The UN world happiness report names Finland ‘the happiest country in the world.’ By contrast, the same list names Afghanistan as the world’s unhappiest country. بود نبود /There was and there wasn't charts artist Elina Ansary’s Finnish and Afghan family history and examines the intersection between these far-flung cultures.

Ansary’s paternal grandmother, Terttu, was born in America to Finnish parents. In 1945, she married an Afghan student named Mir Amanuddin Ansary, and went with him to Afghanistan, where they lived for the next 19 years before separating and Terttu moving to US with the children. 

There was and there wasn't installation centers around a growing collection of blown eggs suspended in a lacy, weblike cloud. Onto these eggs, Ansary paints family photos from her father’s idyllic, cross-cultural childhood in Afghanistan during the 1950s and 60s. These monochromatic egg tempera paintings use genuine ultramarine pigment. Ultramarine blue is powdered Lapis lazuli, a stone that comes from Afghanistan. More valuable than gold, the rich color is integral in western art history, a defining hue in Renaissance painting. The eggshells are fragile, evoking spring, and with their globular shapes, each is a tiny world. A mineral mined directly from Afghan soil binds with egg yolks produced in Finland, resulting in an alchemical resurrection of a distant time and place.

Dari بود نبود (pronounced bood na bood) translates literally to ‘was, was not’, and is the traditional first line of Afghan fairytales. ‘There was, and there wasn’t’ suggests an ensuing story of simultaneous truth and fiction. During Ansary’s childhood, her father spun his own childhood stories into a web of fairytales that cast Afghanistan as a Narnia-like enchanted land; a stark contrast to the turmoil that gripped (and grips) the country, and the smaller-scale tragedies that fractured Terttu and Amanuddin’s family.

In her exhibition There was and there wasn't Elina Ansary aims to reconstruct those tenuous fairytales /بود نبود paying equal attention to the grief and joy —the truth and fantasy— within them. What can we learn about happiness and pain when we compare these two cultures in the context of an interwoven family history? The installation is at once an attempt to communicate with ancestral ghosts, an exercise in futile reaching for ancestral lands, and for the past —for childhood— which are all perpetually remote.