A Limitless Solution to the Spectacle of Tragedy: Faiyaz Jafri and his Drowning Girl

By Emily Owens

Faiyaz Jafri is a self-taught new media artist and current instructor at the Pratt Institute, Parsons School of Design, and Queens College in New York City. The artist was born and raised in rural Holland and is of Pakistani descent. Prints, paintings, video installations, animations and life-sized sculptures by the artist have been exhibited throughout the world. He is the recipient of multiple awards for his films, and his multidisciplinary work has been commissioned internationally by a myriad of publications and commercial projects.

Faiyaz Jafri’s film, Drowning Girl (2019) explores the tension between the media spectacle of the destruction of the Twin Towers and its irreplaceability as a monument of the US landscape.  

Drowning Girl  simulates a multitude of replicated towers on an endless horizon, which erect out of the building's foundations. The countless gray towers emerge from an empty landscape and are soon towered over by enormous humanoid figures. As the figures travel blankly, arms swinging, the towers reveal a neo-classical form, at the top of which a woman submerged in a green liquid is trapped. Just as one begins to empathize with the trapped female figuress, their eyes send out red lasers, cutting the male figures down as though they are but slabs of ruined stone. The men are reduced to rubble, while the towers let loose neo-classic doric style columns that rocket into a new territory. The columns function as a metaphor for US Imperialism and the obsession with neo-classical forms as a symbol for free enterprise. This new territory becomes revealed as a staircase which the men dutifully climb, returning once again to the top of the structures. The slow, calculated, and mechanical maneuvering of the figures recalls Terry Gilliam’s Brazil (1985) and feels reminiscent of the capitalist epicenter which the towers once served. We are then left, at the top of the doric column, in which the drowning girl once again appears, this time, her eyes hovering calmly over the greywater of which she is the same hue, eventually sinking.

Faiyaz proposes a post-Postmodern “solution” to the honoring of a symbolic structure incapable of replacement, as his work responds to the French intellectual philosopher Jean Baudrillard, who said: "The problem is insoluble. Quite simply because one can imagine nothing equivalent that would be worth destroying—that would be worthy of being destroyed. The Twin Towers were worth destroying." [1] Perhaps Baudrillard was right, as the buildings were never replaced and the base of the foundations of the two towers have instead become a memorial and tourist destination, its absence forever leaving a lingering trace in the downtown Manhattan financial district. The destruction of the towers, Jafri posits, was inevitable, as it was previously imagined in countless fictions prior to the actual event. Mass media films and fictions predicted the event years prior to the realization of the event. The hyperreal, in Baudrillard’s terminology, was true, and “too close for comfort.”

Drowning Girl is an intellectual heavyweight with Jafri name-dropping myriad philosophers and cultural theorists. Most important of these are Jean Baudrillard and contemporary philosopher Eric Gans. Gans posits a theory of postmillennialism which associates postmodernist culture with “victimary thinking.”[2] Ethically speaking, this creates a non-negotiable opposition between perpetrators and victims. Gans uses the Holocaust and Hiroshima as examples, while in our current culture we could include Cancel Culture and the MeToo movement, in which the delineation between victim and perpetrator is stark and immovable. 

A conversation with the artist helped to decipher how postmillennialism appears in Drowning Girl as a measured critique of the American reaction to the events of 9/11. As an artist of Pakistani descent, Jafri both witnessed the event and grappled to simultaneously mourn while confronting the contradictions and complexities of US nationalism that followed, including increasing xenophobia which the artist himself routinely experienced. Nationalism too came with an air of “victimary thinking” in which the US public seemed baffled that a catastrophic event could occur on their soil. This victimary thinking did little to consider the role of the United States in the events that had occurred, or culpability moving forward. Instead, we went into a full-on attack of the Middle East, a reaction which killed many more civilian lives than the ones lost on our own soil here in the US. For a more contemporary example, perhaps, we can think of the Ukrainian child who traveled 700 miles alone and is being regarded as a hero, while a Mexican child, also traveling alone for 700 miles was immediately detained at the US-Mexican Border. The self-victimization comes from a strange state of ignorance, nationalism, or both, but refuses to take responsibility for the causation of a massive tragedy, which required our own materials, Jafri points out, to manifest. A couple of box cutters and commercial American airplanes were commandeered to execute the event. This too, recalls Faiyaz’s concept of the “Disneyfication” of the events of September 11, 2001, which he initially explored in his powerful animation This Ain’t Disneyland, which was commissioned by Denver Digerati in 2013. His work is both critical of the American nationalism, self-victimization and media spectacle that followed (pictures from “every angle were coming out hour by hour,”[3] Hollywood blockbuster films and unending live broadcast of the event). But the artist also mourns, as a New Yorker, as a witness, and as an immigrant to this country.

Both the male and female characters in Drowning Girl continue with Jafri’s attempt at “solutions,” both of the capitalist-worker-bee, climbing the never ending column to the top, and the trapped female character who ultimately sinks into a gray liquid after asserting her dominance in the previous scene. Jafri’s work critiques the Gen Z vernacular of our digital culture, and simultaneously makes light of it. The title: Drowning Girl, ironically appropriates a Roy Lichtenstein painting of the same name. A “meme-ified” version of Lichtenstein’s character, found years ago by the artist, updates the feminine character to go from drowning in a pool of water without asking for help, or waiting by the telephone, as one used to do, to awaiting a text on a cellphone in her mid-mod apartment. Here, Jafri cites feminist theory, explaining that his character of the drowning girl acts as both the protagonist and the victim in his film. Drowning Girl asserts her power by laser-cutting the male figures down to the ground, but also continues to be a victim of a never-ending cycle of patriarchal power, as the men continue to ascend the tower to the top. In this way, Jafri seems to assert to the viewer that history continues to repeat itself, despite our attempts at social equality.

While the solution to the irreplaceability of the Twin Towers has occurred in a digital simulation, the human cycle of violence towards one another, often in the name of capital continues, ultimately leaving the viewer with a consideration that the real solution to calculated violence is one of the human condition.

Works cited

[1] Jafri, Faiyaz. “Drowning Girl.” Faiyaz Jafri, January 25, 2022. http://faiyazjafri.com/drowning-girl/

[2] “Eric Gans.” Eric Gans - The Art and Popular Culture Encyclopedia. Accessed April 6, 2022. http://www.artandpopularculture.com/Eric_Gans.

[3] Faiyaz Jafri, Interview by author, Zoom. March 11, 2022.