foreign matter

Commentary on the book for the project

by Edmund Clark

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"A voice is calling, “Clear the way for the LORD in the wilderness;

Make smooth in the desert a highway for our God.

Isaiah 40:3

 

The Bible is rich with references to the desert. It is a powerful metaphor for temptation, isolation, and a place of wilderness to be refreshed and enriched by the presence and word of God.

 

In the desert of Qatar, on the outskirts of Doha, Hannah Bartos looks behind the walls and screens of Church City, a religious compound for migrant workers. Allocated, sanctioned, tolerated, in a country where Islam in the national religion.

 

Within these confines we encounter the iconography of an all seeing and, hopefully, tolerant God, belonging to a multiplicity of Christian denominations - as well as the all-seeing surveillance technologies of security. This juxtaposition suggests both the stark enclosed modernity of migrant life in Qatar, and the gaze of a controlling power observing the smooth highway they make for their foreign God.

 

The challenges of visually documenting the hidden, and conveying the experience of separation, are not easy. Bartos succeeds in this endeavour. Her inside eye provides a nuanced picture of the practice of Christianity for the growing population of migrants in Qatar. She represents the clandestine nature of this diasporic religiosity through the structure and design of the object. Enclosure and disclosure are sensitively transmitted through the visual and haptic experience of engagement. As she discovered things to record in discrete denominational areas, behind doors opened to her, or by her, so the reader will discover these sights, folded in the pages of the book. The assemblage is contained within covers decorated with Islamic architectural motifs.

 

The work provides glimpses into this oasis of faith through the spaces, traces and faces she encounters in the desert. In doing so she evokes the backstory of the rapid development of the Gulf and the people tasked with facilitating this by the rulers of mega rich oil and gas states. This work does not focus on the economic imperatives or insecurities of migrant life. Rather, this work reveals where they come, in their Sunday best, to connect with their God, and to find solace in the desert from the burdens of worldly existence."

 

Edmund Clark.