Akram Zaatari Research Articles

History and photographic memory

In this interview, artist Akram Zaatari reflects on his longstanding work with photographic heritage in the Middle East, North Africa and the Arab diaspora, and considers the different ways in which he has used photographs to illuminate and unfold historical truths. Charting divergencies and disagreements around issues of preservation that have arisen over the years within the Arab Image Foundation (of which he is one of the founders), Zaatari points out radical gestures of preservation that return photographs to the ‘living tissue’, the ‘larger ecosystem’ and a set of affective relations from which they had become detached. The far-ranging metaphor of archaeology that the artist employs to illuminate his practice also lends itself to describe the destructive nature of certain acts of collecting premised on ‘excessive accumulation’, of which the pillage of the archaeological heritage in the Middle East and North Africa in the late 18th and early 19th centuries is an emblematic example. Collecting, however, is also a tool for writing history and the displacement of photographs serves as a crucial step to reconfigure them within new narratives. Attentive to the changing nature of photographic archives, Zaatari frees photographs from fixed and prescribed readings, bringing new perspectives to bear on them without necessarily denying those former interpretations. Additional layers of historical information can be found nestling in details accidentally captured by the camera's lens, in signs of material damage or ‘worthy’ defects. In Zaatari’s hands, digital technologies are used to emphasize, not to occlude the traces of these material histories. In the folds of the archives, hidden narratives wait to be revealed and unfolded under the loving gaze of the artist, collector and historian.

The Use of Photography as a Mode of Social and Historical Investigation

American Readers at Home by Ludovic Balland, Against Photography by Akram Zaatari and Qu’est-ce qui est different ? by Wolfgang Tillmans all have in common the fact they consider photography as a decisive element in the construction of histories, while also integrating it into the narrative chain text is also part of. Akram Zaatari and Wolfgang Tillmans both include pre-existing photographs in their work, thus questioning the medium per se. This is a far cry from the unique, context-less phot...

Photography as Apparatus: Akram Zaatari in Conversation with Anthony Downey

Photography as Apparatus: Akram Zaatari in Conversation with Anthony Downey

Reimagining the Syrian Revolution

Reimagining the Syrian Revolution Miriam Cooke (bio) On March 15, 2011, after forty years of atomization and apparent acquiescence to tyranny, Syrians together said "No" to injustice. Overnight, silenced citizens who had not trusted each other were thronging the streets. The wall of fear had cracked, and the people celebrated, singing and shouting for the regime to fall. President Bashar al-Assad's men went wild. Marshaling Syria's awesome airpower, they bombed a mostly unarmed citizenry, and they threw dissidents into prisons where, without habeas corpus, they were tortured and killed. Yet the demonstrations continued. In The Crossing, her memoir of three forbidden trips back into Syria from her exile in Paris, Samar Yazbek recounts a period of random violence against the revolutionaries. Awed by their resilience and bravery, she writes that they "didn't give in. They weren't afraid of being overwhelmed, or of the shelling, or of being killed, and they continued to defend their homes, even when their ammunition ran out."1 Having stood up to the dictatorship, the revolutionaries refused to return to their former state of passivity. Today, despite spiraling violence and the international agreement that what we are witnessing in Syria is a civil or a proxy war, many Syrians continue to believe in their revolution. So what is this revolution that inspired dreams and hopes in the wasteland of today's Syria? Over the past six years, Syrians—including those who used pseudonyms in their interviews with Wendy Pearlman for We Crossed a Bridge and It Trembled—have continued to affirm their faith in the revolution. Rima told Pearlman in the fall of 2012, "Syrians defeated the regime the moment they went into the streets. We will not allow anyone to steal our dreams again."2 In Antakya, Turkey, in September 2013, Khalil, a Free Syrian Army commander who had defected from the Assad army, assured Pearlman "the revolution will not give up," even though he acknowledged that personally he had "reached a point of despair."3 In a 2014 interview with Akram Zaatari, Charif Kiwan, the spokesperson for the emergency cinema collective Abounaddara, insisted on the persistence of the revolution: [W]e don't feel we are dealing with a war. We are dealing with a revolution. [End Page 269] I don't know what revolution is; I can't explain what it is, but we have the feeling that we are in front of huge breakdowns, ruptures, something very violent and also very beautiful. So, we cannot qualify this. We accept the idea that it is a revolution.4 Two years later in 2016, Abdul Rahman told Pearlman "we come from the revolution and we still support our revolution."5 Imad explained what had happened to the revolution: "Media has tied the revolution to terrorism … in this way the revolution gets buried. It's getting lost … and that alone is a crime against everything that has happened in Syria."6 Marcell in Gaziantep told Pearlman, "To me, the revolution is like a child with special needs. I believe in it and can't abandon it."7 The revolution is something violent and beautiful and vulnerable, which the revolutionaries themselves did not fully understand but to which they were fully committed. This commitment testifies to a remarkable ability to hope for a better future beyond the terrors of the present. CREATIVE RESISTANCE While the revolutionaries have not yet eliminated the Assad dictatorship, they have exposed its brutality to the world. Artistactivists have organized collectively to make sure that the dynamic of the revolution survives even if only for the time being online. The more ferocious the repression—and it was and still is vicious beyond belief—the more people join the opposition. Some fought for this new order by demonstrating in the streets and exposing their bodies to lethal danger. Some produced a form of creative resistance. As is often the case, before the politicians and the scholars can respond to burning questions, artists and writers discern answers. Art, Michel de Certeau writes, is "a kind of knowledge that operates outside the enlightened discourse which it lacks. More importantly, this know-how surpasses, in its complexity, enlightened science."8 I...

Interpretacje nieobecności i obecności historii w artystycznych projektach wizualnych

Interpreting the presence and absence of history in artistic visual projects In the article I analyze selected artistic projects presented at international art exhibitions - 55. The Biennial of Art in Venice (2013) and Documenta (13) in Kassel (2012). What binds the projects is the historical connotation which becomes a pre-text for artistic creation. The artists were inspired by unwritten events, yet determined by the presence of other facts. The origin of the topics are military conflicts which provoke questions concerned with experiencing violence, as well as nationalist ideologies confronted with the ideas of humanism. What is more, the ethic part of these projects becomes a value of itself, which is particularly visible in the non-traditional form. The projects described are as follows: Letter to a Refusing Pilot by Akram Zaatari, an installation by Zsolt Asztalos entitled Fired but Unexploded and a countermonument by Horst Hoheisel in Kassel. Akram Zaatari uses an anecdote, a mysterious historical detail as an exemplum of the event which deconstructs the official political order. The installation by Zsolt Asztalos Fired but Unexploded mentions dormant conflicts which nonetheless bear the same historic burden. A negative reconstruction of a fountain called Jewish by Horst Hoheisel found in Kassel, is a postulate of revoking traumatic history.Key words: military conflict; counterhistory; anecdote; modern art; counter-monument;

New Exposure: The Arab Image Foundation and the Curatorial

It is now about twenty years ago that Lebanese photographers Fouad Elkoury and Samer Mohdad, together with Lebanese artist Akram Zaatari, decided to create an organization with the aim to preserve and study photographs from the Middle East, North Africa, and the Arab diaspora. In 1997 the Arab Image Foundation (AIF) began to operate officially as a nonprofit organization in Beirut. Conceived as an initiative to gather knowledge and promote awareness about the region’s photographic heritage through locating, collecting, and conserving photographs, the AIF now holds a collection of more than 600,000 photographs from Lebanon, Iraq, Iran, Palestine, Syria, Egypt, Jordan, Morocco, and Algeria, as well as Mexico, Senegal, and Argentina, dating from the mid-nineteenth century.[1] Curatorial work defines the mission of the AIF not only in the sense that it is safekeeping and managing a collection, but also in that it has always sought to make the collection visible to the public. One major tool has been an online image database, which makes approximately 20,000 photographs accessible. Another central medium of display is the exhibition format. Since its inception, the AIF has produced fifteen exhibitions that have traveled worldwide, often accompanied by comprehensive publications.

Hanan al-cinema: affections for the moving image

In this book, Laura Marks examines one of the world's most impressive, and affecting, bodies of independent and experimental cinema from the last twenty-five years: film and video works from the Arabic-speaking world. Some of these works' creative strategies are shared by filmmakers around the world; others arise from the particular economic, social, political, and historical circumstances of Arab countries, whose urgency, Marks argues, seems to demand experiment and invention. Grounded in a study of infrastructures for independent and experimental media art in the Arab world and a broad knowledge of hundreds of films and videos, Hanan al-Cinema approaches these works thematically. Topics include the nomadism of the highway, nostalgia for '70s radicalism, a romance with the archive, algorithmic and glitch media, haptic and networked space, and cinema of the body. Marks develops an aesthetic of enfolding and unfolding to elucidate the different ways that cinema can make events perceptible, seek connections among them, and unfold in the bodies and thoughts of audiences. The phrase Hanan al-cinema expresses the way movies sympathize with the world and the way audiences feel affection for, and are affected by, them. Marks's clear and expressive writing conveys these affections in works by such internationally recognized artists and filmmakers as Akram Zaatari, Elia Suleiman, Hassan Khan, Mounir Fatmi, and Joana Hadjithomas and Khalil Joreige, and others who should be better known.

Re-enacting pre-existing image collections in Akram Zaatari’s ‘Unfolding’

Re-enacting pre-existing image collections in Akram Zaatari’s ‘Unfolding’

Akram Zaatari, All is Well

Abstract Review of Akram Zaatari, All is Well, curated by Vicki Moufawad Paul, Agnes Etherington Art Centre, Kingston, UK, 23 November 2013 – 30 March 2014.

Making sense: affective research in postwar Lebanese art

Based on long-term research with contemporary artists in Lebanon, who utilise documentary practices to advance experimental forms of evidence, this article explores the generative possibilities enabled by crossing disciplinary borders between anthropological and artistic modes of social inquiry. In the wake of an unresolved civil war in the country (1975–1990), a vibrant art movement emerged with a set of critical aesthetics aimed at identifying and working through a postwar crisis of representation. Although typically consigned to artistic engagements with the archive, the work of Jayce Salloum, Walid Raad and Akram Zaatari elucidates a motif of research curiously under-examined. Because they each have systematically grappled with the epistemological and methodological aspects of researching the war, their oeuvres provide a germane triptych for assessing alternative forms of evidence. By closely examining the way their work rethinks the taken-for-granted modes of knowledge production, this article argues that their experimental visual practices poignantly critique the politics of representation, redefine the codes of documentary evidence, and ‘make sense’ of the war on an affective level. Although these artists express antagonism toward traditional anthropology, the article contends that their minority perspectives, research methodologies and practice-based accounts work as alternative ethnographies of Lebanon. Drawing upon recent anthropology, film and art theory, this article demonstrates how disciplinary differences serve as ‘productive irritants’ (Schneider and Wright 2006b) and provides glimpses of different forms of knowledge.

Beyond the Middle

Book Review| July 01 2011 Beyond the Middle Radical Closure Curated by Akram Zaatari Video Data Bank, 2010 5-DVD box set/$1100 Joanna Heatwole Joanna Heatwole JOANNA HEATWOLE is a multimedia artist and freelance writer in Rochester, New York. Search for other works by this author on: This Site PubMed Google Scholar Afterimage (2011) 39 (1-2): 89. https://doi.org/10.1525/aft.2011.39.1-2.89 Views Icon Views Article contents Figures & tables Video Audio Supplementary Data Peer Review Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Tools Icon Tools Get Permissions Cite Icon Cite Search Site Citation Joanna Heatwole; Beyond the Middle. Afterimage 1 July 2011; 39 (1-2): 89. doi: https://doi.org/10.1525/aft.2011.39.1-2.89 Download citation file: Ris (Zotero) Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search All ContentAfterimage Search This content is only available via PDF. © 2011 Afterimage/Visual Studies Workshop, unless otherwise noted. Reprints require written permission and acknowledgement of previous publication in Afterimage.2011 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.

Excavating Images on the Border

This text considers the function of the photographic image, both analogue and digital, in the multimedia interventions of the Beirut‐based artist Akram Zaatari. Instead of reading Zaatari’s work through the commonplace tropes provided by the rhetoric of documentary and archival appropriations, it focuses on generating more spatially and temporally dynamic epistemologies in order to better theorise the complexities of imagistic representation during times of war.

Mining War: Fragments from a Conversation Already Passed

In December 2005, we (Hannah Feldman and Akram Zaatari) submitted a joint application to the Council for International Exchange of Scholars and the Fulbright Visiting Specialist Program: Direct Contact with the Muslim World to bring Zaatari, a Lebanese multimedia artist and cofounder of the Beirut-based Arab Image Foundation, to Northwestern University for six weeks in the fall of 2006. Feldman's research on French vanguardist projects from the 1950s to the present, and in particular on their relation to the events and aftermath of the Algerian War of Independence, and Zaatari's work recovering and researching photographic documents of an uneven modernity in Lebanon and the surrounding region suggested several fruitful points of intersection. In interrogating the implications of national and regional affiliations as emblems or determinants of identity, we both question—and hope to reshape—notions of aesthetic heritage in order to think about the political economy of cultural production. We envisioned our collaboration as one that might introduce to Northwestern's campus a sense of the immediacy and interconnectedness of otherwise apparently remote histories, times, cultures, and analytical practices. We hoped that it would also help our students reconceptualize a part of the world that the majority of Americans know only from the fragmented images of violence and war that the Western media routinely disseminate.

Experience – Information – Image: A Historiography of Unfolding. Arab Cinema as Example

Why do certain images of history reach us, while others remain seemingly forgotten, in the infinite breadth of the past? Why do only certain events seem to matter? I suggest those experiences are not forgotten but enfolded. The contemporary politics of historiography can be conceptualized according to the relationship between Experience, Information, and Image; a triadic relationship I have proposed to understand the nature of the image in the information age. While Experience is infinite, the vast majority of experience lies latent. Few Images ever arise from it. In our age, those that do tend to be selected, or unfolded, by political and economic interests that deem them to be useful as Information. Nevertheless, anyone can unfold any aspect of Experience to become a public image, and artists (and others) do so in order to allow other aspects of Experience to circulate, before they enfold, back into the matrix of history. I will show an animated diagram that illustrates this concept of history as a flow of unfolding and enfolding, influenced by concepts from Charles Sanders Peirce and Gilles Deleuze. Many artworks can be illuminated by this process. My examples will be drawn from contemporary Arab cinema. In the heavily politicized Arab milieu, the Image world is constructed as a selective unfolding of only those aspects of Experience that are deemed to be useful or profitable. Some Arab filmmakers, rather than deconstruct the resulting ideological images, prefer to carry out their own unfoldings: explicating hitherto latent events, knowledges, and sensations. Thus what official history deems merely personal, absurd, micro-events, or no events at all, becomes the stuff of a rich alternative historiography. This process characterizes the work of, among others, Joana Hadjithomas and Khalil Joreige, Nisrine Khodr, Mohammed Soueid, and Akram Zaatari (Lebanon), Azza El-Hassan, Elia Suleiman, and Sobhi Al-Zobaidi (Palestine), and Mohamad Khan (Egypt).