I find that due to developments both within contemporary art (see Contemporary conditions and Aesthetic/ artistic practice) and within the field of art analysis (see Composition) we, researchers of contemporary art, are forced not just to work progressively in line with the history of art, when composing a problem or object of analysis, but to work in circles across the analytic material that we find of relevance. Several of the artistic practices that interest me in my current research share an apparent absence of a natural beginning or end, of both entrance and exit, of linear progressivity in an analytic sense. This complicates the process of composing them as singular problems or delimited objects of analysis at first glance, which also explains why I have been spending quite a significant amount of time working my way into each of these practices. Consequently, and more or less by coincidence, I have begun to think across these practices, in a kind of circular movement, to activate the kind of research (thinking, writing, practicing) that I am convinced they invite me to unfold.

To give an example:

The experimental feature film Ouroboros (2017) is made by Basma Al-Sharif. Setting off from the Gaza Strip, the film is a visually intoxicating journey alongside a male character travelling through different landscapes marked by destruction, erasure, and gradual decay. The title “ouroboros” points to an ancient Egyptian symbol depicting a serpent eating its own tail. And really, the film is cyclic, it marks its end as its beginning, as the main character searches for his lost lover while leaving and reuniting with her in an apparently endless loop. Therefore, I feel tempted to argue that the work explicitly contemplates on the idea of “returning” which is so central to Palestinian thought, imaginary, and history of suffering. It seems perfectly plausible to conclude that the film discusses the necessity of practicing a sort of defamiliarization with – or an unlearning of – linear, teleological orderings of time and experience to move forward from loss, trauma, refugeehood. Yet somehow this conclusion is frictionless. It eludes a certain situated sensitivity and places me, the analyst, outside of Al-Sharif’s work. This plausible reading offers an analytic key to Al-Sharif’s work (“oh, that’s what it’s all about”) which inherently claims to transcend the analytic situation that fosters it. Is that fulfilling? Or: for whom is that kind of analytic key fulfilling? For me, the researcher? For you, the reader? For Al-Sharif, the originator? Ouroboros as a cinematic experience do not beg of me as an analyst to solve or order or master it. And really, I do not wish to solve anything, I do not wish to stabilize the fundamentally destabilizing force generated by the film.

Why is it, I ask myself, that the strive within the work itself towards an unlearning of linear teleological orderings of time and experience is somehow closely associated with the continuous return of images of the sea? Both the film’s first and last sequences show aerial views of the sea. Turquoise blue and deep-green waves roll back and forth close to a shoreline, repeatedly. The white-toned foam arises over the sea’s endless surface and, experienced horizontally from above, the waves seem to roll both forward and backwards. The sound of the waves is constant, buzzing like a large metallic bee. Why is that? What do these waves want from me, from us? Why is the sea – which in the case of Ouroboros is not just any sea, but the Mediterranean Sea – so central here? What is the significance of it as a problem, a motif, a rhythmic figure, a referent that returns indefinitely (or so it seems) in Al-Sharif’s film?

As I begin to follow this line of thought, I recall this sea elsewhere in my material. What is for example the significance of the Mediterranean Sea in Heba Amin’s lecture performance and exhibition Operation Sunken Sea from 2018? Is the Mediterranean Sea not a sort of epistemic container from which the work begins and ends? And then, I am reminded of something else, something close to heart, like a beloved ghost whispering from behind the computer screen. Razan Al-Salah’s experimental short film your father was born 100 years old, and so was the Nakba (2018) unfolds the narrative of Al-Salah’s grandmother’s imaginary return to her Palestinian hometown, Jaffa. Living in Lebanon as a refugee, the grandmother is unable to return to Jaffa due to Israeli border restrictions. In the film, she revisits her lost home through the momentarily frozen, strangely disembodied images of present-day Jaffa produced by Google Street View. Returning to Jaffa through these images some 50 years after her forced displacement – along with the forced displacement of around 700.000 other Palestinians in the wake of al-Nakba, the establishment of the state of Israel in 1948 – the city is no longer recognizable to the aged woman. Her ghostly echo wanders in vain through cyberspace as she becomes more and more desperate due to the futile search for her son Ameen and for streets, shops, and buildings in Jaffa matching those of her memory. Finally, towards the end of the film, the grandmother reaches Jaffa’s seaside on the coast of the Mediterranean Sea. She overlooks a panoramic view with dramatic clouds covering both shore and sea. As she stands there glancing at the sea, she realizes that the line of the horizon is somehow fractured in the representation produced by Google. It seems to be reconstructed by two separate images that have been inaccurately edited together. “Even the sea is broken,” Al-Salah’s grandmother regretfully concludes just before the image screen turns black.

Even the sea is broken. Seeing the film again, her statement attracts me with such power. It is direct and abstract, it's enormously sad and impossible, yet it's right there, in the images. Most importantly, in an analytic context, her statement remotely suggests or expresses a potential analytic approach to Al-Sharif’s and Amin’s works that do not promise to solve them, but to complicate them. The Mediterranean Sea as it appears across this body of artistic practices is of analytic relevance, not only as an object of analysis, but as a method for analyzing artistic practices under contemporary conditions. It is something to think through, not to know it, but to think, write, practice it, in circles. As Philip Steinberg and Kimberly Peters writes:

“[…] one is continually faced by the paradox that any attempt to ‘know’ the sea by separating it into its constituent parts serves only to reveal its unknowability as an idealized stable and singular object”^[1]1Steinberg, Philip and Peters, Kimberly: "Wet Ontologies, Fluid Spaces: Giving Depth to Volume through Oceanic Thinking," in: Environment and Planning: Society and Space, 2015, vol. 33. p. 247-264, p. 251..

To engage analytically with contemporary artistic practices, which are, among many other things, characterized by their tendency not to be delimitable within a certain space or time is first and foremost to accept the unknowability of these practices as idealized, stable objects and, secondly, to think, write, practice research on, of, about these practices in circles. Maybe Ocean studies could even be supplemented by Contemporary Art studies in this quote by Alice Te Punga Somerville:

“I want to ask whether Ocean Studies might be better understood as if it were itself an ocean: without a singular starting point or origin; endlessly circulating. Not beyond genealogy, because nothing is, but possessed of a genealogy that is impossibly and beautifully wide"^[2]2Somerville, Te Punga: "Where Oceans Come from," in: Comparative Literature, 2017, vol. 69 (1), p. 25-31, p. 28..