Last week I was at Art Basel, walking through the fair’s Unlimited exhibition space, where monumental works and multimedia projects are on view. The hall was noisy and filled with what felt like thousands of people queueing to see interactive art installations, stopping to talk to one another or taking photos and selfies. (It’s always struck me that, when visiting art fairs, one has to work extra-hard to actually see art.)
One of the works that arrested me was a 26-minute film called The Watchman, by the Beirut-born, Paris-based artist Ali Cherri. It was screened in a small room whose entryway was set just behind Cherri’s giant clay sculptures of two soldiers and a dog. Not usually one to sit through an entire video installation, I was surprised by how quickly Cherri’s film drew me in.
It is a seemingly simple tale of an army sergeant on night duty on a watchtower at an unnamed border. We watch time quietly pass, the sergeant’s steady gaze turned outwards towards a mostly vacant desert. At one point a small lizard moves sluggishly by. At another moment, a bird on its little back takes its last breaths, tiny legs twitching, having flown into the windowpane of the tower. At night the sergeant is visited by glowing lights approaching from the distance, and ghosts of restless soldiers still marching on duty from another lifetime and war.
Moving and haunting as the video is, what was equally powerful was what was happening in the small room. People had crowded in, leaning against the walls, sitting cross-legged on the floor, fully tuned into the quiet, slow-paced footage on the screen. The energy felt still and full of reflective emotion, so different from the bustling art fair outside. When the film ended, hardly anyone shifted as the credits rolled. It was as if no one wanted to leave this little cocoon of space.
Over the past several days I have found myself mentally returning to that room and thinking about how it created a sliver of time where people felt comfortable to sit, feel and consider challenging material. It led me to the idea of a sanctuary, the places in our lives where we can tend to, reflect on or care for the emotions that rise and flow in our lives. What makes somewhere a possible sanctuary, and do we have access to such places in our lives?
The 1888 painting “Recalling the Past” by Carlton Alfred Smith shows a young woman in distress. She is turned away from the desk she is sitting at, resting her head on the back of her chair, one hand clutching a piece of paper. On the floor beside her is a wastebasket with crumpled scraps strewn around it, a discarded addressed envelope among them.
Smith fills the painting with furniture, objects and details, giving the sense of a room well used and lived in. Light comes in through the leaded window and, given the white apron over her pink dress, we can assume the girl has taken time out of the duties of the day to deal with whatever is plaguing her emotionally.
The painting made me think of Virginia Woolf’s essay “A Room of One’s Own”, and the necessity of having a safe sanctuary in which to do one’s work — creative work, of course, but relatedly, the work of grappling with life’s difficulties. I am drawn to Smith’s painting because when I myself have dealt with emotional challenges, it has been life-saving to have a place in my home that feels quiet, private, surrounded by what is familiar to me. These elements seem to open up space for the painful internal reckonings that often demand our attention even in the middle of the day, amid our other responsibilities.
Where are the spaces and places that make you feel safe enough and allow you room to process difficult things? Who or what would be present?
I love the 1650 painting “Dog at Rest” by the Dutch painter Gerrit Dou. Held at the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, the image of a drowsy dog, its eyes half-open, curled up against an assemblage of wicker, terracotta, bundled branches and slippers, exudes a sense of restful peace. Every element seems alive with its own unique energy.
I was struck by how this painting made me consider sanctuary from another point of view. When dogs feel safe, they seem capable of finding a place of rest anywhere, whether a spot by the window where the sun pours in, the nook of their bed or, as in this painting, on a humble shelf. For a contented dog, the world is full of possible sanctuaries.
An animal is guided by self-preservation, untroubled by questions of whether rest is “deserved” or “earned”. I think many of us struggle to choose rest because we are steeped in cultures that suggest rest is for the weak, that if we pause for a moment we will fall behind our peers.
What if we begin to imagine that our world is full of spaces that invite us to rest? As I am writing this piece, I still have a full day ahead of me. Yet I have told myself that when I am finished I will use my lunch hour to walk down to the park at the end of my street and lie down on the grass without my phone. I know this will renew me on multiple levels. I am continually learning how to define restful space as a form of sanctuary because to be renewed in mind and body is, to me, also part of extending a healthier version of myself back into the world.
Light floods the room in the 1899 work “Arranging Summer Blooms” by the Danish painter Adolf Heinrich-Hansen. A woman in a long cream dress stands in an ornate sitting room arranging flowers in a large white vase. On the right side of the canvas, French doors open on to the verdant summer day outside. Another door gives us a glimpse into another brightly sunlit room. The woman’s hat sits on a table and we imagine she has just come in from cutting the flowers from the garden.
The painting feels airy, breezy and redolent of a fresh new summer morning. I am drawn to this work as one that speaks to sanctuary because it feels full of light and the possibility of a new day. Whatever might be happening in our lives, there is always the possibility of a new day on the horizon, one that may come with a sliver or an entire radiance of light. And perhaps sometimes we have to find the faith and courage to tend to spaces until we coax some element of sanctuary out of them. Whether gathered in dark small rooms with others or in expansive light-filled spaces that remind us to move with hope.
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