I raise my hand to the sky, palm flat to block the sun so I can better admire the red kite a few metres above. I didn’t sleep well and woke early to walk the hill behind Helmsdale in northern Scotland. At the viewpoint, there’s a memorial bench—‘to our brightest star, loved and missed by all’—where I sit, gaze unfocused, looking across the North Sea. I think about the people who live in the houses below, but mostly I think about the people in Gaza who, month after month, have been violently expelled from their homes in a campaign of ethnic cleansing that has forced millions of people from north to south to east to west, now compressed into a space the size of Los Angeles airport among bodies, bombs and tents. I think of the children on the beach looking out over the Mediterranean. What kind of world would it be if people were able to move freely like the red kite above?
By the 1870s, red kites had been hunted to extinction in Scotland. It wasn’t until more than 100 years later that the experimental reintroduction of breeding pairs sought to restore the species. The ways in which birds, as well as humans, need care and freedom from oppression to survive and thrive is the subject of We Move as a Murmuration, an exhibition at Timespan in Helmsdale. Co-curated by director Giulia Gregnanin and independent curator Naoko Mabon, the exhibition’s origin is rooted in the bird flu outbreak of 2021 which brought some species of migratory birds to the point of extinction. Bringing together artists from different geographies, the exhibition meditates on the multiple intersecting crises resulting from extractive capitalism’s catastrophic effects on the environment as well as the possibilities of murmuration as a joyful practice for collective, cross-species liberation.
The emotional and theoretical heart of the exhibition lies in the work of American writer and activist, adrienne maree brown, whose book Emergent Strategy: Shaping Change, Changing Worlds inspired the title. Visitors can listen to maree brown reading a selection of “spells”, the product of a year-long reflection on murmuration in a column for Yes! magazine. Through headphones she speaks these words: ‘We are the stewards of the future. We will care for our shared home…We will make new pathways with our healing. We will expand our we beyond humanity—to all that lives.’
In another sound piece, Black American ornithologist and poet, J. Drew Lanham, contrasts his love of birds and birdwatching with the blunt realities of what it means to engage in these activities as a Black man in the USA. Here, Lanham reads ‘Joy is the Justice we Give Ourselves’ in his resonant baritone, every stanza a lyrical and damming refutation of the misguided yet prevalent perception that personal relationships with birds and the natural environment are apolitical. From research showing that a majority people of colour view the British countryside as a white environment where they are made to feel out of place to the notorious incident of a white woman dog walker in NY’s Central Park calling the cops on Black birdwatcher Christian Cooper after he asked her to leash her dog, racism and exclusion have long played key roles in mediating access to nature. Lanham’s gorgeous poem refuses exclusion and claims joy while never ignoring the deadly realities of white racism towards Black bodies in America. It is possible to hold multiple truths simultaneously.
Joy is all the Black birds,
flocked together,
too many to count,
too many to name,
every one different
from the next,
swirling in singularity
across amber-purpled sky.
[…]
Joy is the sharp eye
watching little brown sparrows,
and the kind one,
focused
on little brown children too.
[…]
Joy is the surrender,
to faith of push,
to trust in lift,
giving over to Toni’s command
to ride the air.
To float above
the trouble of this world
on a wish.
Nearby, Joan Ross’s digital animation, I Give You a Mountain (2018) brings to life a 1786 perspective watercolour of Sir Ashton Lever’s eighteenth-century natural history museum. Lever, a voracious acquirer of fossils, corals, birds and mammals, famously held a large collection originally obtained by Captain James Cook. In lurid, fluorescent colours, Ross imagines Lever’s museum reclaimed by the plants and animals displayed on its open shelves. Insects and lush vegetation begin to take over before the scene shifts, moving through the museum to encounter headless birds and a man resembling Sir Ashton underneath a bell jar as the collector becomes the collected. Then, an amusing scene I didn’t understand about dogs happens before the entire building crumbles to dust and fades away into a mountain landscape which then also disintegrates, leaving us at the end of the earth, maybe the end of nature, with only two figures—our eighteenth-century collectors, I presume—for company. I’m not sure whether the ending is hopeful or dystopian, but it speaks to the ways in which imperial acquisition and preservation were also ultimately destruction.
Mamadou Tall Diedhiou’s charming scrapyard birds made with waste reclaimed from the suburbs of Dakar connects Senegal to northern Scotland via the migratory bird routes that link Africa with the north Atlantic. The common terns, great skuas, and gannets which use these routes were some of the birds most affected by the bird flu outbreak. Diedhiou’s sculptures are pieced together from memories of migratory birds in his village, Niomoune, located on the Casamance river not far from Senegal’s western coast. Created from fragments of gleaned wood, fabric, metal, straw, shoes, eyeglass frames, and other objects, the birds are as much creations of the imagination as they are representative of any particular species. For Diedhiou, the sculptures also memorialise the many birds whose forest habitats were destroyed during the ongoing civil war for independence.
At the exhibition’s entrance, Sethembile Msezane’s mesmerising photograph Chapungu – The Day Rhodes Fell (2015) captures the the artist’s performance on the day Cecil John Rhodes’s statue was removed from the University of Cape Town in 2015. Msezane embodies the spirit of Chapungu, eagle and bringer of good fortune to Shona communities. Wings of twisted and braided Black hair hang on Msezane’s arms and a black and gold beaded veil, perhaps a nod to Chapungu’s distinctive facial features, cover Msezane’s face. Though the image has been widely circulated online and in exhibitions—I have seen it many, many times—it remains incredibly potent and affective. By reclaiming and centring space for her Black woman’s body, Msezane refuses the spectacle of the removal of the coloniser’s statue. In manifesting Chapungu, Msezane also brings a celebration of birds and their associations with good fortune to an important day in South African history.
In the far corner of the gallery, Khaled Jarrar introduces the Palestinian sunbird to Helmsdale. An important motif for Palestinians and the Palestinian resistance, here the sunbird is writ large on a vibrant, colourful imagined postal stamp for the State of Palestine. An artist from Jenin in the occupied West Bank, Jarrar foregrounds the sunbird’s symbolic meaning of resistance and resilience—the species has defiantly survived despite the ongoing destruction of green spaces by the illegal Israeli occupation. The stamp is a statement of hope and unshakeable belief in the future existence of a free Palestine. By contrast, a life-size bronze sculpture of the Palestinian sunbird rests on the ground on a low piece of polished black marble, the same kind more often used for gravestones. The immobility of the bronze sunbird sharply opposes the joy of the bird in flight depicted on the sunshine-yellow stamp above. Two completely different representations of the same bird speak to the collective pain, silencing and repression of the current genocide, as well as the resilience, defiance and determination of the Palestinian people to continue to live on their land with dignity and self-determination.
The dichotomy of Jarrar’s work perfectly encapsulates the exhibition’s most important idea: while birds in flight are frequently deployed as metaphors for freedom, the reality is that they, like us, are grounded species rooted in particular environments. We are connected, to each other and to our surroundings. Even in a world where everyone could move as freely and easily as a red kite, we all need care and freedom from oppression to survive and thrive. We don’t need wings to be free. We need a murmuration.
We Move As A Murmuration is at Timespan until 30 September 2024.
Image credits from top:
1, 2. Red kite and Helmsdale from above. Photos: Crystal Bennes
3, 4, 5.. Installation views of We Move as a Murmuration, Timespan including works by Sethembile Msezane, Hanna Tuulikki, J. Drew Lanham, and Petrit Halilaj
6,7. Joan Ross, I Give You a Mountain, 2018 (stills from HD video animation)
8. Mamadou Tall Diedhiou, The Bird, 2018 & The Bird, date unknown
9. Sethembile Msezane, Chapungu – The Day Rhodes Fell, 2015
10, 11. Khaled Jarrar, Postage Stamp, Hopefully, date unknown & Palestine Sunbird, 2024
