Samantha is one of the contemporary artists to have won the Turner Price this year.
But she doesn't care.
She
decided to move to Goa ten years ago. She had time to see her wishes
for adventure and new experiences migrate, to see the color of the
pills she was taking changing from pastel pink, green or blue to the gray of remembrance. And she has at least the chance to add an
artificial taste sensation that she can find in those childhood memories
in London. She hands the bag to the newly arrived group, cashes in and
leaves.
The beach is still there. Samantha thought when arriving in India that
her art work should start there. A bit like the warming-up exercises
they were doing at the Bauhaus. Walking in the sand, letting the
paradise's picture peel off, avoiding the dead bottles, and going to the
studio to reattach the paradise, her paradise.
Samantha writes
and does installations, before she was interested in the evaporation of
the tourist imagery in the West, a scent of dissolved colonialism,
century after century, generation after generation, that has come to
decorate the beaches of India in pastel pink, green and blue.
A few years ago, she was invited to participate in a residency in Dubai. For once, she couldn't resist her need for something new, something else. She wanted to make contacts over there and maybe do some interviews. At least, that's what she told the cops, or whoever they were who forced her to follow them into the building next to the airport. They asked her if she had any contacts with people on file here, journalists, activists. She saw herself living the scenario that a journalist told on the radio last month. They kept her in a cell, without anything, for what she thought was three or four days. And they forced her to fly back to Europe. She decided not to tell the newspapers about it, just to make it part of her work. After all, she did her residency, in a cell, with nothing but the possibility to write down occurrences in her memory. Since then she had more success in the art world and surely, she thinks, the key to the Turner Price.
She met Hans Ulrich Obrist at the Palais de Tokyo. He was as curious as
anyone to hear about her adventure in Dubai. She had started the
automatic verbal flow, as she is used to by now, so that she could look at
him while speaking. And bring out of the illustrious character she had
read and re-read, the flesh and mood of the body in front of her.
Then she stopped talking, cutting the story short, and asked him how he
was. She didn't want to come up with the same lines again. And Hans was
seduced by this display of sincerity, although she wasn't really trying
to produce this effect. He suggested having a coffee together
afterwards, talking about collaboration, and maybe writing a text about his work.
Gestures whose logic she doesn't really grasp, in the midst of her
severed history, except for the light of privilege and luck. He may be
genuinely interested in her, but that's not where she is.
She will let him write about her work anyway. Starting when she worked
on a writing project based on rumor and conspiracy theories. And that
she conceived an installation imagining fake artists paid by the CIA to
exhibit and disseminate their work in the United Arab Emirates. That at
the time she had read about the opening of the Louvre in Abu Dhabi, and
the work of this British journalist on CIA funding for the dissemination
of abstract expressionism during the Cold War in Europe. He will write
that reality overtook fiction when Samantha found herself recluse at
Dubai airport under suspicion of espionage and anti-government
propaganda. And that she then decided to finally play the role of the
spy.
He will say that her work takes the shape of an installation where administrative documents from the CIA are presented, describing the artist's mission to infiltrate the cultural milieu in Dubai and to disseminate Western contemporary art. He will talk about the role of the artist, playing her own role and staging her own work. It will be about decompartmentalisation, contextual approach by deconstructing the political and cultural stakes of any creative act.
Samantha closes her mailbox. She will think about the article later. She still feels that her artist figure is becoming the event, obscuring her production. She wants to ask Hans for more time, more silence, or maybe saying nothing at all. She leaves the studio and returns to the beach.
