Blue Notes Exhibition, Koslov Larsen, HoustonExhibition
202215 Artworks

The Glitchspace

by Zan Zeller

Any space between two given points is finite and measurable, yet an infinite number of points occupy that finite space. Every spectrum between two absolutes encompasses infinite possibilities for multiplicity. This irrational space cannot be defined nor contained. While fixed structures govern life, fluidity governs imagination. Freedom of movement in all directions, in all planes, in all dimensions, is essential to creation.

This is glitchspace. It exists nowhere and everywhere. It occurs never and always. It is nothing and everything.

Alia Ali’s work vibrates with energy. To experience an installation created by her hand is to understand the ways in which repetition of pattern envelops the viewer, welcoming them into the warm embrace of color, beckoning them to find themselves transported. The exhibition becomes a rupture in space, an extension of a landscape that lies solely within the mind of the artist. In this way, the artist herself serves as portal and translator, a link to a coexisting world that is not parallel to ours, not within it, but around it.

Since 2016, Ali’s site-specific installations have made heavy use of fabric upholstery—applied directly onto walls, ceilings, floors, and furniture—that is soft yet unyielding. Any negative space of the wall left unadorned feels strongly intentional, holding much greater weight that the fully blank expanse would otherwise have. White walls are a known staple of the Western art world — the contemporary gallery space is commonly conceptualized as the white cube, a term coined in 1976 by artist and critic Brian O'Doherty. He critiqued it for dangerously elevating art to a cultish level of reverence and alienating those uninitiated in the customs of the art world. This mode of presentation still dominates art spaces worldwide, despite its inherent flaws. Ali’s bold application of fabric, a constant throughout her installations, disrupts this whiteness. This is one side of the coin of black/white, a binary strictly circumvented by her work.

Visibility/invisibility is another binary ever in dialogue throughout Ali’s work. The -cludes, the characters within the portraits, are draped in color and pattern, always fully obscured by fabric. In this way, they sacrifice a sense of individuality in order to achieve multiplicity, the ability to represent something greater than themselves. Coined from the base of the words include and exclude, the -clude investigates terms of belonging within/without. The characters are camouflaged into their backgrounds, some more than others where the same fabric is used for both foreground and background, rather than contrasting colors and patterns. Their shapes are made visible, but only to a point. The -cludes may be easily overlooked, especially when at the margins of one’s vision, or at the margins of one’s experience. Desire to recognize their existence is necessary. Without that, they may continue to go unnoticed, skirting the boundaries of perception.

The artist similarly engages the architectural space of her installations to extend the dialogue between site and artwork. Ali activates the unseen bones of the structure, highlighting features with fabric embellishments, color, pattern, and lines, calling attention to the framework surrounding both the art and the viewer as they move through the space. With fabric and pattern, Ali creates frames around frames around frames, crafting layers of containers, each acting as a portal through which the viewer journeys to experience the work and move deeper into the universe of the installation. Ali conceptualizes the individual framed artworks as windows and doors, thresholds between inside and an imagined outside. The works become architectural elements, while the architecture becomes artwork.

Obfuscation of surface may lead us to eventually forget that the white cube of the gallery exists at all, but Ali finds ways to make purposeful use of it. In an installation of the LIBERTY series (2022 - 2023), one long wall is broken up/disrupted by a series of fabric glitches, sparsely scattered, creating a latitudinal flow across the space connecting the individual works. The white wall, previously relegated to being a canvas for the fabric landscape, is now pulled in, inseparable from the glitches that meld into it and transform it. The glitch cannot exist without a structure to disrupt. Bookending the far left end of this wall is another kind of glitch — one that begins not with abstraction, not with empty space, but with the body: a glitching of the head (or rather, the fabric wrapped around the head) in the photo-sculpture Blue Blossom. The head begins as a solid form inside the image and then jumps outside the frame and onto the wall where it begins to lose visual data. A small sliver at first, then a larger slice missing, then fragmented, fractured, transformed, spread apart, and glitched up and down and across the wall. The process reads from right to left, just as in Arabic and Hebrew text. It is a glitch in seven acts, beginning whole and ending in the void of white wall.

The circle is a recurring visual and experiential motif in Ali’s installations. An exuberant textile circle is at once a sun, a moon, a world of its own, a celestial body of swirling color, shining with rays emanating from its core. It is both a setting and a rising sun, as well as the moon which catches those same beams of light and reflects them back at the earth. This multiplicity is embodied within the form of the circle, a shape that has no top nor bottom, no left nor right, no orientation within space, and implies no hierarchy. God has been described as “a circle whose center is everywhere and circumference is nowhere.” The circle is a sacred symbol of eternity across many traditions. The ouroboros, depicted as a snake swallowing its own tail in a circle, is a symbol of infinity, of constant rebirth, and of the cyclical nature of life and of time. As a movement within space, circular motion has great ritual significance. Within Islam, Judaism, Christianity, Hinduism, and Buddhism, circumambulation around a sacred object or through a consecrated space holds symbolic meaning as devotional practice—direction and number of repetitions is almost always consequential. If the trajectories of our bodies have such a weighty effect on our souls, then our positions within space must carry great significance. In Ali’s work, we find that time and space are inextricably linked, yet malleable in ways that the Western mode of thinking does not account for.

Ali refers to herself as culturally Muslim, though spiritually independent. It is understood that time is perceived differently across the world—fitting, since time is relative. In the Western mode of thinking, time is a straight line, and progress always lies ahead, never behind. In many other parts of the world, including in Islamic culture, time is cyclical. There are many binaries in Western culture which do not exist within Islam; science and religion, emotion and reason, abstract and concrete are not diametric opposites but things which coexist. Referring to her home in Yemen, Ali notes that objects and rooms always have multiple uses there, whereas spaces are strictly delineated in the West and objects are often created to serve one purpose, encouraging overconsumption. Under the Golden Age of Islam (approximately 8th century CE to 13th century CE), scientific thought flourished in tandem with spirituality, as both were intertwined, and a great wealth of knowledge and innovation flowed into the world during this time. Within Islam, there are beliefs that are strikingly futurist in nature, and resonate remarkably with contemporary scientific theory. Among these is a belief in multiple worlds, a belief which finds familiarity in our modern times with the recent prominence of multiverse theory in pop culture. According to scholar Amira El-Zein, “it is this belief in the infinite possibilities of other dimensions that triggered the great development of sciences during medieval times.” This allowance for multiplicity is expansive and exciting; moving beyond binaries opens up revolutionary modes of thinking. Within this multiverse, we see time and space come into play. Muslim compilers speak of seven earths being stacked upon each other, each separated by seven hundred years. This use of time to denote distance is intriguing, and hints at an understanding of space-time as a unit. Seven is at the basis of Ali’s entire body of photo-sculptural work — each upholstered frame, which is not merely a container for a photograph but an extension of the piece itself, stretches 7 inches beyond the edge of the image and sits at 7 centimeters in depth, a constant cyclical play between systems of measurement. Seven is the number of the universe, and the first number in the Arabic script which contains both the spiritual and temporal. However, Arabic numbers and letters each contain multiple layers of meaning, and “seven” could refer to a great multitude of earths, far beyond precisely seven. Within these multiverses, travel cannot be achieved by humans using their physical bodies, but it is possible for the spirit to move through them using the imaginal as a conduit. We will explore the imaginal realm later when we discuss the djinn.

Glitch appears throughout Ali’s work, both in her installations and within the photosculptural images themselves. A glitch is generally understood to be a (potentially minor) technological malfunction. Glitch can colloquially refer to any sort of malfunction, but often references a system or framework of which it breaks the rules. Possibly the most well known pop culture reference comes from the 1999 film The Matrix, wherein a “glitch in the matrix” references an uncanny occurrence that calls attention to the simulated world. The glitch calls attention to the framework that it disrupts, which otherwise goes unnoticed and unquestioned.

Ali describes the glitch as an active force rather than a passive phenomenon. Glitch is something which can be enacted through choice, and is sometimes enacted through mere existence. If glitch is in conflict with the framework that it disrupts, then it can be used to attack that framework, as well as to call attention to the flaws inherent in the system. If there is nothing intrinsically wrong with the actions of the glitch, then the flaw must lie with the structure. In Glitch Feminism: A Manifesto (2020), curator and writer Legacy Russell describes glitch as “an error, a mistake, a failure to function. Within technoculture, a glitch is part of machinic anxiety, an indicator of something gone wrong” (p 7). Russell occupies a space in the world at the crossroads of marginalized gender, race, and sexuality. Within a society where the cultural fabric is unwaveringly heteronormative, white, and cisgender, bodies existing outside of those standards are glitched. Their existence calls attention to the fallibility of the social standard. Their power is in their persistence.

Glitch can function as disruption and as rupture. Fabric can be used to denote structure—the fabric of society, the fabric of space-time, the fabric of reality. While a rupture in fabric could be a tear, or a black hole, it could also be a wormhole, though you would never know which from the outside. To truly find out, you would have to cede control, giving in to the pull and moving past the event horizon, past the potential point of no return. Ali states “we see [the black hole] as an abyss, but only because we don’t know what’s on the other side. It’s so powerful, it bends both light and time. We think of it as something that things get sucked into. But you can imagine anything if you know nothing about it.” In Cruising Utopia, Cuban American academic and queer theorist José Esteban Muñoz writes about his own experience as a marginalized body, saying “We have been cast out of straight time’s rhythm, and we have made worlds in our temporal and spatial configurations.” In this, we find that glitch does not exist as rupture alone—through rupture comes the creation of new worlds, vast and expansive, where multiplicity is embraced.

Ali’s movement toward Futurism engages a mixture of materials, subverting structures of medium alongside structures of time and space. الفلق // al-Falaq is a sculpture crafted for the Arab American National Museum in Detroit, USA. Detroit is home to the largest Yemeni population in the world outside of Yemen itself, and yet there is essentially no representation of Yemeni objects within the museum. A monumental sculpture activating the entirety of the interior space that it occupies, Al-Falak is at once a starship (or mothership), a living creature, a circulatory system, a vault, and a home. “الفلق // al-Falaq borrows its form from the spectacular Socotran glass octopuses that live off the coast of Yemen's Socotra Island, with its tentacles extending from the museum's entrance ninety feet in various directions across the floors and through the corridors of the Museum.” The starship’s movement is not restricted by time or space—it is a visitor from our future, where Ali imagines its inhabitants, the djinn, who travel freely and rapidly through the lengths of each arm, as the keepers and protectors of knowledge. Through the starship, they steal back stolen artifacts, preserving humanity’s history in this museum within a museum so that it cannot be forgotten, fighting the erasure of Yemeni culture through the radical acts of reclamation and reimagination. The starship’s name holds multiplicity within its meanings—it references a surah, or passage, of the Quran which is recited to entreaty protection from evil. Al-Falaq can be translated as a type of splitting, and is most commonly translated as daybreak, the splitting of night and day. In this singular moment of dawn, night and day exist simultaneously and yet not at all, in this state of change which is both and neither. This cataclysmic moment, an energy created by changing states of being, is where the starship sits not within but around time.

The djinn are beings which exist within Islamic faith, but the roots of humanity’s interaction with them dates back to pre-Islamic Arabian culture. There are many varied beliefs surrounding their existence, especially in folklore, but they are also discussed by prominent Islamic thinkers of the Golden Age. They are thought to be intermediary beings, existing above the terrestrial realm and below the celestial realm of angels (although we understand from our previous discussion of time and space within Islamic philosophy that above and below are not so much directional terms as they are conceptual). This realm, which exists among our own but also outside of it, is referred to by Golden Age Muslim scholar, mystic, and philosopher Ibn el Arabi as the imaginal realm. It cannot be perceived by humans because we do not possess the correct sense for it—it is outside of human sight, hearing, touch, smell, and taste. The correct sense is, in fact, the imagination, which a select few humans have developed enough throughout history to engage on journeys outside their physical bodies and into other realms (such as the seven earths) and to on occasion perceive djinn. The djinn, however, can interact with the terrestrial world at their whim and perceive it fully. Within this mode of thinking, humans and djinn are considered the only intelligent species on Earth, both created by God to have free will, and both capable of good and evil. The djinn are complex and multifarious, often characterized in stories as tricksters, using their extrasensory abilities to manipulate and evade. Islamic belief steadfastly positions humans as superior to djinn, but, in pre-Islam, the djinn were thought of as having knowledge that they could share with humans, especially in the realms of medicine and science.

There are many aspects of the djinn which link them to ideas of glitch, of marginality, and of subversion. As intermediary beings, they exist around us but not within the structure of our society, at the margins of our senses and of our comfort. Because they do not conform to the rules of society, they are something to be wary of. Notably, it is said that “Thresholds in general are connected to the jinn, and it would be best not to linger in these particular locales… As a boundary symbol it is the line of meeting of the natural and supernatural.” Djinn exist within liminal spaces, outside of binaries and in between realms of understanding, in spaces where rules have not been established and behavior is therefore unpredictable. And if it is unpredictable, then it is difficult to control. Looking towards more positive depictions of the djinn, El-Zein notes that “Not all pre-Islam Arabs were afraid of the jinn. Many of them befriended them, and even sought their aid. They believed the jinn do not respond to the person calling them unless they became wild and dwelled in barren and ruined places, and unless this person quits the society of humans.” This kinship between outcast and djinn shows an understanding, as well as a lack of fear of the unconventional. Embracement of the marginal can open passageways which are otherwise impossibilities from within the confines of structure.

Djinn appear as characters in several bodies of Ali’s work, including NOOK, where the djinn embody East and West, and JADE (2023 - 24). JADE is a fairytale crafted by the artist to tell the story of Jade, the Djinn of Jaipur. Ali describes this mystical figure as her guide, and she brings her/his story to life through these works. The djinn offer guidance to humans, but our choices are ultimately our own. Jade represents the instinct and intuition of the artist, a translator for the vault of experiences and encounters which have influenced her work. In this fairytale, Jade lives among lotus clouds, in a constellation of flora and gold embroidery. (S)he comes down to the earth by descending the terraced mountains of Yemen. Through playful posing, (s)he appears as a trickster spirit, a genie who rejects the Western characterization of such powerful beings, serving no one but herself/himself. Within the series, Wink and Blink act as a pair which embody both the masculine and the feminine, exploring the multiplicity of the djinn. Like any fairytale, it is presented as a playful children’s story with an undercurrent of warning. The misconstruction of djinn as servants to humanity is a dangerous act; they may act as protectors of our histories, but they serve no one.

Ali notes that the djinn are important to the women of her tribe in Yemen. In the same breath, she mentions snakes, symbols which adorn striking Yemeni garments (some of which Ali has incorporated into her earlier work). She calls out a parallel between snakes and djinn as entities often considered evil, and offers the question: how has the serpent survived as a symbol, and why do we wear it? The interconnection between djinn and snakes is ancient, dating back to pre-Islam culture. The djinn are known as shapeshifters and often take the form of animals when they appear to humans. It is said that they prefer to dwell in serpents. Across the world, serpents and spirits are considered linked in this manner. Serpents thread a tight line between divine and demonic, thought of as lowly because they slither across the ground, yet symbolizing rebirth because of their cyclical shedding of skin. Ali refers to the women in her tribe as the daughters of snakes, linking them to this spirituality and complex power. In parallel, serpents were considered by some to be the daughters of the djinn under pre-Islamic belief. There is a thread linking women to snakes and snakes to djinn, weaving a complex web of feminine energy and hidden/secretive/veiled power.

In Ali’s Futurist world, she describes the djinn as living “within the Glitch.” The seven djinn which inhabit the living ship appear from within static on the many screens that are the suckers of the arms of the starship al-Falaq, disappearing, and teleporting through these glitches to the other screens. As the inhabitants and caretakers of the ship, they are the keepers of knowledge; prophets, seers, and protectors. For this reason, they are a threat to those in power, who rely on humanity’s ignorance to control and continue to exploit again and again. Those who forget history are doomed to repeat it, and the djinn have come to ensure that we never forget again. In this way, the djinn are not actively interfering with human events. Rather, they are providing us with the chance to take control of our own futures.

Ali's work endeavors to make visible the invisible—the djinn, the immigrants, the refugees, the queer community, the marginalized—by studying the shapes of such things. She grants us access to the unseen by applying the patterns found throughout the structure of our world to the -cludes, the characters within the portraits. Like the djinn, the -cludes are not of this world and therefore belong nowhere. But, in this liberty of placelessness, they create ruptures, carving out space where none exists, creating expansive new worlds in which to belong. This visibility/invisibility is one of the many binaries that Ali confronts throughout her work, where she chooses to delve into the spaces between. The push and pull between these dichotomies creates a cyclical force, energies generated by tension and in the moments of transformation. Ali’s installations reproduce those ruptures within the architectural space of the gallery, transporting the viewer into her world of symbols through the imaginal. Space, time, serpents, circles, sevens, and glitches abound, endlessly intertwined within the fabric of her universe. Guided by djinn, intermediary beings at the margins of convention, Ali initiates glitch throughout her practice, calling attention to dominant structures, spaces, and histories. Journeying through the glitch to embrace multiplicity and marginality, we open passageways into new, limitless worlds of imagination.

___________________________________

1. Brian O'Doherty, Inside the White Cube, 1976.

2. Alia Ali, catalog for Cartographies of Pattern, 2021, an installation in Houston, USA.

3. See installation of NOOK series in In Collective Rise, 2022–2023 at z33 Contemporary Museum in Belgium, where fabric completely covers each wall and the ceiling. The floor, while not covered, reflects the colors of the fabric above it, creating color fields which the viewer may walk through.

4. Blue Note, 2022 at Koslov Larsen (previously under the name Foto Relevance). Note that Blue Note, the exhibition, is distinct from and preceded the BLUE NOTE series.

5. See installation of Blue Note, 2022, works such as Ayn, WARP series, and pairs of works creating circular movement between them, such as East and West 5NOOK, 2023) and Wink and Blink in (JADE, 2023-24)

6. Amira El-Zein, Islam, Arabs, and Intelligent World of the Jinn, 2009; p 83.

7. El-Zein, 2.

8. El-Zein, 2.

9. El-Zein, 2.

10. The term glitch may have been coined in the mid-twentieth century by US astronauts, or may have potential Yiddish origin.

11. Russell, Legacy. Glitch Feminism: A Manifesto, Verso Books, 2020; p 22.

12. Alia Ali, statement for الفلق // al-Falaq at the Arab American National Museum in Detroit, USA

13. El-Zein: all information summarized in this paragraph from throughout Islam, Arabs, and Intelligent World of the Jinn

14. El-Zein, 85.

15. El-Zein, 75.

16. El-Zein, 95.

17. El-Zein, 98.