Might some meaning accidentally emerge from meaninglessness? – Dina Danish’s Protocols and Other Formal Agreements at Museum Rijswijk
Protocols and Other Formal Agreements at Museum Rijswijk is Dina Danish’s first solo exhibition in a Dutch museum, showing an oeuvre spanning over fifteen years of explorations into language, gesture, modes of standardisation, and the visual culture of politics. Manuela Zammit goes to have a look, finding almost all the forms that political and social signification, (mis)translation, (mis)understanding and (mis)interpretation could possibly assume, from a brass replica of stone-age chewing gum, to a meaningless letter, and a series of appliqué tapestries depicting important political moments from recent years.
In her practice, Danish draws greatly from her own situation of having lived across continents and being immersed in multiple cultural contexts and languages: being born in Paris (France, 1981), growing up in Cairo (Egypt) and San Francisco (US), and being based in Amsterdam since 2011. That her last name is Danish is an apt coincidence that the artist does not refrain from playing with as well. Speaking from personal experience, the process of moving and finding oneself in a new country kickstarts a twofold process. On one hand you start looking for a sense of familiarity: What is the common ground between the last place and here? Which words and gestures are universally understood? On the other hand, you are more sensitive to the new specificities and all that which is yet inaccessible to you. Very often this includes the local language. You witness new social cues which you try to decode. You extend your hearing towards strange utterances, repeating them to yourself, and often calling upon your imagination to guess at their meaning. To my delight, Danish’s forms often creatively embodied this mode of experience riddled with uncertainty, ambiguity, and most importantly, curiosity.
I first make my way through a hallway of colourful canvases hung along one side of the wall, folded and painted to look precisely like what the title suggests: Sports Memorabilia, Signed and Everything: Sports shirts (2017). This first encounter with Danish’s work presents me with a word of caution, or perhaps encouragement; the painting of an FC Barcelona t-shirt playfully misspelled former team captain’s Lionel Messi’s last name to ‘Messy’, as if signalling the beginning of the undoing of the linguistic and symbolic orders. This characterised my approach towards most of the works throughout my visit: look at everything carefully and at least twice from different angles, because nothing is exactly what it appears to show at first glance. For text-based works—provided they were in a language I am familiar with—I internally repeat the words in different accents and feel how even a slightly different pronunciation can alter meaning: ‘Messi’ does end up sounding a lot like ‘messy’ when spoken in French, a language which I assumed Danish herself to be fluent in, if I picked up on the correct accent while watching her introductory video at the entrance.
As I walk into the tapestry room, I am first greeted by a set of earlier works, among which The Things that Count (2011 – ongoing) consisting of a collection of eleven books titled by the numbers zero to ten, placed upright from left to right in ascending order. The work offers an exercise in idiosyncratic ways of sorting content and a play on the double meaning of the word ‘count’: count as in adding up numbers and count as in that which matters most. Read also as: a librarian’s worst nightmare. In another work occupying the width of the other wall, more counting takes place: The One; The Twos; The Threes; The Fours; And the One and Only Five (also from 2011) is a series of five holograms, each depicting a hand gesturing all the different ways in which one can count to each of those numbers. Funnily enough, you can count to one in five different ways (including by giving the middle finger, ha!) but there is only one way to gesture the number five. I chuckle to myself.
Among this cluster of playful experiments, the visitor is also met with two books about the Peace of Rijswijk, a set of treaties between the Grand Alliance (the Holy Roman Empire, Denmark, Sweden, the Duchy of Savoy, Spain, England, and the Dutch Republic) and France dating from 1697 that ended the Nine Years’ War. The books are positioned side by side. One of them depicts the King of England and the other the King of France, but despite finding themselves on opposing sides, they look almost identical in demeanour and attire. They are both depicted according to the standardised way in which powerful men were to be portrayed at the time, making it almost impossible to tell them apart on the basis of their sanctioned public portrayal.
This reconciliatory moment in Western European history was famously characterised by great commotion around how diplomatic meetings should unfold at each step. For example, how the diplomats involved in the negotiations should ride their carriages over a single access bridge on the way to Huis ter Nieuburch, the location of the signing. The perspective that we in the present are afforded by history as we look at meticulous visual documentations of the event from the time, reveals the theatrical nature of the international diplomacy and politics of back then. The designated meeting rooms, behavioural procedures, documents, and dress code appear as stage and set pieces each playing a specific, universally understood role within a larger choreography. There was absolutely no room for miscommunication: the smallest misunderstanding could throw whole countries and kingdoms back into a state of war.
The perspective that we in the present are afforded by history reveals the theatrical nature of the international diplomacy and politics of back then.
I turn towards the tapestries and I am met by embroidered faceless figures, disembodied hands, and headless bodies. I quickly realise that in some respects, not much has changed since 1697 after all. The textiles are made using the artisanal khayamiya technique from Cairo, a refined appliqué style originally used for decorative tents. They each reproduce highly circulated media images referring to major political moments from around the world, including the immediate aftermath of the attempted assassination of US president Donald Trump, moments of large-scale protest in Iran, Syria, and China, British queen Camilla Parker Bowles playing ping pong with former French first lady Brigitte Macron, and a group of Arab ministers shaking hands during a ‘historic’ summit hosted in Israel in 2022.
Danish has stated that especially since during the COVID-19 pandemic, she has been equally confused and fascinated by the aesthetics of politics, especially during high-stakes official camera moments such as these. The cues and props in the political theatre of our time are pant suits, podia, microphones, national flags, protest banners, a strong handshake. While the news cycle has a short memory and is always swiftly moving on to the next piece of breaking news, the impact of politicians’ words and actions is far-reaching and long-lasting in many people’s lives. The textiles’ weighty materiality, their different patterns and textures, along with the labour, meticulousness and time involved in their making, stand in tension with the fleeting photographic moment. Unlike the news image, which is intended to pass a clear message and be universally understood, these textiles are artworks, and therefore open to (re)interpretation.
I make my way upstairs. Here, a variety of forms and sounds turn the space into a sort of Dada-esque viewing room. The top floor is where Danish’s oeuvre comes closest to a rich tradition of conceptual art concerned with language, at times recalling well-known works by John Baldessari or Joseph Kosuth in that here, the works’ forms directly alluded to language’s consequential materiality and showed thorough processes of the making-material of language, for instance through exercises in writing, translation, and repetition. A main achievement of the conceptual art movement’s involvement with language which Danish also partakes in, was highlighting how language inherently shapes our understanding of the world and often determines the extent of our engagement with the world of ideas. The artist’s specific condition of having grown up across multiple cultural contexts was traceable here in the multiple languages that she tinkered with, and in some of the specific artistic and cultural references that she employed.
I am met with a large sculpture of an open packet of chewing gum (Big Red Out of the Box 2, 2013), a video work of the artist practising German (Practising foreign languages, 2011) in which Danish makes visible (and audible) the mental and physical effort that goes into memorising and pronouncing words in a new language. The word ‘THERE’ projected onto a wall, that once you approach it (and in so doing blocking the projection light) turns into ‘HERE’ (traced on the wall in pencil). Two works dedicated to the comma, including The Unnamable (2010), in which Danish reproduces the six pages-long final sentence of Samuel Beckett’s novel carrying the same title in large format. She blanked out the words, leaving only the commas, thus prioritising the moments of pause that actually enable the reader to carry on until the end. Explorations of senseless translations to Arabic, such as in Ursonate in Arabic Pronunciation (undated), in which Danish translates Kurt Schwitters’ poem Ursonate, composed out of German-sounding meaningless and repetitive sounds, into Arabic-sounding sounds. Might some meaning accidentally emerge from utter meaninglessness?
This is where I was briefly brought back to my earlier years in the Netherlands, an interesting time during which I voluntarily enlisted myself to the energy-draining feat of learning Dutch and necessarily got used to navigating clumsy grammatical configurations, insufficient vocabulary, and awkward misunderstandings. Danish’s works reminded me that if there is a moment when language exerts its full weight on you, when there is no mistaking it for non-material, it is when it falls short: when not having the right words or even any words can either turn into an imaginative space of playfulness and connection that eludes codification, or cut off the possibility of meaningful communication. Although, speaking in the same language, or even subscribing to carefully orchestrated protocols might not amount to much in the end either; the Peace of Rijswijk was broken within five years after it was signed.
Protocols and Other Formal Agreements is curated by Julia Geerlings and on view until June 8, 2025.
Manuela Zammit
is a writer and researcher from Malta
