Social Anthropology and Art

Agnieszka Joniak-Lüthi,
University of Fribourg, Switzerland
Head of the research project ‘ROADWORK: An Anthropology
of Infrastructure at China’s Inner Asian Borders’
and initiator of the exhibition

Social anthropology has been very busy redefining and re-inventing its relationship with museums and with art over the past at least two decades. For a long time, anthropologists and their journeys to places far away from their homes were one of the channels through which museums have expanded their overseas collections of Indigenous art and objects of everyday use to be displayed in the exhibition halls in the Global North. Today the relationship between anthropology, museums and art is – to a great degree – a different one. First, the rise of the post-colonial debate has made ethnographic museums to the hot-spots of the debate on ownership, cultural extractivism, and historical justice. Increasing global connectivities have redefined the understanding of ‘near’ and ‘far’, and digitalisation has transformed access possibilities, making exhibitions available to new audiences: virtual visitors. But also the relationship between anthropology and art itself is dynamically transforming. Social anthropology and art seem to be getting closer together because there is a lot of potential in this relationship. Conceptual artists and social anthropologists tend to ask questions in a similar way, sometimes they ask similar questions, too, but they work with different sensibilities, execute their projects methodologically differently, and the aim of their work is different, too. This partial overlapping and partial distinction can be a source of inspiration for both.

For me as a social anthropologist, reaching out to art has been part of the quest to break away from the solely textual – and more broadly word-focused – forms of communicating my research and my research findings, and making them understandable and available to non-academic audiences. One of the projects that came out of this quest to expand on the communicative repertoire without compromising on complexity is the diamond Open Access journal Roadsides which I co-founded with ten colleagues in 2018. The journal is devoted to the social science studies of infrastructure. With its innovative format of combining textual interventions with images, videos, audio recordings, drawings and more, we seek to find a balance between words and other means of conveying knowledge.

Another way to learn about other-than-textual means of communicating ideas is by collaborating with conceptual artists. The ‘messy’ reality that social anthropologists usually encounter in their long-term ethnographic research is not conducive to concise bullet-point presentations — that is why we rather prefer to tell stories that reflect this complexity. But the question is: do we always need all these words? And further, how could we mobilize other registers – visual, acoustic and otherwise sensory — to make our point? What is left of our research when we discard the academic jargon and the ossified form of academic articles? Collaborating with artists and designers, observing how they process the reality, and which tools they choose to reflect on it has been an utterly refreshing and instructive experience.

The Exhibition

The exhibition Asphalt — Lines and Lives has been born out of this effort to observe and learn. The guiding theme of the exhibition is roads. The focus of the exhibition is closely linked to the research project “ROADWORK: An Anthropology of Infrastructure at China’s Inner Asian Borders” which I have headed since 2018 and which has been based at the Universities of Zurich and Fribourg in Switzerland. Funded by the Swiss National Science Foundation, the project explores how new roads built in course of China’s Belt and Road Initiative have transformed the lives of people who live along them. We as a team are interested in how the new roads inscribe themselves in local life-worlds. The ROADWORK team focuses in their research on a diverse range of topics but they all boil down to an attempt to understand the social, cultural, moral, and political complexity of roads.

When developing the idea for this exhibition my aim was to shine the light on roads – a seemingly unpoetic and banal object, which, however, matters immensely in our lives not simply as a sort of conveyor belt for vehicles, people, commodities, animals, viruses, spirits, ideas and other objects and beings. Roads are omnipresent but the emotions they engender, memories related to them, their role in migration, their aesthetics are rarely consciously reflected on. As their users, we rarely take the time to consider what they actually do with us and to us, how they streamline our mobility, where their quasi-agency to transform people and places comes from, and why we are equally often enthralled and annoyed by what they can do. The aim of the exhibition is to meet virtually the artists from the region at the center of our ethnographic inquiry encompassing northwest and northern China, Mongolia, Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan. Unfortunately, we were not able to solicit any art works from the artists in Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region, which was my research site since 2011. The political situation there makes collaboration with artists impossible. This absence of artistic voices from within Xinjiang is a significant silence. We did not try to compensate for it – it is there and should not be concealed. Still, with three interventions on Xinjiang we hope to make this region visible in the exhibition.

All the artistic interventions that make up the Asphalt exhibition are an inspiration to us not only in terms of the language used to reflect on roads and travel, but also as a way to learn about living with, next to, or without roads through the eyes of the artists from the region of broadly understood Inner Asia.

Acknowledgments

I would like to convey a very big thank you to all the artists participating in the exhibition, it is an honour for us to host you on the ‘Asphalt’ platform. Together with the curatorial team, the ROADWORK team will take good care of it to make sure that the exhibition is available online to everyone as long as possible. Second, I would like to thank the curators of the exhibition. I hoped to be able to initiate an exhibition that would be curated by an international team, at least half of which would be from Central Asia itself, and half of which would be made up by women. I dreamed of a team in which senior and junior curators would collaborate on an equal footing. This worked out perfectly. I extend a heartfelt thank you to the four curators — Gosia Biczyk, Aida Sulaimankulova, Ulan Dzaparov and Philipp Reichmuth — for their fantastic work and engagement in this difficult pandemic- and war-dominated year. Further, many thanks to Natalia Andrianova for logo design, Yulya Kyrychenko for graphic and interface design, and Oleksandr Anpilov and his team for implementation.

Third, I would like to thank the ROADWORK project team. The idea of the exhibition and the Call for Artworks which we published in six languages evolved and transformed through our conversations, thus, you should definitely consider yourself co-authors of this exhibition. A big thank you for being creative, inspiring and enthusiastic companions. Last, I thank our generous sponsors: the University of Zurich, the Swiss National Science Foundation and the University of Fribourg. The Financial Departments of all these institutions, and especially Miriam Wohlgemuth from the Department of Social Anthropology and Cultural Studies in Zurich, have done their best to assist us and manage our modest funding effectively. The exhibition is a collective product of many minds and hands, I am very happy to have participated in the process and hope to watch it grow and transform into new forms of online and off-line sociality.