Page - 176 - in Mobile Culture Studies - The Journal, Volume 4/2018

176 Mobile Culture Studies. The Journal 4 2o18 Charlotte Bank | Remaking a World the sessions enabled the development of a climate of mutual trust and confidence, a factor that also informed the final shape of the art work. Hasbani created a tunnel-like device made out of soft, white fabric that was kept flowing through the means of several small table ventilators. The room, in which the installation was staged, was kept in a soft light. Inside the tunnel, loudspeakers were placed at four places from which the accounts of the women were heard, in Arabic and Kurdish. Visitors to the space were asked to remove their shoes and enter into the tunnel, crawling on all fours and engage with the narrated stories by lying down close to the loudspeakers. The narratives were kept in their original languages of Arabic and Turkish and resumes in German and English were provided to be consulted before or after entering the tun- nel. Even though the majority of the visitors were unfamiliar with the original languages, the soft voices of the women and the knowledge of the content of their accounts led many to spend considerable time inside the tunnel, which became a kind of cocoon-like, protective space for reflection and intimate engagement with the narratives. If Hasbani’s Here, There, and Other Places sought to create a safe space for encounters between the participants’ narrations and the visitors, two works have addressed the loss of safety and the disintegration of the sense of security normally associated with domestic space. Rula Ali’s Chairing (2016) consists of a room with two chairs standing opposite each other. The upholstery of the chairs is in shreds and shredded fabric also covers the entire floor, the radia- tor and the ceiling lamp.13 The former comfort of the carefully and lovingly decorated home, witnessed by the elegant chairs and their fabric, has turned into its opposite. For all we know, the room might have witnessed an unknown disaster. In a similarly unsettling way, Khaled Barakeh’s On the Ropes (2015, recreated in 2018) presents the viewer with an entire floating liv- ing room, each piece of furniture hanging on thin plastic cords and moving slowly.14 The effect is one of profound anxiety and instability, conditions often associated with exilic existence. Visitors to Ali’s and Barakeh’s works enter the spaces not fully knowing what to expect. Both installations appear to present the results of some unknown and unsettling event and an unseen danger might still be lurking somewhere in these rooms. In the discussed works, the body of the spectator/visitor becomes part of the art work and their importance as articulations of collective trauma with the potential to evoke an empathic reaction in the spectators relies on this interaction. In Monument, the overwhelming size of the barrier confronts the visitors with their own helplessness. In Here, There, and Other Places, the visitors need to engage physically with the work by entering the “tunnel” in order to get close to the voices (rather than the content) of the women narrating their stories. Chairing and On the Ropes both draw the visitor into their destabilizing spaces and upset all sense of ground- edness. Viewed from afar, these works lose much of their affective capacities. Other artists have approached the theme of trauma differently and taken the bodily dis- tance of the viewer into account. Works in more traditional media such as painting, drawing 13 Video <https://www.facebook.com/taqwa.ali.79/videos/1015883428493498> [accessed 10th June 2018]. 14 Barakeh, Khaled. [2018]. Video On the Ropes 2015, installation <https://khaledbarakeh.com/on-the-ropes. html> [accessed 10th June 2018]. Re-staged May 12, 2018 at Art-Lab Berlin. 2018. Exhibition views “In-Be- tween. Rethinking Transcultural Identities” https://artlabberlin.wordpress.com/2018/05/12/exhibition-views-in-between-rethinking-transcultural-identities [accessed 10th June 2018].