The Game is Rigged (2013)

Functioning as a perspective check, The Game is Rigged clearly contrasts the quality of life across the developed and developing worlds. Jafari invites audiences to choose a character and play the game, ascending one square at a time, on which several cards offer altering courses for the character’s life. A roll of the dice decides which of the fates the character will endure based on statistics gathered from the UN. The chance of children, a holiday, asylum or death, are unequally distributed across the board, and are made more controversial as many opportunities will cost more than their life savings.

The six characters all begin within their country of origin, with luck some may hop to alternative courses. Five of the characters are representing the most common nationalities of refugees, while the sixth character, for contrast is a typical middle class Australian. The two far right courses on the board, the UN camp and the Asylum Seeker course remain without a starting character as the refugees, may skip in or out of these courses throughout the game.

Jafari has chosen a context that audiences would find familiar within their home, though the individual experiences present explicit realities for refugees that make this game unsuitable for children under 14 years. Leaving little to chance, the work imitates common international realities, where the objective is debatable and the odds are rigged against the players.

Monopoly is the most successful board game in America, a game that thrived in the great depression, and continually teaches children the fundamental priorities in capitalist American life; rent, mortgage and investments. Converting these capitalist ideals into a more contemporary international context, something like Lava Jafari’s The Game is Rigged (2013) is conceived.

When The Game is Rigged players choose their country of origin, rather than the familiar top hat or money bag of monopoly; players are presented opportunities unevenly, rather than the luck of a draw; money often acts as an obstacle rather than a given salary; where the objective is to endure life, rather than thrive or monopolise.

Jafari’s work emerges from the political hotbed of the Australian refugee debate, as 2013 marks the return of offshore refugee processing centres.   These centres since opening have come under scrutiny from the international bodies of the UN and Amnesty International, as an act against the Torture Convention by subjecting people to cruel, inhuman or degrading incarceration. Jafari uses her work to raise awareness surrounding the poor conditions and unknown longevity that mandatory detention places individuals within.

 Using a board game for communications, Jafari seeks to invite audiences of different educations, backgrounds and ages to participate. Each player faces an individual plight that is mixed between: chance and circumstance. The characters options may vary between: a family death in conflict, going to work, being tortured or seeking asylum. These odds, are placed across the board in favour for the rich and strong. In truly Deleuze and Guattari fashion ([1]), Jafari seeks to create political thought from the act of play, whilst undermining the axiomatic system of refugee treatment by subverting the accepted expectations of boardgames so explicitly that one may ask for the point of it all.

By placing profound matters such as anothers’ life, within a board game, the layer of indulgence and consumerism are brought to scrutiny. Audiences of art, enjoy games, live in developed countries, with minimal military conflict and through simulation contemplate hypothetical realities, a problem Jafari is highlighting.  The Dialectic Enlightenment (1979) ([2]), proposes that the capitalist system propagates games as a distraction from monotones of life and the injustices of another, the work breaks the assumption that no one is taking business investment advice from a game of Monopoly, by explicitly shocking the players to imagine themselves experiencing rape or torture. The contrast of these events are splayed across the board to juxtapose David the Australian against the other players, as his perils are limited to sporting injuries.

The statements made by Jafari’s work hold relevance within the political races of Australia as a large election focus circulates the asylum policy updates. In challenging the label ‘boat people’ Jafari’s artwork provides audiences with a personal simulation of what is endured to obtain refugee status, creating awareness for more informed decisions to be made regarding asylum seeking. As national territories are always redefined, there will always be refugees, whether a country of wealth will recognise another human face, will always be the debate.

[1] Deleuze, Gilles, and Félix Guattari. Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Trans. Robert Hurley, Mark Seem, and Helen R. Lane. London: Continuum, 2004.

[2] Horkheimer, Max, and Theodore Adorno. The Dialectics of Enlightenment. Trans. John Cumming. London: Verso, 1979.