Biinjiya’iing Onji (From Inside) (2017)

by Hana Nikčević

In 2017, Anishinaabe artist Rebecca Belmore pitched a tent on Athens’s Filopappou Hill. This was no typical nylon-and-aluminum camping shelter, however. Hand-carved in Carrara marble and finished with a patina of just-excavated stone, Belmore’s Biinjiya’iing Onji (From Inside) fused an icon of the contemporary refugee crisis with the artistic language and materiality of antiquity. The placement of the work furthered this connection. Tourists flock to Filopappou Hill for its scenic view of the Athenian Acropolis, and Belmore’s tent, too, looked out on this ancient vista. Sitting inside the tent, however, the viewer’s perspective was focused, funnelled between verdant bushes and trees to land squarely and solely on one building: the Parthenon. The commonality of material between the sculpted tent and the ancient temple solidified the effect of a direct encounter between the two structures; indeed, both the Parthenon and Biinjiya’iing Onji (From Inside) were constructed of marble quarried from Mount Pentelikon.

Biinjiya’iing Onji (From Inside) occupied this brushy Athenian hilltop during 2017’s documenta 14. An international contemporary art fair held every five years in Kassel, Germany, documenta was relocated to Greece for 2017 with the thematic objective to “learn from Athens” by examining mass migration, displacement, and the search for identity, following the 2015–16 European refugee crisis. Pursuing the fair’s objective, Belmore collaborated with the studio of local sculptor Vangelis Ilias to produce a new monument in Athens’s quintessential building material. Referencing Classical Greece through its material and location, and pointing to the plight of refugees in current-day Greece through its form, Belmore’s tent asked viewers to consider democracy, past and present. She made a material claim for the representation of marginalized peoples and their perspectives on the political systems that disenfranchise them.

Democracy and the dispossessed

In 2016, when Belmore visited Athens on a research trip for documenta 14, she witnessed a multitude of refugee tents set up at the Athenian port of Piraeus.^[1] These structures were the temporary homes of hundreds of migrants and refugees fleeing countries—Afghanistan, Iraq, and Syria—mired in war; following treacherous marine journeys, they had become trapped in Greece. Most had sought to continue on to another European country, searching for family or an improved quality of life. The European Union’s promises to legally relocate refugees from Greece to other EU member states, however, were ineffective, because few states wished to accept refugees. Most migrants thus attempted to leave Greece “illegally” through the Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia—but Macedonia had just closed its border to Greece, putting an end to the “Balkans route.” Suddenly, a large population of migrants were forced to remain in Greece, unexpectedly joining those who might have been willing to remain in the state or who chose to attempt departing “legally.” This exacerbated the existing problem: temporary accommodation sites for refugees were so low on space and resources as to render them essentially uninhabitable, and the asylum registration process was dysfunctionally slow.^[2]

When Belmore visited, a wall behind the refugees’ encampment displayed a vast banner depicting sailing ships, an advertisement for the Piraeus Port Authority. The sea in front of the tents, too, was dotted with island-hopping cruise ships and the everyday travel of locals and tourists. Belmore recognized the irony of this juxtaposition.^[3] The sailing ships alluded to the history of seafaring, the mode of transport that enabled early modern imperialists to circle the globe, expanding their own region’s wealth and power. The modern-day activity of the Piraeus port, meanwhile, manifested the long-term result of those earth-wide journeys: a globalized economy that sees wealthy states take advantage of other regions—often to their detriment— largely for their resources. The immobilized refugees were caught in between, lacking the affluence or national credence to traverse the world at will, yet needing to leave their homelands behind.

Belmore’s Biinjiya’iing Onji (From Inside), however, was inspired not only by Piraeus’s refugee tents but also by the vernacular shelters of the artist’s own Anishinaabe heritage: “The shape of the tent is, for me, reminiscent of the wigwam dwellings that are part of my history as an Indigenous person.”^[4] Wigwams (wiigiwaam in Anishinaabemowin) are traditionally built by bending into place the wood of young trees, softened with water, and covering the assembled structures with birch bark. Requiring nothing for its construction beyond readily available organic materials, the wigwam enabled people who relocated often to set up a home wherever they chose—it is “a rather ingenious solution for building with the materials available at hand.” As a temporary, dome-shaped structure, featuring a stiff framework draped with a more pliable material, the wigwam anticipates the form and itinerant function of the tent.

Confronting the Parthenon, an iconic symbol of democracy and its Classical origins, with a form that symbolized both refugee tent and Anishinaabe wigwam suggests a connection between migrants, refugees, and Indigenous peoples and their relationship with democracy, past and present.

Belmore’s work highlights the discrepancy between the lived experience of democracy and the imagined ideal. Canada may present as a proudly democratic nation, but, as Belmore has addressed in her past work, systemic inequalities continue to affect the lives of Indigenous peoples in the country (who live on their traditional and often unceded lands but contend with Canada’s settler-colonial government). Her performance piece Vigil (2002), for instance, called attention to the status of Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls in Canada, central to which is the Canadian government’s evident neglect to investigate these cases with due diligence. At Pelican Falls (2017), meanwhile, acknowledges the survivors of residential schools, psychologically and physically harmful institutions through which the Canadian government sought, purportedly, to assimilate Indigenous children to Euro-Canadian society. Both of these machinations on the part of the Canadian government have been recognized as genocidal practices, through which the settler government aimed, above all, to administer Indigenous land inhabited exclusively by a settler population: any ostensible interest in extending equal rights to citizens leaves unspoken the condition that only certain people will truly be recognized as citizens. Refugees and migrants confront the gap between residing within a nation’s borders and accessing rights reserved for citizens. Although European states present themselves as democratic and committed to equality, their reluctance—or outright refusal—to accept Middle Eastern and African immigrants reveals implicit assumptions about who qualifies as a legitimate citizen.

By weaving Indigenous and migrant narratives of disenfranchisement together through the form of the tent, and pairing them with allusions to Classical Greece through the work’s location and materiality, Belmore suggests that the marginalization and mistreatment of certain groups of people occurs not in spite of, but squarely within democracy. Belmore’s reference to the origins of democracy reinforces her point: in ancient Athens, democracy was limited to male citizens, while women and “foreigners” (metics) had few or no rights. Her sculpted tent, which formally and materially evokes Classical Greece, echoes her argument that democracy has never been inherently opposed to the exclusion of refugees or Indigenous peoples. The tent’s marble was quarried from the mountain range that supplied the Acropolis’s marble; the illusory carving of ripples and folds in the tent’s “fabric” resembles the drapery of Greek sculpture much more than the appearance of stretched nylon. These two structures, Belmore suggests, are cut from the same political cloth.

The Parthenon and Acropolis—in their dominant location rich with historical and symbolic meaning—serve as powerful reminders that democracy and Western civilization grew up together, closely tied to a long-celebrated legacy of cultural achievement. By constructing a material viewpoint, Belmore’s Biinjiya’iing Onji (From Inside) claims the right to look back –both literally and metaphorically–from a new, critical perspective, demanding the recognition of refugees’ and Indigenous peoples’ perspectives on democracy, of the critical capacity of those experiencing democracy “from below,” and of the need for nation-to-nation address.

Belmore does not explicitly claim, however, that democracy can or must be salvaged. Biinjiya’iing Onji (From Inside) may even call this possibility into question. While the wigwam is integral to the artwork and consistently mentioned in the work’s accompanying texts, the sculpture itself does not reveal the wigwam’s influence; to most viewers, the form will read solely as that of a refugee tent, and the material and its undulating surface will exclusively quote ancient Greece. Part of Belmore’s claim is thus suppressed, imperceptible, and so the artwork seems to ask: when it comes to democracy, can the disenfranchised truly be represented in a system that has long brought about their dispossession? If our current political system supported, and was wrought through, centuries of colonialism and imperialism, would the meaningful enfranchisement of the dispossessed invariably necessitate a different political system? Belmore offers no answers to these weighty questions, but proposes the first step for addressing it: a re-envisioning of democracy from the perspective of those it neglects to serve.

Crisis tourism or “politics by other means”?

Biinjiya’iing Onji (From Inside) also negotiates another, related question of representation within existing systems. Given that Biinjiya’iing Onji (From Inside) was created to be shown at an international art fair and, more specifically, at the Athenian iteration of the fair, it seems appropriate that the artwork would engage with debates within global politics. However, documenta 14 has been denounced by some critics as an exercise in “crisis tourism”—as an event that sought to address serious issues, predominantly the plight of migrants and refugees, in voyeuristic, uninformed, and ephemeral ways.^[5] Indeed, here was Belmore, an Anishinaabe artist from Ontario, in Athens, Greece, articulating concerns of Indigeneity in Canada; attempting simultaneously to attend to the situation of refugees and the Greek state, and proposing thoughtful, embodied engagements with local environments in the context of a frenetic, globalized art world so often focused on travelling from one city to the next. Issues of global reach and complexity demand sustained, detailed inquiry—and featuring art about the immobilized at an event that represented, for so many, a summertime travel destination may have rehearsed the very irony Belmore initially identified at the port of Piraeus.

Art enthusiasts attending documenta 14 might have expected representations of the refugees that Belmore initially saw at Piraeus; with Biinjiya’iing Onji (From Inside), Belmore instead suggested that gaining an understanding of local issues could be achieved by observing the monuments populating any tourist’s Athenian sightseeing checklist—what was needed was a new perspective on old material. By inviting the audience to climb inside, sit down, and contemplate the Parthenon, the work overtly shifted viewers’ gaze away from those in crisis to face, instead, the unassuming origins of that crisis.

Even so, in seeking out the craftsmanship of an Athenian carver and using local materials for Biinjiya’iing Onji (From Inside), Belmore attempted to engage with longer histories of Athens and Greece and to avoid taking artworld globalism for granted: what claim did an international, non-Greek artist have to occupy space in the region? Documenta 14 wasn’t the perfect context, perhaps, for the expression of specific political concerns, but Belmore’s approach reflected, above all, the methodological ethos of the wigwam: as “a rather ingenious solution for building with the materials available at hand,”^[6] the wigwam highlights the potentials of working with what one has.^[7]

Meaningfully articulating the specific concerns of certain groups of people––and avoiding trite political generalizations––can be difficult at an international art fair; what itinerant viewer will take the time to learn about a complex historical issue when there are fifty more artworks to see in the city? Art historian Caroline Jones has suggested, however, that, despite their faults, biennials might offer a uniquely productive way to conduct “politics by other means”—when it comes to nation-to-nation conflict resolution, better a biennial than a war.^[8] In a time when the concepts of “nation” and “internationalism” need to be “subjected to permanent critique,” the “theatre of globalism that is the biennial” provides the ideal venue for that critique.^[9] In this view, Belmore found an ingenious solution for building with the available materials, literally and figuratively. Biinjiya’iing Onji (From Inside) references a politics of representation and questions the optics and potentials of artists making political statements at global art fairs: how, within the available contexts of viewing, can one best be seen? Making the most of a high-profile opportunity despite its complications, Belmore created an artwork that took a significant political stance while remaining critical of its means of doing so—and stopping short of suggesting that existing frameworks need always be maintained.

FURTHER READING

Agamben, Giorgio, Alain Badiou, Daniel Bensaid, Wendy Brown, Jean-Luc Nancy, Jacques Ranciere, Kristin Ross, and Slavoj Žižek. Democracy in What State? New York: Columbia University Press, 2011.

Azoulay, Ariella Aïsha. Potential History: Unlearning Imperialism. London: Verso, 2019.

Bryan-Wilson, Julia. “Rebecca Belmore: Material Relations.” Afterall 45 (2018): 40-49.

Hopkins, Candice. “Rebecca Belmore.” In Documenta 14: Daybook, edited by Quinn Latimer and Adam Szymczyk. New York: Prestel, 2017. Excerpted online at https://www.documenta14.de/en/artists/13529/rebecca-belmore; unpaginated.

Jones, Caroline A. “Biennial Culture: A Longer History.” In The Biennial Reader, edited by Elena Filipovic, Marieke Van Hal, and Solveig Øvestebø, 66-87. Bergen: Bergen Kunsthalle, and Ostfildern: Hatje Cantz, 2010.

Jones, Caroline A. The Global Work of Art: World’s Fairs, Biennials, and the Aesthetics of Experience. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2016.

Kahane, Leon. “‘Doing Documenta in Athens Is Like Rich Americans Taking a Tour in a Poor African Country’: An Interview with Yanis Varoufakis.” Spike Art Magazine, October 7, 2015. http://www.spikeartmagazine.com/articles/doing-documenta-athens-rich-americans-taking-tour-poor-african-country.

Mirzoeff, Nicholas. The Right to Look: A Counterhistory of Visuality. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011.

Moss, Wendy, and Elaine Gardner-O’Toole. Aboriginal People: History of Discriminatory Laws. Ottawa: Library of Parliament, Research Branch, 1991.

Nanibush, Wanda, ed. Facing the Monumental. Toronto: Art Gallery of Ontario and Goose Lane Editions, 2018.

Nanibush, Wanda, and Rebecca Belmore. “Facing the Monumental: Rebecca Belmore and Wanda Nanibush in Conversation.” Streamed live on Nov 15, 2018, from the University of Toronto, ON. Video, 1:26:26. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x-WsSFNaTFI.

National Inquiry into Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls. “Reclaiming Power and Place: The Final Report of the National Inquiry into Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls.” The National Inquiry into Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls, 2019.

Woodend, Dorothy. “Rebecca Belmore Wins the Audain Prize,” The Tyee, October 25, 2024. https://thetyee.ca/Culture/2024/10/25/Rebecca-Belmore-Wins-Audain-Prize/

About the author

Hana Nikčević is an art historian and arts worker, currently overseeing collections and public programming at the Art Museum at the University of Toronto. Her present research investigates the deployment of plastics as an artistic medium throughout the twentieth century, questioning artists’ perceptions of plastics’ integrity, durability, and origins in relation to environmental and anthropocentric concerns. This research and her past work engage with the aesthetics of loss and deception; environmental and settler-colonial art history; and the temporal dimensions and phenomenology of objects and images. She has an MA in art history from McGill University and, as of fall 2022, is working towards a PhD in History, Theory and Criticism of Art at MIT.