Visuality and Parrēsia: Ai Weiwei’s countervisual re-enactment of Alan Kurdi’s image

Abstract

As an intervention in the study of visuality and countervisuality (Mirzoeff 2011), underscoring its connection to democracy and parrēsia (Foucault 2010), this article examines Ai Weiwei’s re-enactment of Alan Kurdi’s image in 2016. The instant and expandable polemics that characterized the reception of the re-enactment built on the unethicalness – even blatant inappropriateness – of a celebrity’s appropriation of (the graphic representation of) a dead child’s body. Building on the role of the Chinese celebrity artist-activist as a public intellectual, this article advances a way to rethink the re-enactment beyond the idea of shock and away from controversy, analyzing it as an indictment of two interrelated ‘crises’: the European refugee ‘crisis’ and the inadequate response to the influx of refugees in 2015, and the ‘crisis’ of democracy more broadly, considering that respect for human rights is integral to democratic governance. To make a case for the re-enactment as a form of countervisuality, I deploy Barthes’s theorization on the punctum and studium of photographs. The contention is that Ai’s re-enactment of Nilüfer Demir’s photo – and the controversy surrounding it – actualizes the punctum and studium of the precursor image to function as a denunciation of the ‘crises’ of our present moment.

INTRODUCTION

A celebrity beyond the art scene, Ai Weiwei is globally famous for his hard-edged critique of the Chinese regime’s censorship and repression, particularly the reality-engineering linked to the regime’s human rights violations. An art student during the Beijing Spring in the late 1970s, followed by more than a decade in the US, from 1981 to 1993, the celebrity artist-activist returned to China. He continued to produce his public art of dissent before moving to Europe after getting his passport back in 2015. While still in China, the centrality for Ai of speaking truth to power is perhaps the most evident in the Study of Perspective 1995–2003 photographic series, where he flips the middle finger (a gesture that has become associated with Ai’s activism via, e.g. #RaiseYourFinger) to architectural symbols of world power – confronting political authority at personal risk. In one of the photos, Ai gives the middle finger to Tiananmen Square and synecdochically to China’s authoritarian government and repressive regime. His confrontations with the Chinese authorities, painstakingly recorded and exposed in documentary films such as Little Red Cheeks, 4851 and Disturbing the Peace, have been a part of a steadily constructed global celebrity as an artist-activist (Ponzanesi 2019, 231). These 2009 documentaries exposed the devastating impact of the 2008 Sichuan earthquake and the up until that moment unaccounted loss – in fact, the official silencing – of at least 4851 children’s lives. For example, in 4851, the children’s names listed in white lettering against a black background are read out by volunteers across China for 87 min. The documentaries opened the loss to public discussion following a ‘citizen investigation’ Ai organized to combat the official silence, calling for transparency and government accountability over the poor quality of state school construction. More recently, his 2020 documentaries Coronation and Cockroach, aimed at a global audience, continued to expose the depredation of democracy in China.

Parrēsia is a particularly apt descriptor of Ai’s protests of authoritarian China, of his fearlessness and relentlessness in speaking truth to power.¹ Michel Foucault defines parrēsia as free or ‘truthful’ speech, a kind of truth-telling that is a necessary condition for democratic life in the polis: ‘For there to be democracy, there must be parrēsia; for there to be parrēsia there must be democracy’ (2010, 155). When individuals speak truth to power, they are striving for effect. The agonistic structure of parrēsia means that it endows individuals with ‘a certain superiority which is also an ambition and effort to be in a position such that one can direct others’ (Foucault 2010, 155). As Foucault elaborates:

Not everybody can tell the truth just because everybody may speak. True discourse introduces a difference or rather is linked, both in its conditions and in its effects, to a difference: only a few can tell the truth. And once only a few can tell the truth, once this truth-telling has emerged into the field of democracy, a difference is produced which is that of the ascendency exercised by some over others. (2010, 183-184)

The artist-activist has privileged social media as a platform to raise awareness and bring about social justice, especially in the informal public sphere of a one-party democracy such as China. The fundamental opposition to authority in the name of a transparent democracy has been a critical theme of Ai’s art for decades. Still, his indictment of the ‘crisis’ in democracy is not limited to the Chinese geopolitical dimension. His art is fundamentally a call for human rights with a global reach. As the artist-activist noted in an interview, ‘I think all human rights issues are the same around the world; it’s not only China’s problem’ (Ai 2021, 26).

As a public intellectual (Mendes and Ai 2022, 160-161; Zimanyi 2022, 142-143), Ai’s ‘art of dissent’ is a channel of ‘individual expression and collective action’ (Ponzanesi 2019, 216). His art-activism bears the characteristics attributed to intellectual interventions in the public sphere by ‘articulat[ing] issues of importance in their societies to the general public’ (Misztal 2007, 1), cultivating civic imagination and creativity. ‘Civic imagination’ (Jenkins et al. 2020),² the opening of new ways of thinking about and acting upon the world through imagination, fighting for social justice and speaking against authoritarianism, is vital for the action of public intellectuals. Relatedly, Barbara Mizstal signaled the attribute of ‘civic creativity’, a particular type of creativity that ‘provides us with ideas on how to democratize and humanise the workings of modern societies’ (2007, 64). The urgency of deploying civic imagination and creativity to respond to the many ‘crises’ of our present moment is clear. These include the ‘crises’ of the refugees, economy, environment, justice, and more recently the Covid19 pandemic, which have created new situations of endemic precarity and vulnerability, already in an epoch of an ‘accelerating condition of precarity’ (Butler 2015, 10). These ‘crises’ call for ‘shared projects of imagining a better democratic future’ (Misztal 2007, 64).

As an intervention in the study of visuality and countervisuality (Mirzoeff 2011), underscoring its connection to democracy and parrēsia (Foucault 2010), this article examines Ai’s re-enactment of Alan Kurdi’s image in 2016.³ The re-enactment took place when Ai was developing a series of artistic projects in Lesbos, between 2016 and 2017, inspired by the global refugee ‘crisis’.⁴ The venue of these projects is significant: Lesbos has been a key point of entry into ‘Fortress Europe’ for thousands of migrants, a refugee hotspot, and a once-popular tourist destination. Ai travelled to the island because he wanted to see first-hand the ‘reality’ he saw screened on the news. In an interview, Ai describes the unreal experience of seeing in Lesbos, for the first time, a group of migrants squeezed onto a tiny dinghy coming ashore. This watershed experience made him decide to move his studio to the island and film the documentary film Human Flow:

We [Ai and his son] traveled to Lesbos, to the beach, and I told him it was a vacation. And it is a beautiful place for a vacation … It was a very beautiful sunny day, and the ocean was so blue. Then suddenly I saw a boat approaching us. The people on the boat wore orange life jackets. I was kind of shocked, even though that’s what I came for, to see how they arrived. I used to say that to hear about a snake is very different from seeing a snake. I was totally shocked. (Ai 2020, 56)

The artistic projects Ai developed around this time included arranging for 14,000 life jackets worn by migrants who arrived on the Greek island to be wrapped around the six ionic portico pillars of the Konzerthaus, headed by a large sign with the hashtag #safepassage, on the Gendarmenmarkt square in Berlin; the documentary Human Flow; and the artworks F lotus, 4,992 Photos Relating to Refugees, Crystal Ball, and Law of the Journey. The re-enactment of Kurdi’s image aligns with the artist-activist’s larger conceptual concern with expanding our sense of reality. Kurdi’s death in September 2015 can be seen as directly resulting from a conflict that began in late 2011 in the aftermath of the civil war following anti-government protests in Syria. To re-enact the image of the dead refugee child can be construed as an indictment of two interrelated ‘crises’: the refugee ‘crisis’ and the inadequate European response to the influx of refugees in 2015, and the ‘crisis’ of democracy more broadly, considering that respect for human rights is integral to contemporary democratic governance.

The instant and expandable (viral, even) polemics that characterized the reception of Ai’s re-enactment of Kurdi’s image built on the unethicalness – even blatant inappropriateness – of a celebrity’s appropriation of (the graphic representation of) a dead child’s body. Building on the role of the Chinese celebrity artist-activist as a public intellectual, this article advances a way to rethink the re-enactment beyond the idea of gratuitous shock and away from strategically aiming at controversy. As a public intellectual, Ai expands our sense of reality through countervisual interventions aimed at reinforcing democracy. For Mirzoeff, countervisuality is the active refusal of visuality’s claims to authority, a reconfiguration ‘of the terms on which reality is to be understood’ (2011, 28). Countervisuality – or ‘the right to look’, an expression Mirzoeff borrows from Jacques Derrida’s lecture that accompanies Marie-Françoise Plissart’s 1985 photo-essay Droit de regards – is the opposition to the authority of visuality. For Mirzoeff, we should claim the realism of ‘the right to look’ as key for contemporary democratic politics (as anti-colonial, anti-imperial, and anti-fascist politics), that is, ‘the right to the real’ that comes with the deconstruction of the naturalization of the way the world out-there is mediated and represented (Figure 1). Ai’s confrontations with the Chinese police (Figures 2 and 3) enact public calls for the right to look, as elaborated by Mirzoeff: ‘The right to look confronts the police who say to us, ‘Move on, there’s nothing to see here.’ Only there is, and we know it and so do they. (…) the choice is between continuing to move on and authorizing authority or claiming that there is something to see and democraticizing democracy’ (2011, 1, 5).

FIGURE 1. Still from Ai Weiwei’s documentary Ai Weiwei’s Appeal ¥15,220,910.50 (2014). Photo credit courtesy of Ai Weiwei Studio.

FIGURE 2. Still from Ai Weiwei’s documentary Lao ma ti hua Lao ma ti hua/Disturbing the Peace (2009). Photo credit courtesy of Ai Weiwei Studio.

FIGURE 3. Still from Ai Weiwei’s documentary Lao ma ti hua Lao ma ti hua/Disturbing the Peace (2009). Photo credit courtesy of Ai Weiwei Studio.

Coinciding with the ‘order of things’ (Foucault 2005), visuality organizes the world discursively and establishes social relations; it mobilizes and constructs conditions of power and privilege, and constitutes power differentials. Visuality does not merely mirror reality or underlying ideologies but helps to constitute them socially. In this conceptual framework, authority is a self-authorizing power that needs to make itself self-evident, i.e. visible: the distribution of power is visually shaped through public visual artefacts and narratives that enact and consolidate authority. Countervisuality is thus fundamental to democracy, but how is it actually put into practice? Countervisuality is not the same as seeing things from a different perspective, directing our eyes in an unusual direction, or looking at pictures contrarily. The right to look is not dependent on pictures, not restricted to being able to see ‘crisis’ events unfold (the expression would be ‘in front of one’s eyes’), nor even to be before the spectacles such as the Mediterranean ‘border spectacle’ (De Genova 2015; Debord 1995). It goes even beyond our knowledge that the presence of ‘irregular’ migrants in Europe is invisibilized through their confinement in camps, the outsourcing of visa applications and detention centres, and the management of borders still further from sight by the European Union’s Frontex agency. Engaging in countervisuality begins at a personal level. It involves being with others differently when it disavows the individualism and voyeurism of the univocal look and requires a mutual look: ‘It means requiring the recognition of the other in order to have a place from which to claim rights and to determine what is right’ (2011, 1). Mirzoeff adds: ‘This practice must be imaginary, rather than perceptual, because what is being visualized is too substantial for any one person to see and is created from information, images, and ideas’ (2011, 2).

In my analysis of Ai’s re-enactment of Nilüfer Demir’s photo, I begin by deploying Roland Barthes’s theorization on mortality and photography regarding the punctum and studium of photographs. The contention is that Ai’s re-enactment – and the controversy surrounding it – actualizes the punctum and studium of the precursor image to function as a denunciation of the ‘crises’ of our present moment. By adapting Demir’s photograph – by re-creating the source image – Ai appended to it a whole constellation of new meanings. His adaptation brought into being something new, a new way of looking at Kurdi’s body, the refugee ‘crisis’, and the ‘crisis’ of democracy at large. For this analysis, I build on the concept of visuality as a discursive practice, a ‘visual construction of the social field’ (Mitchell 2005, 345) with intended material effects enacted in its capacity as ‘both a medium for the transmission and dissemination of authority, and a means for the mediation of those subject to that authority’ (Mirzoeff 2011, xv). Beyond an acknowledgement of the privileged place of the visual and the image in knowledge formation and political agency – the Enlightenment legacy of ocularcentrism, or, in Chris Jenks’s expression, ‘the centrality of the eye in western culture’ (2002 [1995]) –, the concept of visuality allows for a more expanded understanding of the links between the visual and authority.

BEYOND IMAGES OF SHOCK, TOWARDS THE CHANNELING OF AFFECT

In January 2016, Ai posed for a photograph of himself, face-down, lying on a pebbled beach of the Greek island of Lesbos. Ai laid in the same position as drowned three-year-old Alan Kurdi.⁵ Kurdi, a Syrian refugee of Kurdish extraction, had washed ashore, four months before, on a beach in the resort town of Bodrum, Turkey, the ancient Greek city of Halicarnassus on the Aegean Sea. At the height of the Mediterranean’ crisis,’ raw, graphic photographs of Kurdi’s inert body made global headlines on 2 September 2015, when he was found drowned. Kurdi and his family were fleeing Syria on an inflatable boat bound for Kos, about 30 min from Bodrum. The boat capsized, and Kurdi drowned. Ai’s re-enactment of Kurdi’s image was captured in the elegant simplicity and dramatic starkness of a black-and-white photograph by photographer Rohit Chawla. The pose was suggested to Ai by the photographer to be featured on the cover of the news magazine India Today and in the accompanying exhibition at the India Art Fair (Jayaraman 2016; for Ai’s account of the staging, see the interview Mendes and Ai 2022, 172).

Months before, Kurdi’s body was photographed by Nilüfer Demir for a Turkish news agency. Demir’s photos were distributed via Reuters in newspapers and television; on Twitter, they were circulated with the hashtag #KıyıyaVuranİnsanlık (Turkish for ‘Flotsam of Humanity’) (Vis et al. 2015). While one of the images, depicting the lifeless toddler face down, pressed into the sand, went viral on social media in a couple of hours, its virality was, to a certain extent, short-lived (Ibrahim 2018, 5; Ray 2021, 100). As part of the protest dynamics that ensued after this photograph of Kurdi was posted online (Olesen 2018), many refused to share it on the grounds that this news image exploited Kurdi’s death (Durham 2018, 240-241; Ibrahim 2018, 2). Some of those who repudiated for ethical reasons the circulation on social media of the image of the drowned Kurdi seemed broadly aligned with the argument that refugees are viewed as objects generating ‘spectacle rather than empathy’ (Szörényi 2006, 24) without emerging as subjects in their diversity–as individuals. According to this perspective, Demir’s image of the deceased Kurdi was the ultimate example of how refugee victims tend to be presented as objects of western pity, as ‘passive symbols of resistance and human compassion’ who ‘had no say over their representations’ (Leurs 2018, 273).

Correspondingly, the media hypervisibility of the dispossessed other, particularly the global use (and even appropriation) of images of drownings and near-drownings of migrants and refugees in the Mediterranean, yields a subjective indifference to the life-threatening difficulties that these individuals face. Instead of harnessing empathy, what we have is spectacle, the refugee’s dead body commodified. For many, the western media framing of migrants’ deaths at sea still averts empathy through its spectacularizing of pain. It increases collective indifference towards the lives and hardships of the other if the deaths of others (more than often unrecognized and unaccounted for) remain geographically separate. Even if digital media has amplified (western) self-critique towards ‘the spectatorship of suffering’, the conditions of possibility afforded by ‘public action as action at a distance’ remain a central issue for cosmopolitan citizenship (Chouliaraki 2006, 2). Mette Mortensen and Hans-Jörg Trenz deploy the image of Kurdi shot by Demir as an empirical example of the ‘impromptu publics of moral spectatorship’ that emerge and develop in response to distant suffering, and try to evoke moral outrage among readers and spectators; via Demir’s photo, Mortensen and Trenz examine the ‘immediacy by which social media publics emerge in response to iconic images’ (2016, 346).⁶ The image of Kurdi’s dead body became the visual icon of the Syrian refugee ‘crisis’, its exemplary referent.

Ai’s public clout was used to conjure up the Mediterranean Sea as a site, not of blue-emerald green or turquoise waters, but where refugees continue to drown as we speak. This conjuring was done through the adaptation of Demir’s photo of Kurdi. Ai’s re-enactment of this photographic representation immediately sparked controversy, perhaps a controversy even more intense than that surrounding the circulation on social media of the precursor images of the young refugee’s dead body. As part of the ‘impromptu publics of moral spectatorship’ Mortensen and Trenz discuss (2016, 346), some responses looked negatively upon the artist’s replacement of Kurdi’s body with Ai’s celebrity body. Ai’s larger adult body, a celebrity body, heightens the pathos of Kurdi’s tiny body, which was unknown and unseen until after his death. The photo was not read primarily as a re-enactment, a visual performance, an adaptation, or resignification intended to comment on the inadequate institutional response to the migration ‘crisis’ in the Mediterranean and the human pain this lack of response (an absence of human resonance) inflicts. It was instead interpreted as an insensitive appropriation and exploitation of the pain of the other to court controversy for the sake of playing to the gallery and furthering Ai’s celebrity status as the enfant terrible of the western art scene.⁷ In the context of a visually saturated landscape, where perhaps the most impactful way to reach an audience is through spectacle and controversy, provocation and scandal, this re-enactment was read in global news outlets as either a powerful artistic-activist statement or a callous deployment of the shock value of Kurdi’s photo – and the appropriation of the refugee’s body, a child’s body, as a site of shock.⁸ The status of the re-enactment as a document of human precarity and the refugee plight, to challenge indifference towards that plight, was questioned, even if it involved a self-defined exiled and refugee.⁹ Besides, Chawla and especially Ai were accused of following a tradition of visually using children as victims of violence, capitalizing on children’s overall optical purchase, under cover of a politically engaged artwork (Durham 2018, 242-244).

Appropriation and its cognates copy, adaptation, recreation, and re-enactment are fundamental in processes of iconization (Mortensen 2017). While it can be linked to the western tradition of imitatio to establish an affiliation, copying is an act of respect, a tribute, and homage in Chinese culture. In this respect, Han discusses the ‘genuinely Chinese phenomenon’ of shanzhai, a neologism for ‘fake’, as a combination of subversion and creation (2017, 72-73). Shanzhai expressions of creativity are contextual and adaptive through their exploitation of ‘the situation’s potential’ (2017, 72); the shanzhai movement in China has the potential to unleash ‘anti-authoritarian, subversive energies’ (2017, 78), and there is ‘the hope that the shanzhai movement might deconstruct the power of state authority at the political level and release democratic energies’ (2017, 75). Nonetheless, Han stresses that ‘if we reduce shanzhai to its anarchic and subversive aspect, we lose sight of its playful and creative potential’ (2017, 75); by highlighting the fact ‘that they are not original, that they are playing with the original’ (2017, 76; emphasis in original), shanzhai products become originals.

Through the deconstruction that shanzhai performs, Ai’s re-enactment can be understood beyond aiming at controversy, first, as decontextualizing the iconic image of Kurdi (Mortensen 2017) and then re-contextualizing it. One way to read the re-enactment was that shock was deployed to counter viewers’ passivity towards what was happening in Lesbos at the time. Shock is contextual, situational, and relational. As Susan Sontag reminds us, ‘For photographs to accuse, and possibly to alter conduct, they must shock’; however, shock as a political tool of indictment, protest, and change can lose its effectiveness as ‘Shock can wear off’; besides, Sontag continues, ‘Even if it doesn’t, one can not look. People have means to defend themselves against what is upsetting’ (2003, 81-82; emphasis in original). Disparaged as a shocking picture, critiqued as another of Ai’s characteristic publicity stunts, the criticism that this striking black-and-white adaptation of Demir’s graphic original encountered had already been extended to the precursor photograph and others that depicted the dead infant and were circulated online. Some of this criticism might be explained using Sontag’s reflections on the ethics of visually representing ‘the pain of others’, specifically human suffering and death:

The dual powers of photography – to generate documents and to create works of visual art – have produced some remarkable exaggerations about what photographers ought or ought not to do. (…) Photographs that depict suffering shouldn’t be beautiful, as captions shouldn’t moralize. In this view, a beautiful photograph drains attention from the sobering subject and turns it toward the medium itself, thereby compromising the picture’s status as a document. The photograph gives mixed signals. Stop this, it urges. But it also exclaims, What a spectacle! (2003, 76-77)

Considering the ethical complexities of exhibiting ‘beautiful’ photographs of human suffering, Sontag hints at the possibility that these pictures invite cognitive dissonance, their reception oscillating between aesthetic contemplation, spectacle, and social awareness, hence the controversy that usually surrounds their display. As Sontag observes, accusations of aestheticization in photography overpowering the ethical dimension are frequent when ‘beautiful’ photography bears witness to suffering. This is the case especially when the representation involves graphic violence in the context of war and conflict, and the ‘beautifying’ of these landscapes, framing in an artistic setting the bereaved, mutilated, or dead bodies that were trapped or forced to inhabit these landscapes.¹⁰

Yet, if we follow a Barthesian reading of the re-enactment, focused on how mortality is integral to photography and cannot be disentangled from it, as examined in Camera Lucida (1981, 14-15), other meanings open up, away from the controversy, the spectacle, and the shock value. Barthes describes the moment of taking a picture as one where the living body becomes a dead object: ‘the Photograph (the one I intend) represents the very subtle moment when, to tell the truth, I am neither subject nor object but a subject who feels he is becoming an object: I then experience a micro-version of death (of parenthesis): I am truly becoming a specter’ (1981, 16; emphasis in original). In Ai’s re-enactment, there is a double evocation of death – of the subject of the first image (the subject position here is understood as the referent of the image in terms of the compositional aspect of the frame, or that what the image concerns) and of the image-making itself, considering that the negativity of time is a precondition of the photographs that Barthes examined in Camera Lucida.

Ai’s re-enactment is made through a mediated document – a digital photograph – of a performance. It is a copy of a precursor digital image. Distinguishing between analog photography, in the terms discussed by Barthes, and digital photography, Byung-Chul Han notes that the latter ‘is the corollary of an entirely different way of living, one that dispenses with negativity more and more’; Han calls this ‘transparent photography’, photography that evades birth and death (2015, 11). Circling back to the idea of ‘impromptu publics’, which Mortensen and Trenz (2016) apply to social media publics, and in connection to Lauren Berlant’s idea of the ‘intimate public sphere’, how is a grid of pixels made to inhabit our ‘affect worlds’, strengthening our emotional attachments to strangers (Berlant 1997; 2008)? How different are digital images from earlier forms of photography, when a photograph was a piece of chemically discolored paper, in terms of affect and audience reception? Finally, as Avishek Ray asks with reference to Demir’s photograph, ‘how does a digital image – a conglomeration of pixilated dots, as devoid of any materiality whatsoever – in its singularity generate ‘affect’, universalizable and synchronic across cultures?’ (2021, 99-100).

Photos, whether analog or digital, are both objective and subjective, and Demir’s photograph of Kurdi and Ai’s adaptation of it play with these dual effects – what Barthes calls, when discussing the photograph’s ontology, the punctum (the personal, affective connection established with what is depicted) and the studium (the historical and sociocultural meanings attached to what is depicted). Jacques Rancière describes this distinction as that between the ‘force of pensiveness of the punctum’ and ‘the informative aspect represented by the studium (2009, 110). The ‘transparent immediacy’ (Bolter and Grusin 2000, 23) of the precursor image of Kurdi lends the photograph documentary truth-value pertaining to the evidentiary value of the photo as a record of human precarity and uneven exposure to social and corporeal risk and death.¹¹ This informative dimension of photography emphasizes the studium (Rancière 2009, 110), what is recognizable and stabilized in the context of the refugee ‘crisis’ – almost giving the narrative structure and preliminary interpretation to the scene depicted, determining the symbolically recognizable emotion the punctum elicits. To express the punctum through discourse is not possible, as Barthes acknowledges: ‘to give examples of punctum is, in a certain fashion, to give myself up’ (1981, 43). This impossibility is underscored by Rancière, who points us in his critique of Barthes’s theory toward the affect of the photographic image: ‘The theory of the punctum intends to affirm the resistant singularity of the image. But it ultimately ends up surrendering this specificity by identifying the production and the effect of the photographic image with the way in which death or dead people affect us’ (2009, 112).

As Barthes clarifies, not all photographs have punctum – a ‘sting, speck, cut, little hole’ that disturbs the narrative of the studium (1981, 27) – and contain within themselves the potential of prompting an embodied, affective response in the viewer. Barthes observes: ‘Whether or not it is triggered, it is an addition: it is what I add to the photograph and what is nonetheless already there’ (1981, 55; emphasis in original). He writes that news photographs are very often all studium and no punctum; this applies to the ‘unary Photograph’: ‘In these images, no punctum: a certain shock – the literal can traumatize – but no disturbance; the photograph can ‘shout,’ not wound’ (1981, 41). Images of shock can then be devoid of punctum. Nonetheless, Demir’s photograph of Kurdi wounds us. The fact that it is shot not showing the child’s face invites identification – indeed, it may even call for another level of mourning, a sort of grief by proxy. As an iconic representation, it transcends the specific circumstances of the Syrian refugee ‘crisis’. It is far from a ‘docile’ photograph, i.e. ‘invested by a simple studium’ (Barthes 1981, 49), and Ai’s re-enactment plays with the already intense punctum and the blind field it creates in that first image. As Barthes notes about the punctum, it is ‘that accident which pricks me (but also bruises me, is poignant to me)’ (1981, 27). ‘Ultimately,’ he writes, ‘Photography is subversive not when it frightens, repels, or even stigmatizes, but when it is pensive, when it thinks’ (1981, 38; emphasis in original). Provoking pensiveness, the punctum endows the photograph with ‘a power of expansion’, a power ‘is often metonymic’ (1981, 45). Building on the pensiveness of photography, related to the different modes of representation it involves (Rancière 2009, 115), the following section expands on how Ai’s re-enactment of Demir’s photo and the enduring controversy surrounding it add another valence of signification to the precursor image when it actualizes its punctum and studium concerning the ‘crises’ of our present moment.

AN INDICTMENT OF ‘CRISES’: ACTUALIZING THE PUNCTUM AND STUDIUM OF KURDI’S PHOTOGRAPH

Photographs like Demir’s of Kurdi’s lifeless body and Ai’s re-enactment seem to resist the visuality that has become a characteristic of photographic representations of refugees attempting to cross borders. They exemplify a strategy of re-appropriating regimes of visuality and the need for an ‘autonomous realism’ (Mirzoeff 2011, 25). Relatedly, Sontag notes how ‘photographs alter and enlarge our notions of what is worth looking at and what we have a right to observe. They are a grammar and, even more importantly, an ethics of seeing’ (1977, 18). The right to look opposes the authority of visuality; as Mirzoeff explains, the right to look is about ‘requiring the recognition of the other in order to have a place from which (…) to determine what is right’ (2011, 1).

The photographs of Kurdi and Ai’s bodies puncture what Tugba Basaran observes as ‘the governing of indifference’ in contemporary liberal societies (2015, 1),¹² forcing people to look at the consequences of state action and their complacency, or view the (guilt-inducing) human cost of those state policies they have allowed to continue. Demir’s photographic representation of the drowned migrant granted hypervisibility to the previously invisible migrant (who, as an illegalized immigrant, might have deliberately chosen the safety of invisibility had the situation been different). Through Ai’s re-enactment, a different context for human precarity is provided. Both photos prompt us to look back and see in hindsight the conditions that characterize the entire refugee ‘crisis’ that led to Kurdi’s death: conditions of precarity and persistent necropolitical divides. Furthermore, the reception of this photographic adaptation is colored by our knowledge that, since the photo was taken, the problems that undergirded Kurdi’s death – increased Islamophobia, anti-immigrant sentiments, precariousness, and austerity – have only intensified. Returning to Barthes’s terms, the re-enactment actualizes the punctum and studium of the precursor image. Ai’s adaptation offers a counter-spectacle, asking us to reflect on the embodied politics of migration – on its corporeality. The image of the artist lying dead face down, seemingly washed up on the shore, re-enacting an iconic image of the migration ‘crisis’, reinscribes the migrant body into the public discourse (Ibrahim 2018 6-7).

Borders are no longer seen as fixed but fluid, with different impacts for different actors. Cultural demarcation lines, or soft borders (Eder 2006), superseding the individual, are materialized in social, racial, religious, and (significantly) national and supranational borders (for example, in the case of the European Union, frontiers are secured by Frontex). These borders are intersubjective spaces of negotiation. Such normative political landscape (and the hard borders that are part of this landscape) has been legitimizing whose lives are deserving of saving and whose are not, warranting new sovereign acts of the ‘governing of indifference’ in the context of the Mediterranean Sea. Physical hard borders, patrolled by coastguards and drones, as a technology of state power meant to filter ‘illegals’ from entering the state, have been increasingly translated into soft social borders, where multiple walls are created for different illegalized migrants. Such boundary work involved in producing both soft and hard borders undermines the notion of the shared precarious existence of humanity writ large. As Achille Mbembe argues, through such boundary work, ‘We try to exclude – from humanity itself – those who have been degraded, those whom we look down on or who do not look like us, those with whom we imagine never being able to get along’ (2017, 182). (Interestingly, the very idea of humanity was a product of particular modern and colonial knowledge forms.)

Ai’s re-enactment defies the dominant narrative of the Mediterranean refugee ‘crisis’ that frames it within a geopolitical language of crisis-scapes and prioritizes a language of nativism and cultural ownership. Indifferent to the controversy sparked by Chawla’s photograph, Ai re-enacted Kurdi’s iconic image again in 2017 at the Israel Museum for his installation Maybe, Maybe Not, lying face down on his artwork Sunflower Seeds (first exhibited in 2010 at the Tate Modern), made up of millions of hand-crafted porcelain sunflower seeds (Figure 4). This image, posted by Ai posted on Instagram on 29 May, was assumed to be a response to Donald Trump’s visit to the museum the previous week and the fact that, as the caption read, Ai’s works ‘were taken away and covered for his presence’ (Shaw 2017). In January of that year, Trump ordered a ban on immigration which included Syrian citizens. In the specific act of hard bordering announced by the Trump administration, in this ban on mobility as depersonalized violence, but nonetheless public and embodied violence, in this act of outright inhospitality and the abjections it produces, migrants are the scapegoats who came to represent the root cause of the problems North Americans were facing – these soft-targets would appease scattered pockets of anger internally. The state harnesses the affect of discontent, and the trail of violence is effaced through legality and normalization. Borders such as these, discursively carved through post-truth rhetoric and materialized in walls (like the imagined one between the US and Mexico, part of a ‘prevention through deterrence’ policy), are the outcomes of physical and socio-spatial dynamics that illegalize migrants.

FIGURE 4. Ai Weiwei re-enacts the Alan Kurdi image at the Israel Museum in 2017 for the art installation Maybe, Maybe Not. Photo credit courtesy of Ai Weiwei Studio.

Ai’s re-enactment of Kurdi’s image spotlights acts of hard and soft bordering. In an era that is often characterized as one of unprecedented mobility, the ethical-human issue of forced migration is presented by populists as a ‘crisis’ that demands immediate action, underwritten by a glut of what Paul Gilroy (2019) calls ‘fearful images of the alien invasion of Europe’; or Arjun Appadurai (2006) describes as the ‘fear of small numbers’ when statistics and headlines that speak of waves of illegalized migrants are the source of social apprehension and ‘moral panic’.¹³ When images about invading enemies shape public discourse, defining the European ‘we’ against the ‘them’ deploying the familiar terms of the citizen versus the ‘illegal alien,’ and coalescing ‘with ideas of civilizational clash, White cultural vulnerability and demographic decline’ (Gilroy 2019), they do not serve only to establish ‘a cordon sanitaire around the nation-state, protecting it from alien trespassers’ in the name of national security (Kearney 1999, 258). Such images create new conceptions of the racialized and marginalized, discriminated-against body. These conceptions are based on a ‘logic of dispossession’ which ‘is interminably mapped (…) onto particular bodies-in-place, through normative matrices but also through situated practices of raciality, gender, sexuality, intimacy, able-bodiedness, economy, and citizenship’ (Butler and Athanasiou 2013, 18). This logic underwrites state and personal decisions about whose lives are grievable, and whose lives are expendable and can be forgotten, even whose lives are real – in other words, whose lives (and deaths) can be met with indifference.

CONCLUSION

How can the artist-activist-intellectual speak truth to power in an era where public opinion is being increasingly shaped by emotion, when political life seems to be shrinking, and facts have been replaced by deception and populist storytelling, when post-truth rhetoric has acquired such a memetic force? This question concerns the new configurations of the public sphere and public-ness, and the function of art – and, relating to the topic of this article, the impact of artists as public intellectuals. (The adjective ‘public’ is used here not to identify a site of intervention, but the type of intervention, i.e. the agentive and participatory intervention that constitutes a political force in an affectively constructed society.) In today’s entangled world, anxieties surrounding complicity with power structures are recurrent. As Kathrin Thiele observes, ‘in this globalized and interconnected world one major critical symptom of the planetary condition is the very state of being entangled: often painfully entangled, implicated, caught up, and complicit’ (2017, 43). Those anxieties assume that public intellectuals, specifically celebrity artists in their role as public intellectuals, have lost their effectiveness in speaking truth to power. Celebrity activists-artists’ acts of dissent and transgressiveness, and their commitment to democracy, social justice, and equity tend to be regarded as ambivalent. Being a celebrity and challenging unequal power dynamics are usually seen by critics as discrete and contradictory, even incompatible, rather than inevitably overlapping dimensions. In our condition of entanglement, it is assumed that celebrity activists-artists can only aspire in limited ways to parrēsia.

The persistent question of the entanglement between celebrity, activism, and humanitarianism (Chouliaraki 2012) was replayed in the reception of Ai’s re-enactment of Kurdi’s image. Looking beyond all the controversy it encountered, mostly staged on social media platforms, regarding the use of the shock value of a depiction of a drowned migrant infant and its attendant ethical concerns, this article examined this re-enactment as a countervisual intervention and an act of parrēsia, speaking truth to power against threats to democracy – racism, xenophobia, the authoritarianism of border control, and the inadequate hosting of refugees in Europe. In its representational effect, based on the indexicality of the photograph of a Syrian-Kurdish child lying dead on the shore, Ai’s body channels affect, becoming a referent for the consequences of a lacking hospitality response towards the refugee. This intervention on othering and bordering is about thinking with and against visuality, or the right to look. Mirzoeff’s historicizing and deconstruction of the naturalization of visuality allow us to consider it a discursive practice with material effects; visuality becomes ‘both a medium for the transmission and dissemination of authority’ (2011, xv). In this framework, the authority of visuality is opposed to the autonomy claimed by the right to look. Demanding the right to look, Mirzoeff acknowledges, ‘might seem an odd request after all we have seen in the first decade of the twenty-first century on old media and new, from the falling of the towers, to the drowning of cities, and violence without end’ (2011, 1). In the second and third decades of our century, we have seen, in new media and old, the growth of ultra-nationalisms, right and left-wing populisms, and neo-imperialisms, from the Brexit referendum in 2016 and Donald Trump’s election in 2017 to the war in Ukraine in 2022. We have seen the lifeless bodies of migrants and asylum seekers wash up along European shores as part of the refugee ‘crisis.’

Demanding the right to look, Ai re-signified motifs we see recurrently in media reports on the refugee ‘crisis,’ such as rubber boats, discarded lifejackets, and migrants’ clothes and shoes, by accumulating them in colossal size and quantities and adapting them for artistic projects, such as those developed between 2016 and 2017. As a countervisual intervention, Ai’s re-enactment of Kurdi’s iconic image can be a civic creative and imaginative way of expressing what human rights scholar Michael Humphrey described as the transformation of the securitization of migration into the securitization of migrants themselves, ‘whose bodies are made surrogate borders culturally and politically’ (2013, 181). The referential slippage between Kurdi and Ai, the thanatic shorthand (in the sense of a compact, symbolic expression of actual death) or shortcut in Ai’s re-enactment functions countervisually by bringing ‘closer to home’ the distant suffering triggered by western imperialist policies and actions. In its denouncing of the shortcomings of European hospitality policies, the re-enactment bears witness, constitutes a testimonial gesture, and acts as a document of structural violence, showing the human cost of conflict in the Middle East, and more specifically, of the Syrian refugee ‘crisis’, in a way that becomes an indictment of other ‘crises’ in the contemporary (and primarily western-democratic) world.

DISCLOSURE STATEMENT

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

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Ana Cristina Mendes

Ana Cristina Mendes is an Associate Professor of English Studies at the School of Arts and Humanities, University of Lisbon, Portugal, and Chair of the ACS–Association for Cultural Studies (2022–26). She uses cultural and postcolonial theory to examine literary and screen texts (in particular, intermedia adaptations) as venues for resistant knowledge formations in order to expand upon theories of epistemic injustice. Her latest book, Decolonising English Studies from the Semi-periphery (Palgrave Macmillan 2023), explores, from the perspective of the semi-periphery of the academic world-system, how decolonising the curriculum might work in English studies, one of the fields in university that bears the most robust traces of its imperial and colonial roots.

Notes

1 The artist-activist’s acts of parrēsia are the subject of the 2012 documentary film Ai Weiwei: Never Sorry, written and directed by Alison Klayman.

2 Henry Jenkins, Gabriel Peters-Lazaro, and Sangita Shresthova define ‘civic imagination’ ‘as the capacity to imagine alternatives to current cultural, social, political, or economic conditions; one cannot change the world without imagining what a better world might look like. Beyond that, the civic imagination requires and is realized through the ability to imagine the process of change, to see oneself as a civic agent capable of making change, to feel solidarity with others whose perspectives and experiences are different than one’s own, to join a larger collective with shared interests, and to bring imaginative dimensions to real-world spaces and places’ (2020, 5).

3 I am adopting Thomas Olesen’s definition of re-enactments based on the Kurdi images ‘as photographs of events where activists re-perform the scenes depicted in the original photograph’ (2018, 666).

4 When referring to the European refugee ‘crisis’ throughout this article, the term ‘crisis’ is enclosed within quotation marks to signal how it has been deployed to further particular political interests (Sohlberg et al. 2019, 2276). For an examination of the strategic use of the discourse of ‘crisis’ in specific cultural moments, see Mendes 2021.

5 This image is available at: https://www.indiatoday.in/magazine/special-report/story/20160215-ai-weiwei-tribute-to-syrian-refugee-aylan-kurdi-828413-2016-02-03

6 Such ‘impromptu publics of moral spectatorship’ are a possible iteration of the idea of ‘affective publics’ (Papacharissi 2015). See Lin Prøitz’s discussion of how the reception of the Kurdi image among the youth population in Oslo and Sheffield ‘elicited an initial affective response that raised awareness of the refugee “crisis” among the younger generation, which in turn generated engagement and mobilization’ (2017, 358); on the role of affect, Cigdem Bozdag and Kevin Smets’s study of reactions to Kurdi’s images through a qualitative study of tweets from Turkey and Flanders (Belgium) finds that ‘Emotions and affect play a key role in the collected tweets (…). The range of emotions varies from sadness and benevolence to shame, anger, and pleasure along with a varying tonality of tweets from a sympathetic to an angry and hateful one’ (2017, 4055). See also Avishek Ray’s argument on the ontological changes to the category of ‘migration’, brought about by the image of Kurdi, towards a focus on refugees’ experiences (2021, 101). Interviewees in Ai’s book Human Flow: Stories from the Global Refugee Crisis likewise stress how this image ‘galvanized support and changed the course of the discussion on the refugee situation’ (2020, 20; interview with Boris Cheshirkov, UNHCR, Lesbos, Greece, 2016-01-01 and 2016-02-19).

7 On the artist-activist’s perceived appropriation of migrants’ experiences, see, for example, Zimanyi (2022), on how Ai’s exhibit Laundromat (2016) was received as ‘a willful appropriation of refugees’ belongings for personal artistic gain’ (2022, 152) and, with reference to the re-enactment of Kurdi’s image, how Ai was critiqued by other artists ‘for supposedly capitalizing on Kurdi’s death for personal gain’ (2022, 154).

8 See Deutsche Welle (DW)’s list of quotes from other news outlets exemplifying these reactions at https://www.dw.com/en/essential-or-impudent-the-debate-about-art-and-refugees/a-39177781 (6 September 2017).

9 Ai defines himself as an exile from his native country of China and a refugee as he ‘cannot live where [he] grew up’ (Mendes and Ai 2022, 170).

10 Such accusations of unethical aestheticization, Sontag reports, have been famously levelled against, for example, Sebastião Salgado’s work on the reality of global migration and Gilles Peress, Susan Meiselas, and Joel Meyerowitz’s work on the World Trade Center ruins.

11 While the documentary value of photography has been well established, the idea of photography as a recorder of truth, affording some sort of ‘transparency’ through which the viewer can access ‘reality’, has also been sufficiently challenged as photographs cannot ever be ‘true’. On the disciplinary apparatus that made photography work as an instrument of surveillance, official record, documentary evidence, and, ultimately, truth, see John Tagg’s Disciplinary Frame (2009).

12 The title of Basaran’s article, “The saved and the drowned: Governing indifference in the name of security”, draws upon Primo Levi’s The Drowned and the Saved (1988).

13 For example, negative news coverage in Europe about the asylum-seeking ‘crisis’ is not directed at disliking the individual refugee, but rather focuses on the threat refugees pose to ‘society’. In significant ways, this is an iteration of the social production of a ‘moral panic’, trying to instill fear in the community, leading to the rise of authoritarian populism in the 1980s UK under Margaret Thatcher, as demonstrated in the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies’ landmark volume Policing the Crisis (Hall et al. 1978).