IV. Bessma Khalaf: Destruction of the California Landscape

Bessma Khalaf is a multimedia performance artist who immigrated from Iraq to the United States as a child, and has been producing artwork in the Bay Area for the past fourteen years. Khalaf currently creates most of her works in her Oakland studio on Telegraph Avenue, and is known to travel across the Bay Area for performance art pieces. Khalaf’s work is experimental, subversive, and often explores the theme of the destruction landscapes.¹ As a multimedia artist, Khalaf excels in blending mediums, especially through performance, video, and photography, as demonstrated in her 2008 piece Knock Out. In Knock Out, Khalaf punches through a sheet of white paper with images of the California landscape projected onto it, breaking the scenery with her fist. (Figure 11) This performance piece was captured through both video and photography; the medium of Knock Out displayed at Mills College is a photograph of her performance. Khalaf’s piece Knock Out was chosen by the Mills College Museum Studies Workshop for the State of Convergence show because of its depiction of immigrant experiences in California.

Bessma Khalaf. Knock Out (Landscape), 2008.

fullscreen Figure 11

Although Khalaf is not originally from the Bay Area, her piece was selected for State of Convergence because her struggles to find her place in the world reflects the experiences of many other Bay Area immigrants. As an immigrant from Iraq, Khalaf’s experience living in California is complicated by the fact that she “migrated to the place that’s actually destroying the place [she] came from.”² She moved to the United States to escape religious persecution for being Catholic at twelve years old, around the time of the first Gulf War, and has not been back to Iraq since.³

Many of Khalaf’s works explore how she feels that she “stuck in a conflicted place,” living in a country that is actively harming her homeland, and that she can never safely return home because her family is Catholic.⁴ Additionally, Khalaf is unable to go to her home country because of the United States’ sustained violent military presence in Iraq, which has destabilized the government, resources, and communities where she is from.

Within Knock Out, audiences can feel Khalaf’s frustration through the force she uses to destroy the paper and projection. Although the landscapes she is tearing through are pretty and calm, Khalaf’s forceful intervention in breaking the image encourages audiences to look deeper within the meaning of these landscapes. By pairing destruction and beauty, Knock Out expresses states of contradictory feelings that many immigrants in the United States encounter.

Although living in the United States can provide some opportunities and freedoms that were not available in a person’s home country, many immigrants resent the way the United States government can treat the countries they are from through violence and racist policies, and how images and narratives about the United States can be misleading. The United States markets itself as a place of prosperity, unity, and freedom, which is far from the harsh reality most Americans face. The “American Dream” is often too far out of reach for America’s most vulnerable populations and minorities. However, when looking at an idyllic landscape image of the United States, none of these nuances about oppression are present. While speaking about her tendency to destroy landscapes in her works, Khalaf notes that while pondering the “weird destructive relationship” she has with landscapes, she is “starting to realize that it’s because [she] grew up watching landscapes being bombed … [she] definitely [has] a need to not just enjoy the landscape.”⁵ There is a deeper meaning within these landscape photos for Khalaf; as a person who grew up with the United States bombing her home country, there is a sense of catharsis and satisfaction in destroying these specific images.

Khalaf created Knock Out after she finished graduate school at California College of the Arts in response to her experiences filing and archiving a nature photographer’s photos. Although she describes the American landscape as “so vast and beautiful, and diverse,” she has a love-hate relationship with these images because she feels they are incredibly overdone.⁶ Landscape photos are present all over the United States, seen on brochures, on the walls of museums and homes, in commercials and more, leading some audiences to feel desensitized to the beauty of nature they are depicting. Because of how widespread these types of photos are, there are only so many times a person can see a photo of a landscape and feel the same awe of the world’s natural wonders they felt the first time they saw it. Additionally, the widespread prevalence of these images can cause audiences to think less deeply about the implications of portraying the United States as an idealized, picturesque nature scene without acknowledging problematic aspects of it. In her own words, Khalaf says “landscape photography—it’s been done, man.”⁷

Within Khalaf’s approach to art, she is a master at blending together comedy and a sense of absurdity in her works that coincide with the work’s deeper meanings. While it is valid to note that Knock Out is a very subversive piece that is directly tied to the pain Khalaf felt seeing her homeland being bombed, it is also an objectively comedic piece. Khalaf herself recognizes that although how the “political overtones in [her] work” are present, she “[tries] to be more humorous and lighthearted about it because that’s how [she] deal[s] with tragedy in general, [she] ha[s] to laugh at it.”⁸

Khalaf’s pairing of her frustration with landscapes of the United States along with absurdity is apparent in many of her works, including This Land Is My Land and Standing On a Beach. In both of these pieces, Khalaf uses her signatures of utilizing non-traditional forms of material with performance to dismantle and disrupt images of the landscape.

In her video performance piece This Land Is My Land from 2006, Khalaf explores the theme of destroying land by creating a sculpture of it made out of food, attaching it to a wall, and then putting her face right on the sculpture to eat it and spit it out. Within This Land is My Land, Khalaf disrupts the landscape by taking it in and consuming it, which is different than how she destroys the land with her fist in Knock Out. In Khalaf’s 2014 piece Standing on a Beach, Khalaf burns a big piece of paper with a video of an ocean projected onto it. This mode of destruction is similar to Knock Out, because in both of these pieces, she destroys the background of a projected image of the land.

State of Convergence was curated to showcase many differing experiences of Californians, especially Bay Area residents. Through a variety of art pieces, State of Convergence explores the diversity of various communities in the Bay Area, how identity is represented in art, the Bay Area’s history of resistance and protest, and more. For Khalaf in particular, her piece Knock Out explores themes of resentment that many immigrants experience while living in the United States. Although not all of the works in State of Convergence directly relate to each other, the things they all have in common are that they are a part of the Mills College Art Museum collection, and that they showcase the various types of experiences, lives, and communities present in the Bay Area.