Staying with the Trouble: Yara El-Sherbini
by Debra Herrick & Audrey Lopez
We live in mixed-up times, overflowing with both joy and pain, Donna Haraway tells us in her introduction to Making Kin in the Chthulucene.
“Our task,” she writes, “is to make trouble, to stir up potent response to devastating events, as well as to settle troubled waters and rebuild quiet places.”
Staying with the trouble, Haraway says, is our task – to be aware of our status as “mortal critters” in an uneven and complex web of material, geographic, historical and social conditions.
Artist Yara El-Sherbini has been stirring up trouble for a while. In ambitious and ludic projects, El-Sherbini often takes familiar expressions, games, devices or artifacts and alters or recontextualizes them to produce new meaning. The experience of her work is sometimes lighthearted, but the issues that El-Sherbini addresses are nothing short of weighty.
Born in the United Kingdom and now based in Santa Barbara, El-Sherbini works across the US and the UK. She completed her master’s degree in fine art media at the Slade School of Fine Art, University College London before moving to California.
Of Egyptian and Trinidadian heritage, El-Sherbini spent her childhood living in England and Saudi Arabia – a combination of cultural influences that led the artist to develop a “fresh and sometimes perturbing approach” – as Kelly Carmichael puts it in Contemporary Practice.
El-Sherbini’s practice, Carmichael notes, “touches on relational aesthetics, stand-up comedy, familiar family entertainment and socio-political concerns.” It is a “trans-disciplinary” practice, Carmichael says, that intentionally crosses art and nonart borders.
El-Sherbini often stages her works outside the gallery, in places as varied as crowded pubs, empty fields or well-transited public plazas.
From small- to large-scale interventions, spanning mini-golf games to water closet locks to comedy sets, El-Sherbini’s interdisciplinary practice fosters public engagement with matters of politics, social and human conditions, relational aesthetics and live art – or as Haraway calls it, “myriad unfinished configurations of places, times, matters, meanings.”
In addition to her solo practice, El-Sherbini is half of the artist duo, YARA + DAVINA. The other half is the Scottish social practice artist Davina Drummond, who lives and works in London. Together, they make bold public art, seeking to open art up to a wider more general public.
At top and above: YARA + DAVINA, Arrivals and Departures, photos by Tom Merrell
In the interactive and touring public installation, Arrivals + Departures, by YARA + DAVINA, the axis of the work is two 12-foot-tall station/airport arrivals and departures boards. The artwork – focused on birth, death and the journey in-between – invites the public to share the names of people who have arrived and departed, as a way to celebrate a birth, recall someone still living or commemorate a death.
Names can be submitted online or with the help of a steward at the boards themselves. After a short while, the name appears live on the board with others, usually strangers, grouped and presented as in a train station – as arrivals (births) and departures (deaths).
Arrivals + Departures was set to open in April 2020 and tour the UK, but was postponed due to Covid-19. Months later, in September 2020, the project was launched at London’s Somerset House, with new resonance and urgency.
Communities the world over continue to be disrupted by the effects of Covid-19, racial injustice and the environmental crisis. Arrivals + Departures serves as a timely platform to explore issues around loss and grief.
Moreover, through its monumental size, public placement, and participatory engagement, the work questions who and what has traditionally been allowed the honor of public statues and memorials – particularly as relates to racial, ethnic and social justice.
“We’re not interested in making what’s classed as high art events or objects or whatever,” El-Sherbini says in an interview with Lum, “It’s actually about down-to-earth accessibility, about home, about life.”
Indeed, the artists seek to radically expand both how and who engages with art.
“The main thing for Davina and I, in terms of practice, is this notion of engagement. For us, what’s always at the root is this idea of creating meaningful moments and moments of collaborative engagement. For us, the public programme is absolutely about finding ways to bring people together and collaborating with experts,” El-Sherbini says in a recorded interview for the project.
The Arrivals + Departures public program is integrated and integral to the live artwork. For instance, during the opening week of the work’s debut at Somerset House, there was a death café, a birth café, and conversations led by experts in different critical and cultural fields.
At the site of each public installation, the program changes to reflect the context and relevant resources. The variety of experts and people from across communities that participate has included midwives and ministers, musicians and care workers.
The artists also invite social media takeovers focused on birth, racial, social and environmental justice. These multi-modal, globally accessible entry points, allow for greater and more diverse participation. The work can’t exist without the public, El-Sherbini says.
The collective experience of the public piece reflects the magnitude of sharing a name. Entries range from family members to well-known victims of police violence, such as Breonna Taylor.
One participant in the program submitted the names of her children and nephew to arrivals, noting that it was important to see the birth of her nephew, who has cerebral palsy, celebrated at the same time as her children.
“It’s really to make sure that all our children’s births are celebrated, not just neurotypical children, not just children without disabilities, not just children without special needs, but also those who do have difficulties in life,” the participant says at the live presentation at Somerset House.
“It is important that we talk about birth as well as death. We do not know how people come and go in this world,” she later adds.
In Arrivals + Departures, the names we quietly carry with us – shifting from foreground to background at all times – are made visible to the world in a collection of names, likely strangers, who share that transitional space in our collective human experience.
Since Arrivals + Departures premiered in London, thousands of people have shared names and stories. The work has traveled to the Brooklyn Academy of Music, the IF: Milton Keynes International Festival and Theater Spektakel, Zurich.
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Yara El-Sherbini, Occupied/Freed, photo by Erica Urech
While Arrivals + Departures continues to tour, El-Sherbini opened her first solo show in the US in November 2020, Forms of Regulation and Control, at the CUE Art Foundation, New York.
The exhibition, curated by Naeem Mohaiemen, features pieces that deftly employ humor and participatory elements of games to engage the public, such as Occupied/Freed and Border Control.
“There is a sharp irreverence paired with lacerating wit, hidden under the surface of Yara’s process. It sits there so quietly that people often miss it, reading the projects only through the lens of interactive public play,” Mohaiemen writes in his essay for the exhibition catalogue, This Joke Kills Fascists.
“That is there of course, deploying the formats of the pub quiz, hidden treasure, card game, racing cars, mini golf, and knock-knock jokes. In public spaces, her audiences range from children to pensioners, leading critics to think of the work as ‘family friendly.’ Underneath that pleasant, and pleasing, surface is roiling, dark humor and challenge, belied by her gentle tone.”
Take for instance, Occupied/Freed, an intervention to the locks on the gallery’s bathrooms. By changing the standard indications of “occupied” and “vacant” to “occupied” and “freed,” El-Sherbini provokes surprise and amusement while simultaneously signaling questions of ownership and geopolitics. In broad strokes, the piece identifies occupation of land as a form of control, and points to how borders are implemented to regulate the movement of people.
In context – at the door of a gallery toilet – the wordplay is light and humorous. But in the context of civil unrest related to current military occupations of countries, such as the case of Palestine, Syria, Cyprus, Georgia and Ukraine, these words are as heavy as lead.
Yara El-Sherbini, Operation Brexit, commissioned for Now Play This, Somerset House, London, photo by Ben Catchpole
Yara El-Sherbini, Border Control, commissioned for Bloom Projects: Museum of Contemporary Art Santa Barbara, photo by Erica Urech
In the piece Border Control – originally commissioned in 2015 by the Museum of Contemporary Art Santa Barbara – El-Sherbini invites audience members to play a tactical game. Players have one minute to move a metal ring across a charged US-Mexico border without touching the wire. If they make contact, an electric circuit sets off warning sounds and lights.
Border Control replicates the politically charged US-Mexico border as a tangible power line. The US’s southern border is the entry point to the country for people who have been displaced from all over the world, including people from South and Central America, Africa, Afghanistan, Eastern Europe and Indonesia. Strategic elements of the game mimic the risk and requirements of crossing the border illegally. Crossers must move forward – sometimes slowly sometimes quickly – and they must be undetectable, or they risk dying or being captured by border patrol.
In this way, the piece offers an avenue to critically activate engagement with a difficult issue without having to talk about it directly. In a game which simulates high-risk, audiences confront the implications of man-made lines on the movement of millions of people.
“At the heart of my process is the question, ‘How can I engage a wider audience in an unexpected way?’” El-Sherbini writes in the gallery text for the CUE exhibition.
“This is followed by, ‘How can I invite this wider public to explore varied global, social, and political issues in accessible ways?’ My answer is through play, humor, and participation, making artworks which become entry points for everyday dialogue in a myriad of ways.”
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On the moving edge of trouble, El-Sherbini conducts her practice and defines her role as an artist in a global community. Instead of letting despair halt or darken her vision, she embraces working in what Haraway calls the “thick, ongoing present.”
In both her solo and collaborative practice, El-Sherbini’s work reveals unsettling truths of the present, and seeks to expand our collective capacities to respond to and relate to each other.
