reason: Toward a History of the Vanishing Present (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1999).