In a scene from Daniel Kotter’s film Hashti Tehran (2016), residents of the Nafar Abad district of Iran’s capital gather in a makeshift space among the ruins of their neighborhood. The excerpt, featured in “Temporarily Ours: Contemporary Photography and Film” at Smith College Museum of Art, depicts the government-ordered demolition that is, though devastating, incomplete. Residents have dragged sofas and chairs to border what was once a residential courtyard. They light fires within those boundaries, gather to talk and eat, and try to carry on with life as normally as possible despite being officially prohibited from existing there.
What drew me in most from this film excerpt was the tree at the center of the courtyard. It’s battered, leafless, poorly trimmed, and encircled by a concrete and stone structure that reminds me of a homemade religious grotto. I don’t know what the importance of this tree is to the neighborhood—it’s never discussed in the film. But it’s survived in a broken space, for some reason or other, and its bruised rootedness feels like a last stand amidst the rootless existence of so many living in this condemned neighborhood.
The eight artists chosen for the exhibition by curator Kamala GhaneaBassiri bring together works that preserve a moment in time and experience for a group of people. I appreciate how a reading area set up in the center of the gallery space connects each community’s specific realities into conversation with one another. Inspired by the Nafar Abad neighborhood’s gathered sofas in Hashti Tehran, GhaneaBassiri crowdsourced chairs from offices throughout the museum to pair with three large wooden museum shipping crates covered with artist monographs, calendars, poetry collections, and other printed materials that tie in with the exhibited works.
The intentional juxtaposition of these differing forms of community is the greatest strength of “Temporarily Ours.” Lorraine O’Grady’s series Art is… (1983) chronicles the fifteen Black dancers and actors O’Grady tasked with “framing” parade-goers at the 1983 African American Day Parade in Harlem. In Art Is… (Cop Framed) (1983/2009), a blushing, smiling white police officer, hands crossed in front of him, is “framed” by a Black woman who looks directly at him. Her posture and close proximity to the officer elicit a formal strength that appears to shift authority, if just for a moment. That momentary power shift also occurs with a much less celebratory feeling in Bani Abidi’s Ken D’Souza, 7:42 pm, 25 August 2008 (2009). D’Souza polishes shoes for a living, which the exhibition caption notes is “a menial job associated with Christians” in Karachi, Pakistan. The photograph, one of two images from Abidi’s Karachi Series I (2009), depicts D’Souza sitting on a stool, his back to the camera, in the middle of a Karachi street. For the series, Abidi staged portraits of marginalized Hindus, Christians, and Parsis during Ramadan on the city’s streets while most Muslims were indoors breaking their daily fast. “A rare moment in time,” GhaneaBassiri said when I spoke with her, “where minorities could be visible in that public space.”
Untitled #13 (2001), from Catherine Opie’s series Icehouses, speaks to midwestern winter survival adaptations in ways analogous to the depiction of a moment of daily life in the Palestinian Bedouin village of Arab al-Na’im in Ahlam Shibli’s Woman, house and tree (Unrecognised no. 4) (1999–2000). The stillness of both scenes creates a quiet tension grounded in the shared need of adapting to an indifferent, dangerous environment. Opie frames the fishing houses just off-center of the composition, a horizon line sandwiched on both sides by the winter-white jaws of sky and frozen lake. The subjects take up more of the frame Shibli’s work, but the rocky, arid landscape appears as beautifully unforgiving and engulfing as the Minnesota ice.
A scene of nighttime hot tubbing lit intermittently by harsh artificial light in Cass Bird’s Untitled (2005) comes from a road trip chronicled in the 2006 calendar JD’s Lesbian Utopia. Bird, musician JD Samson, and three other friends spent ten days traveling across the South to stay at queer-owned campgrounds and RV parks. Deitch Projects, the calendar’s publisher, wrote in its website’s project archive that “many people in the lesbian and gay community were looking for a utopian space. The trick, as JD found, was you have to make it yourself.”
In El Muro (The Wall) (2005–2007), Eduardo Hernández Santos’s photography series of queer nightlife along a block of the Malecón sea wall in Havana, Cuba, another version of the makeshift utopia is found. The series of triptychs juxtaposes portraits of the people who gathered there nightly with architectural close-ups of the brick and concrete surface of the Malecón. Excerpts from Cuban poet Virgilio Piñera’s 1943 poem “La isla en peso (The Island Burden)” are printed atop some of these wall images.
One translated line from the poem reads “Nothing could stop a body destined to be trampled by hooves,” and it hit me harder than it might have had this exhibit taken place in a different political climate. I read it just a few days after the presidential inauguration, in a collection of Piñera’s poetry included among the books scattered across the shipping crates in the central gallery reading space. “I tried to pick pieces that showed resilience and creativity in creating a sense of belonging in the face of oppression,” GhaneaBassiri told me. These books add heft to the successful artistic counterargument “Temporarily Ours” makes against proponents of a homogenized, obedient monoculture.
“Temporarily Ours: Contemporary Photography and Film” is on view at Smith College Museum of Art through June 1, 2025.
