These days, living means balancing heartache with joy, anguish with hope, and bitterness with a lightness of being. Poet Nikita Gill writes, “Everything is on fire, but everyone I love is doing beautiful things, and trying to make life worth living”. These words resonate with the ethos of artists throughout history who have positioned creativity and imagination as instruments of power and agency.
All over the world, dystopic realities are tearing through the seams of life. In times like these, how does art serve as a tool for not only reflection but active disruption? Can art alter the course of this dystopic moment? Is a taintless world possible? In this piece, artists think through these questions and reflect on artmaking as a means to bear witness, experience catharsis, imagine alternative realities, and kindle with the possibilities of conjuring tangible utopia. Utopia and dystopia are two possibilities that feel like they are in tension. They are understood as contradictions, but what if one can exist within the other?
Hanna Noor Mahomed
Hanna Noor Mahomed is a Muslim South African artist of South Asian descent. When she speaks about her work it is as if her entire being is in rapture with an ever-growing puzzle.
“When I paint, I feel like I am painting a landscape. A landscape is not symmetrical. A landscape has many elements – shapes dancing with each other”. Hanna believes that abstract art is a realm full of freedom and possibility.
“As a women of colour, there is so much expectation of tropes and motifs and certain aesthetics that you have to [adhere to]”, while abstraction is a path that breaks away from structure. “When you look at abstraction, it does something on a subconscious level where it reflects the nature of life. The power of abstraction is that it’s not prescriptive. It’s the viewer’s decision and the viewer’s mind working through the system of form”. Abstraction allows Hanna to rebuild and redefine what a world can look and feel like.
Hanna speaks about experiencing creative depression over the past few years due to global violence and sub-human treatment. She found herself asking why care about art, given how everything is tied up in institutions. “I lost hope in art and, to some extent, respect”. Her advice is to “remember the roots of why you do something and the history that falls behind it.”
She reminisces about visiting a museum on a recent trip abroad and being immersed in beautiful works that reignited her curiosity. It made her feel like an art school student again. “The feeling reminded me of why art has always been made, before the commercial art world, the role that it played in society, and why artists did what they did,” she remarks. “Contemporary art today is free because these artists went against the grain at the time”. These realisations made her feel alive again.
“I’m still learning how to protect and nurture my creativity,” she admits. “Now I am in a place where I want to create in the darkness, but I am not in the darkness anymore. I think you can have both.”
According to Hanna, it’s about keeping our spark alive and coming to terms with our agency. “I have within me [the ability to] access. I don’t need to wait for anyone or ask anyone permission to paint a painting. This power makes us survive this time.”
“I believe in a utopia inside me.” For Hanna, it exists in the spirit and the mind. If her art could offer one vision of possibility to the world, she hopes that “People experience the feeling of being human”. She contemplates, “We have been on this Earth for so long and navigated it for so long. Human beings like you and me, thousands of years ago, felt inclined to paint on a cave wall or rock. Ancient symbols at that time were mostly abstract […] it’s a mystery and there’s magic in the mystery of why or what it means […] I do this not because I am an artist, but because I am a human being.”
Phoebe Tran
“In Vietnamese, culturally, you don’t say I love you. You ask, ‘have you eaten yet?” says Phoebe Tran, a New York based chef whose practice also delves into culinary art performances.
“I grew up in such a big family that was surrounded by food.” She reminisces about driving up to Los Angeles where her grandma or an aunt would always be toiling over a big pot of soup. For Phoebe food is a connector and being a chef means understanding the importance of lineage, archiving stories, and preserving aspects of her culture that are often oversimplified or misunderstood.
After her mother got sick and received a devastating diagnosis, Phoebe’s connection to culinary preservation deepened. She was living away from home at the time, but learned how to cook certain dishes via phone calls with her mom. “It all originates from my mom and the relationship that I have with her. I would be in the grocery store, in the aisle, and ask her for recipes or which ingredients to get.”
“My art practice is contextualised to what is going on in the world. We are holding a lot of grief, always.” Processing her mom’s passing is a “microcosm of that grief as well”. Last spring, Phoebe created a two-part piece titled “Grief Ephemeral, Grief Eternal” for a gallery group show. One part featured a short film, mixing footage taken of her mother during seven years of treatment and footage taken during Phoebe’s time in Vietnam after her passing. For the closing ceremony, Phoebe sat in the middle of the gallery, cooked a large steaming pot of fish congee and served it to attendees. It felt like a warm tropical hug, like living inside Joy Harjo’s poem: “The world begins at the kitchen table […] It is a place to hide in the shadow of terror. A place to celebrate the terrible victory […] Perhaps the world will end at the kitchen table, while we are laughing and crying, eating of the last sweet bite”.
Her work is a reminder that anguish can be a catalyst for change. For her interactive performance “Temple of Memory”, Phoebe installed an elaborate alter – inspired by alters her mom used to make as offerings to ancestors and Buddhist deities – then invited anyone to pray about anything. She emphasises the importance of confronting our grief and being intentional with it so that it doesn’t lead to unfettered anxiety or hopelessness. “Processing it collectively or in companionship with another person is so healing […] What my practice is creating space for is collective spirituality.”
For Phoebe, utopia is a loaded and complex term that must be approached with caution since it can “leave people behind, people who are suffering in the world”. When creating an idealist vision, we must question who is included in that vision and who is left out. “The word suffering comes to mind because it is a very Buddhist belief. When you’re mediating you breathe in everyone’s suffering and then you breathe out joy, peace, and hope.”
“I believe in the power of world building within a community and within the safety of like-minded people.”
Gisela McDaniel
Gisela McDaniel, a painter whose maternal origins sprout from the island of Guåhan (Guam) in the Marianas, creates pieces that centre women and femmes of the global south and of indigenous descent, enthroning them against vibrant and flowering, lush backdrops.
“When I include natural elements in my work, I would never be so arrogant as to understand their inclusion as seeking to add ‘realism’ to a painting,” she says. “Instead, I understand the inclusion of such elements [soil, seashells, åmot (medicinal plants)] as living things that exist as spirit and storytellers.”
Gisela explains that in CHamoru and Pasifika cosmology, nature is viewed as extended family and kin, not as something “inert and prime for plunder and profit”. For Gisela, protection of the land and its living beings is central, whether advocating against deep-sea mining of the sacred Mariana Trench – the deepest known part of our planet’s oceans, endearingly called “the heart of the archipelago” – or upholding the right of CHamoru people to self-determination.
“I’m driven to document stories of joy both on and off the island. I want to document and celebrate the way communities that are targeted for extinction, erasure, displacement and replacement continue to ‘show up’ for each other despite the weight, and frankly fear, that often exists and works so hard to silence and disappear us.”
In a world that centres and feeds off the trauma of select populations, finding and holding on to bits of joy allows us to reclaim our humanity, our mental fortitude, and spiritual frequency. Joy and the appreciation of beauty are powerful channels that Gisela harnesses to ground herself and sustain.
“Being here and spending time with my primas (cousins), mañe’lu (siblings), and yan manåmko (Elders), always reminds me of the need to slow down and enjoy the beauty of our island as an act of resistance […] Even something as seemingly ‘insignificant’ as enjoying the ubiquitous butterflies found throughout the island(s), are powerful reminders that the beauty and integrity of our island and indomitable CHamoru resistance are forever intertwined.”
When asked if she believes in utopia, Gisela responds, “I very much believe in the promises of peace and the meaningfulness of fighting for a just way to live.” She turns world-building into a practice by inviting her subject-collaborators to share their own visions of an ideal day or world, “allowing them to summon a world that offers a way of living, loving, and existing is […] a way of calling forth a kind of utopia that goes beyond indulging ‘individual’ pleasure”.
Gisela views art as a “refusal to allow [ourselves or] others to ever underestimate who we are, where we come from, and what we are capable of creating.” She says, “I continue to find inspiration from the strength of the people, especially i famaloa’an (the women) around me. We are so much stronger when we fight, celebrate, rest, laugh, and heal together.”
If her art could plant a vision of possibility, it would be ‘Tinanga’ – the CHamoru word for ‘hope’.
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