January 10th I gave a talk at the symposium of Photocairo4, “The Long Shortcut”. In October 2008, when discussing possible scenarios with CIC director Edit Molnar and curator Aleya Hamza, I decided I somehow wanted to look at how artists script the political and the critical in their work, by focussing on the formal and aesthetic properties of their work. With the ongoing fighting in Gaza, political reality really had caught up with me. In Egypt’s backyard, the Gaza onslaught will always be looming on any discourse which struggles to reflect on the image, mediation, representation, crisis and locality.
With war raging a few 100 kms away, I looked at the work of Palestinian, Iraqi and Lebanese artists without necessarily talking about the political critique these works might offer. The previous day at the symposium, in a discussion with ACAF curator Bassam el Baroni, visual artist Hassan Khan had commented that intentional socio-political critique can dominate anything else within artistic production. I tend to agree with this stance, echoing Jacques Ranciere’s position that:
“Art is not political because it deals with political matters or represents social and political conflicts. It is first political because it reframes the distribution of space, its visibility and—let us say—its habitability.”
The title of my talk “The Heavy Weight of Things Present: Jump Cuts into Mediations and Representations of Crisis” took its cue from several sources. First of all from the title and conceptual proposal for Photocairo4: “The Long Shortcut”, which in and by itself seems oxymoronic, but in Egypt makes perfect sense in a paradoxical kind of way. I wanted to look at the cut, in the sense of the edit, the frame of the image and its display, and how this ties into issues of perception and representation. Secondly, I wanted to relate to the weight and the responsibility of the image, placed within a specific space-time axis. Again by drawing on Ranciere that “Art is political because it shapes a specific sensorium, suspending the ordinary coordinates of space and time that structure the forms of social domination.” Thirdly, when we speak of crisis whether military, ecological or economical, I particularly wanted to draw attention to a semiotic/semantic crisis, where systems of representation – either visual or linguistic are crashing, become depleted, and downright fail.
Iraqi artist Adel Abidin’s video installation “Common Vocabularies” exemplifies the instance how we - the spectator - comprehend nothing of an incomprehensible situation; an instance when words and language and a semantic system utterly fail. In “Common Vocabularies”, a looped one-channel video shows us a 7-year old Iraqi girl who is not a native speaker of Arabic, struggling to pronounce a dictionary of war uttered by a male voice: “massacre”, “suicidal”, “ration share”, “elections”, “terrorist”, “fucking bad luck”, “improvised explosive device”, “hegemony”, “occupation”, “reconstruction”, etc. This is indeed our “common vocabulary” which has become meaningless. The tongue twisting is almost comical, but is in effect a repetition and cyclical rehearsal of horror without content. In that sense, the choice to refuse to couple linguistic signifier with its image, and offer us the one screen shot of the most innocent of messagers - a child - is strategically verging on the opportunistic. What’s interesting here, is a refusal on the artist’s side to engage with generic imagery, which suggests that the latter has become inadequate. Moreover, words have become inadequate and generic. Accompanying the installation are stacks of take-away cards with the key words written in Arabic script, their phonetic Latin transcript, and English translation. The cards’ uniformity and disposability, signal the incapacity of language to genuinely express the traumas of war, but simultaneously remind us of the short-lived expendable news value of these words.
A project where we can trace a disconnect between mediation, context and display on a more formal level, is Lebanese artist Akram Zaatari’s installation “l’enlevement” (=the kidnapping). This was shown recently in Beirut at the Sfeir-Semler Gallery, at French curator Catherine David’s show “In the Middle of the Middle. “L’enlevement” is part of Zaatari’s ongoing Madani project, wherein he takes the archive of the Saida-based photographer Hashem El Madani’ and his studio Shehrazade, opened in the 1950s, as study material to understand the complex relationship which ties a studio photographer to his working space, his equipment and tools, economy and aesthetics, and further explore his ties to his clients, society and the city in general. The Madani Project takes shape as a series of thematic exhibitions, Publications, interventions and videos centered on Hashem El Madani and his archive. The installation features a video beamer placed conspicuously on a white plinth, projecting a looped image of a super 8 film projector sitting beside the super 8 film sleeve reel of the British TV action thriller series “The Protectors” (1972-1974). In the background there’s an indiscernable soundtrack – most likely of the series episode.
As many Lebanese artists, Zaatari’s practice is one that excavates narratives and histories of the Lebanese socio-political condition. So Madani’s studio becomes like an archaeological site where meaning is retrieved not only from the photographic archives, but from all the objects found in the studio. By exhibiting the super8 projector, found in Madani’s studio, along with one of the 3 super 8 films, also found in the studio, Zaatari isolates them and invests them with an object property with historical value, devoid of context. By doing this they attain a certain monumentality or hermeticism The suggested image and tools of image production become iconographic. In addition, the projector and the film become witness to the mechanisms of technology and mediation. Zaatari does not show us the real machine and film, but a mediation of it through new technology: that’s why the beamer is so prominent. In that sense the piece is very much about the system of image production. The only image we as spectators see is the representation of the image’s machination, and a dissection – which is almost simultaneously a re-assembling - of the product as a whole: audio, moving image, still image, the projectors and the film.
It is telling Zaatari has chosen an episode called "L´Enlèvement" (The Kidnapping) in a time when our sensory perception is being kidnapped by visual overload. Yet what this choice most importantly does, is emphasise once again that in his installation the image proper has been literally kidnapped by means of providing us an image of image production, instead of the image proper or the imaginary.
It’s interesting to contrast this to a more material articulations, to be found – for example - in works which involve the “maquette”. 2 recent works worth mentioning are: Palestinian artist Wafa Hourani’s “Qalandia 2047” and Marwan Rechamoui’s “Spectre”.
Wafa Hourani’s project Qalandia 2047, shown in 2007 at the Thessaloniki Biennial and most recently in Beirut’s Sfeir-Semler Gallery’s show “In the Middle of the Middle”, both curated by Catherine David. Hourani offers us a detailed scale model of how he envisions the Qalandia refugee camp, a century from 1947 when the inhabitants were evicted from their homes, following the creation of the State of Israel. Situated on the road from Jerusalem to Ramallah, Qalandia camp and the Qalandia checkpoint encapsulate literally where Palestine has been divided and cut from its roots, territorially and historically. Scarring the area around Qalandia is the separation wall, which Hourani in his maquette has dressed with mirrors on the Palestinian side. This partly suggests frivolity, but also implies that when the rest of the world is sealed off, one is forced to indulge in narcissism and gaze at oneself. On the other side of the wall, a menacing airstrip with fighter jets reminds us that 100 years onwards, little has changed. Hourani’s Qalandia is strewn with minute and playful details, such as sports cars, TV antennas sculpted into decorative forms and figures, colourful rooftops, flowerpots, photographs, graffiti, and even a real goldfish swimming in a fishbowl. Yet it remains a ghost town, a dollhouse of the occupation, beautified by ornament and mirrors, seeped in inertia. The artist has mapped out a vision as architect, archaeologist, chronicler of a past, and future forecaster. Nevertheless, similar to the goldfish, he remains trapped in a space too confined, in a history and a present too dictating. And of course – a representational format that can never convey that what he intends to do, namely the re-creation of an imaginary place, that is in effect a real place. This is perhaps the flaw of Hourani’s project: aesthetically and politically: he is still too much attached to the “real”.
Hourani’s project does not attain the sculptural or monumental qualities that Marwan Rechamoui’s Spectredoes. As an artist, Rechmaoui is mainly interested in urban/rural dynamics and demographic transformations in urban space. “Spectre” is a 420cm x 225cm x 80cm grout, concrete, glass and aluminum replica of a 45 year-old building the artist used to live in for 5 years, but got evacuated during the 2006 war with Israel. Similar to Hourani, there’s a lot of eye for detail. Obsessively reproducing every minute detail, and traces its inhabitants have left behind, “Spectre” is not a dollhouse copy of reality. Rather, stripped of human presence, this architectural skeletal structure resembles many of the by civil war gutted buildings, which scar Beirut’s cityscape, and which force the viewer to construct an own narrative of meaning and history. Yet Rechmaoui’s construct becomes self-referential, an enclosed symbolic entity, and is therefore not per se about anything outside itself. It combines the generic with the specific within its formalism. Here there is no futurist scenario imagined but it is – indeed – a spectre of the past, and hence also attains this sculptural and monumental quality because the artist has ceased his quest for the real.
Tagged as:
adel abidin, akram zaatari, art, crisis, marwan rechmaoui, photocairo4, representation, wafa hourani
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