Review: Walls of Algiers: Narratives of the City

Abstract

Walls of Algiers: Narratives of the City ; The Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles; 19 May––18 October 18 2009 Walls of Algiers makes a timely and challenging contribution to debates about French colonial photography, colonial urbanism, and their legacies. Certitude and strident critique of the colonial archive is dislodged in Walls of Algiers by a series of potent questions that look to the historical record as a focus for critique and a resource. Framing their project in such terms, Zeynep CCelik, Julia Clancy-Smith, and Frances Terpak ask: If architecture is left as primary evidence, how does the historian read and interpret it, dissociating it from the meanings given by colonial representations, yet capitalizing upon them? How do we break free from the guided or supervised receptions imposed by colonial image making in order to perceive other social facts and realities? How can the erasures in text or image be recovered and interpreted historically?1 Through this exhibition's curatorial strategy and in its catalog, we see that these are not only questions for the architectural historian and visual theorist but also for the curator and contemporary artist. Walls of Algiers begins with the familiar narrative of French colonial Algiers, the archetypal bifurcated colonial city divided into its European and Arab quarters——but one of its contributions is to insist on the diversity of Algiers' population both prior to and during French colonization and to ask how we understand the visual legacy differently in light of this complexity. This comes through …