Yara El-Sherbini

Manifesto, Yara El Sherbini; 2006, digital image.
Manifesto is a series of say what you see wordplay posters.

'Not just for art’s sake'
Muslim News, February 2008.

When last year’s Turner Prize winner, Mark Wallinger, came on television in a bear suit (his winning entry being a video of himself in said bear suit wandering around a gallery at night) many people may have felt justified in thinking that modern conceptual art had reached a new height of inexplicable weirdness. What with all its Tracy Emins and Damien Hirsts, you can’t blame the average Joe for thinking that this is a realm of culture that he can comfortably do without. But it doesn’t have to be this way, says artist Yara El- Sherbini, who wishes to make art more accessible to the general public. “I think there are problems: art has always been elitist; art is elitist; but I’d like to say it won’t always be.”

Growing up in Pontefract, an ex-coalmining town in West Yorkshire, Yara says being the only ‘brown’ person there “was pretty hard…It made me extremely aware.” She recalls being four years old when she first realised she was different. “If I had grown up in a very multicultural atmosphere like London, I would have a very different attitude to my identity. You can’t escape being a non-white person.” She was 18 when she understood the potential that art had, namely “the ability to alter people’s conscious, their awareness of things, social issues. I could create work that was socially and politically engaging, and that made me very excited.” It was then that she decided it was what she wanted to do for the rest of her life. After going to live in Egypt for a year “to get to know my roots” (she’s half-Egyptian, half-Trinidadian), she studied Fine Art in Context at Bristol, then Fine Art Media at Slade, London, where she has stayed since.

“Growing up, being Muslim was part of my every day life, it was who I was, it very much defined myself and my actions and my outlook on life, it was always there, it was just…who I was. I think post 9/11 there was so much negative press and so many negative attitudes in the media, that it became something that I had to talk about a lot more, because I was so angry and so frustrated that I wanted to fight back in my own way, and I found that art gave me a space in which to do that.” But even before 9/11, she had always been deeply aware of her Islamic identity (her father is writer on comparative religion); she even wanted to become a theologian at one point. After 9/11, it wasn’t a matter of becoming more aware of her Islamic identity, but becoming more vocal about it, and art was the perfect medium.

Her work can sometimes have direct social and political relevance: she is currently working on a project in Beeston, a place which was particularly affected after 7/7 as some of the bombers were from there. To help alleviate some of the alienation in the community an Islamic cultural centre commissioned her to adapt her famous pub quiz (which satirises media portrayals of Muslims) for an interfaith event.

But regardless of her background, her art is in essence politically and socially engaging. When she is not satirising common perceptions of Muslims, her work uses a variety of media - including video, photography and sculpture - to portray art that uses humour, satire and wordplay to many ends. “I don’t believe in just the idea of painting a nice picture for someone to look at,” she says, but retracts: “I believe in it, but that’s not what I want to do. I want to make something a lot more political. People say to me why don’t you study politics? I disagree with that. I believe art has the ability to live in the realm of political engagement.”

But of course, combine a politicised artist, with a minority background, and you get the tokenism that can frustrate anyone who just simply wants to be a master of his or her craft. “I have to clarify one thing: I don’t ever consider myself a Muslim artist; I’m an artist who happens to be Muslim. One of the things I’m battling against is that a lot of the time I’m labelled into this little token of an artist, when I don’t want to be. I want to be an artist, and I want my work to be on the same level as everybody else’s.”

An instance of this tokenism came when she was commissioned by Book Works to look at the Muslim vernacular in the form of a joke book. “I said actually, I just want to make a book, why aren’t you just inviting me as an artist? But they weren’t. The only person who was inviting me was the ethnic minority candidate who was in for their year placement, for the ‘tick box’, and she wanted me to do a ‘tick box’ project. So I was forced to make a work about exploring this concept of my experience as a Muslim. I don’t think that’s the way to make work.”

But being of a minority group in any socially engaged field has it burdens. The first black American artist, Jean-Michel Basquiat, was acutely aware of his social background at the same time as trying to be impervious to it: in one scene in Julian Schnabel’s 1996 film portrayal of his life, Basquiat is asked by a journalist about being a black artist, to which he wryly replies that he’s not a black artist, but paints in other colours too.

“I’d like to think it’s not always going to be case,” says Yara “and that’s what I’m fighting for, to be seen as an artist, who sometimes looks at all of these cultural issues, but also looks at many other things, things that are going on in the world, all over the place. I’m trying to fight that so we can be seen as people first. Surely this is what people of colour have been fighting for, for generations, and I don’t think I’m going to stop doing that.”

So where does she see the future of art? “I don’t know where I see its future. There has always been an art world and there’re going to be different levels: there’s always going to be work which is more and more elitist, and that is actually always just about money; and there’s going to be work which is actually radical and pushing the boundaries of what art is.”

When he isn’t in bear suits, Mark Wallinger is also the author of a sculpture which is a reconstruction of peace activist Brian Haw’s protest banners after they got confiscated by the Government in 2006. The banners became illegal following the passing by Parliament of the ‘Serious Organised Crime and Police Act’ prohibiting unauthorised demonstrations within a one kilometre radius of Parliament Square. Wallinger not only reconstructed the confiscated protest banners, but defiantly placed them within the forbidden one kilometer radius around Parliament Square. And who said art was just about being weird?

The Muslim News, 29 February, 2008.