Art-Cure: Image-work between the Spiritual and the Political

Stefania Pandolfo (UC Berkeley

A man paints mural frescos in his Rabat apartment during an episode of his illness of the psyche/soul. Later he reinterprets his visions in the mode of ta`bir and taswīr: an unconscious work of form born in the midst of crisis­–psychical, mystical, political–as a force of expression, and a bridge between the visible and invisible. Ilyas’s visions are at once intimately personal and collective. They disclose a vocabulary of agentive forms, which bear witness to the forms born of crisis in the dream of a suspended collectivity. My paper will reflect on what I call “art-cure” through two scenes: the first is my ethnography of psychiatric illness and liturgical healing in Morocco, through the world of Ilyas’s paintings. 

The second moment reflects on the artistic practice of the Syrian film collective Abounaddara, whose work I am curating in collaboration with them in the exhibition The Ruins We Carry, and which I suggest, could be pondered from the perspective of the imaginal-political practices discussed above, in Abounaddara’s terms, a “utopian realist” practice. Best known for the short open access videos they made during the Syrian revolution and war, Abounaddara’s work is characterized by a capacity to capture the spiritual essence of a world through “image events”, which are visual interventions at the threshold of the invisible. Yet the group developed their practice of the animated image from an apprenticeship at the image-work of master artisans, seeking the capacity of form to disclose other worlds, at the border of the visible and the invisible, where that which cannot be said or represented can only been "shown". 

Stefania Pandolfo is a professor of Anthropology, Medical Anthropology and Critical Theory at UC Berkeley. Her recent work has focused on the articulation of psychic, spiritual and aesthetic experience in a context of violence, trauma, and madness in North Africa and the Middle East, in conversation with psychoanalysis, Islamic thought, and artistic practices. She is the author of Knot of the Soul: Madness, Psychoanalysis, Islam (Chicago 2018), and Impasse of the Angels: Scenes from a Moroccan Space of Memory (Chicago 1997), and co-author with A. Lovell, V. Das, and S. Laugier of Face aux désastres: Une conversation à quatre voix sur la folie, le care, et les grandes détresses collectives (Ithaques, Paris, 2013). In her ethnographic exploration of imagination’s formative and transformative power, she relates to the experience of mental illness and domination in the Maghreb, and to an Islamic understanding of imagination as sensory and divine imprint in practices of healing and image-making. She guest-curated Matrix 274, a contemporary art exhibition at the Berkeley Art Museum entitled J’Accuse, featuring the work of Kader Attia (2019) and co-curated the exhibition The Ruins We Carry, featuring the image-work of the anonymous Syrian film collective Abounaddara (2024), conceived in a long collaboration with Abounaddara and premiering the three-channel film installation “The Imagemaker”. She is currently working on a book entitled Art-Cure: Image-work at a Time of Catastrophe, based on her ethnography and collaborations with several artists.