I Can’t Sleep: Homage to a Uyghur Homeland
When I met with Lisa Ross at the Miyako Yoshinaga Gallery, the photographer was full of hope as much as she was deeply concerned about the plight of the Uyghur community in China’s Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region, with whom she has worked for more than a decade. In the last few years, the Uyghurs—Turkic Sufi Muslim inhabitants of the region for centuries—have been disappeared at alarming rates and reportedly incarcerated in ‘de-extremification’ training camps by the Chinese government. This aggressive move is said to be a counter terrorism measure against the community’s alleged roots in modern global Islamism.
Ross’s exhibition I Can’t Sleep: Homage to a Uyghur Homeland, comes at a time when various human rights organisations, journalists, and scholars have exposed sequestered camps in China which house thousands of Uyghurs. Her homage begins with a tribute to her friend and colleague, the prominent Uyghur anthropologist Rahile Dawut who disappeared in 2017. A large grey toned mural which measures thirty by eleven feet, and comprises photographs of Dawut taken by Ross, forms the backdrop of the exhibition. In the forefront, nine color photographs, mostly sixty by forty inches, of women and children seated and playing on wooden beds in the open Turpan desert, immediately draw us in.
Unlike her previous work titled After Night, and Living Shrines in Uyghur China, that featured empty beds in the landscape, here for the first time we see their occupants. For Ross these beds placed outdoors in the summertime have always been of particular interest. Like her ethereal images of Uyghur Sufi shrines in the desert, the beds too were markers of human presence. But now for Ross there is an
Lisa Ross, Untitled (Blue), from ‘I Can’t Sleep’ series, 2007/2015. Archival pigment print on cotton rag paper. ©Lisa Ross. Courtesy Miyako Yoshinaga, New York.
