“Whereabouts are you from?” is an increasingly common question in today’s shrinking globalised world. But in Dufftown, in the northeast of Scotland, the accent makes the question sound more like “furry boots ye fae?”
And it is this peculiarity that is at the core of artist Dan Halter’s recent work produced for the Glenfiddich artists residency programme.
Selected with artists from the United States, Canada, India, Taiwan, South Korea and China, Halter has spent three months with that unlikely backdrop creating work that speaks about severed roots and belonging to nowhere while being a citizen of the world at the same time. Whereabouts are you from indeed.
Clad proudly in what looks unmistakeably like traditional Scottish tartan, complete with sporran and furry boots, Halter poses next to the source of his inspiration — the ubiquitous plastic mesh “refugee” bag. Known locally as “Zimbabwe bags”, they too have an international flavour.
In Nigeria they are called “Ghana must go bags”, in the US “Chinatown totes” and in the United Kingdom “Bangledeshi bags”.
There is even a German equivalent that translates as “Turkish suitcase”.
Translation of myths
In Halter’s work they embody the essence of how to question and translate the myths of such origins. Halter (33), born in Zimbabwe and now living and working in Cape Town, is no stranger to such issues of displacement and his work deals with issues of territory and immigration.
Being in Scotland presented him with the opportunity of further exploring these themes by geographically localising their context.
The similarity of the red, black and white checked pattern of the bag, which bears a striking resemblance to Scottish tartan, led Halter to the famous Johnstons of Elgin, where he commissioned the pattern to be woven out of wool into a kilt, which he plans to have registered as his very own brand of tartan.
Besides the local regalia, he made a Scottish version of the bag with tartan, transforming it into a luxurious piece of luggage.
This tartan was also the object of another installation in which Halter used more than 1 000 barrels from the distillery’s cask compound as pixels to make up the pattern, which is visible from Google Earth. The title is simply the geographic co-ordinates of the installation, 57°27’55.24″N 3°07’45.33″W.
On the surface, what is an almost childish exercise in join-the-dots has a deeper significance — none of the barrels has a generic, homogenous history.
The imprint
Each one is different. Some are white oak from North America and used only once for the distilling of bourbon. Others are a darker variety, from Spain, for example, used for sherry.
Halter’s tartan imprint speaks of a fleeting belonging in a global world filled with the transience that consumption demands. These wooden vessels, from far away, are used to brew liquor for export, to be sent, almost ironically, away again.
Like the refugee bags, which are used to transport people’s worldly possessions across borders, the now-discarded barrels, arranged into Halter’s now signature pattern, address the trauma of a very real condition of forced migration and exile.
Halter was recently lambasted by some sectors of the art world cognoscenti for “fiddling like Nero while Rome burned” in his recent show, Double Entry, at Whatiftheworld in Cape Town, but his recent work nevertheless displays a subtle observation of the intricacies of not belonging.
Halter admits that “the country I grew up in no longer exists”. Perhaps this is not such a bad thing. But with the problematic history that has come to characterise Zimbabwe’s recent turbulent political economy, it seems that such a situation could lead only to a form of detached reflection.
Having suffered, like Nero’s victims, at the hands of Zanu-PF agents in Zimbabwe earlier this year during his participation at the Harare International Festival of Arts, where he was, like so many Zimbabweans, detained and beaten, could possibly account for Halter’s calculated and somewhat detached meditation.
‘The commodification of pain and suffering’
The visual arts today, most noticeably in South Africa, have become characterised by the commodification of pain and suffering. Burdened by history, it seems doomed to perpetuate debates about where we have come from, not where we are going to. Halter’s work, which could easily slip into the former category, nevertheless resists such easy conscriptions.
It is surprising how such a simple pattern can communicate so much, to speak of lives altered and histories lost through the movement of people from one country to the next.
Yet there is something surprisingly regenerative about this recycled imprint that appeals to the vitality of the human spirit in its capacity to transcend the tyrannical circumstance of place.
The simple everyday nature of these bags, which represent entire communities of people displaced, forced into exile, makes Halter’s work immediately accessible and conceptually rich.
This imprint of the barrels, visible from Google’s all-seeing satellites, speaks of a marked landscape in which region is no longer disconnected and isolated but rather is intrinsic to the notion of being a citizen of the world at large.
As much as the bags, Halter’s presence is now ubiquitous, reinvigorating the question, “furry boots ye fae?”