Conceptual rightness and fiction: Revealing new truths through fragments in history.

In contemporary media, images of Arabs often support clichés about faraway societies and dangerous folk. In mass media, the dehumanization of multitudes of people disguises information and reveals little. There could probably be many ways for the Arab community to counter this in the sociology of art and to challenge the popular view when portraying how the West mediates. Akram Zaatari (born in 1966 in Lebanon) and Walid Raad (born in 1967 in Lebanon) did something original when tackling this issue. Instead of challenging the Western media, they presented a vast archive of photographs from the Arab world. The Arab Image Foundation in Beirut (a non-profit organization that collects, studies, and preserves photographs from the Arab world) was the main source for the archive. [1]

Zaatari and Raad both have strong ties with Lebanon and its history of war, resulting in personal connectivity in more ways than just being at York University. The wide-ranging archive presented consisted of over 3000 photographs (mostly commercial) taken throughout the 20th century in Iraq, Egypt, and Lebanon, giving the viewer an extensive insider´s view that augments and widens the perspective of the Arab picture.  [2]

 Raad and Zaatari drew upon different sorts of images that date over the past two centuries. The data came from the historical archive of Arab photography: passport photographs, licenses, official documents, pictures from photographers who snap pedestrians on the street, and pictures from Arab regions, along with institutional group portraits. The exhibition's centerpiece showed a vast, glittering grid of thousands of little photos mentioned above, dating from 1935 to 1970. The images were reprinted from negatives found in boxes in a flood-damaged photography studio in Tripoli, Lebanon, owned by Antranik Anouchian.  [3]

The images were mounted on blank backgrounds, and everyday photographs were seen of different kinds of people, including men in suits and uniforms, women in traditional clothing, nuns, and teenagers. Some individuals were shot looking vulnerable, some not. Some were seen doing everyday things that westerners would expect only to be seen in the western world. The viewer sees a vast ocean of the Lebanese community, many seeming to have a strong individuality and wanting to be seen as that. This mural-size work can feel a certain intensity because of the variety in the flora of different characters. [4] 

The installment method in the centerpiece interprets ambiguity because the two curators seem to have several things they want to interpret to the viewer with this array of data (Figure 1). The further away the viewer stands from the images, the more he gets a feeling of being located in an aerial atmosphere looking at a unified, seemingly pixelated cluster of small squares so the faces evolve into a stack of clouds or mass (especially since the curators have stacked the photos, so there is no negative space in between them) but this mass still has a glistening variety. There is also a sense of fragmentation in knowing that many individuals upon the wall have experienced trauma from war. If the viewer moves forward, he begins to focus on certain individuals, some might look like someone the viewer could know. The small cluster the curators have created within this array becomes thematic, based on identity or certain visual elements. The boundaries of black-suited businessmen, teenagers, and military men are vague. Aesthetically, when viewing the mural, there is a sense of looking at a universal network formed by objects in conjunction that merges into one. The viewer, therefore, is given several different things to think about when moving through the space. [5]

Figure 1: Akram Zaatari and Walid Raad, Mapping Sitting:ID, 2002, Photographs,
Third Text journal.

The two curators also created a rapid-moving film collage of Arabian streets (Figure 2). The viewer sees a vital city, where different individuals from all over are moving across the screen, and then the movement becomes a blur. Businessmen might, e.g., be seen in sharp focus, but then they fade into the crowd. The intention behind the method of appearing and disappearing individuals seems to be to make the viewer wonder about what happened to all those people, given the atrocities they were about to endure. [6]. For Zaatari, working with the archive can be likened to an archaeological excavation. The curator chooses what to look for and what to present, and he goes through a selection process to ultimately reveal something more or different than showing something in its entirety. Therefore, the desire to complete something (and then be able to exhibit the findings) isn´t really what motivates him. [7]

Zaatari has a unique take on photography as a medium because he doesn´t look at it as a medium in itself so much as a subject when working with it. He has explained that he works on photography while most artists work with the medium. For Zaatari, this mindset leads to him being able to enter a space of intervention, which makes sense since working with something doesn´t allow for that type of creative methodology (of intervention). [8]  

The curator in the discussion views photographs as one of many factors that are a part of the culture. He wants to know what information they convey about history before using them as artwork for display. Only then will he know how he chooses to display them because the message and the relationship with the viewer are important. The work needs to be presented so that the audience sees the information behind it. Mapping Sitting shows how regional photographers are representing Arabs throughout the years. [9] The photographer is important. His relationship with his subject, his point of view, and his way of communicating are intertwined with the photograph; in that way, he is a part of the subject that the curators are archiving. The nature of photographs is that they register factually from history, but the viewer also uses his imagination to fill in the blanks and wonder about everything the photograph can´t tell us. [10]   The curators then intervene in the medium with their understanding of the past and contextualize it, putting fractured pieces together in a new way to reveal something that lies between fact and fiction. [11] 

The story that the photographs tell makes sense only when contextualized. When Zaatari and Raad document how Arabs represent their community, they also group these photos to exemplify, e.g., vagrant photography. Portraying how the photographers who originally shot the subjects approached history and showed it in a different context gives a new way of interpreting, re-arranging, seeing, and perhaps (re) discovering from the archive. While the photographer at the time was perhaps engaged in being of service to his clients, creating beautiful images, or showing people´s identities, Zaatari and Raad are regrouping and arranging the images to create the new. It would be safe to say that the truth in the exhibit lies in the contextual practice, making the photographs show new ways of looking at things. [12] 

The exhibit reveals the curator's desire to address the trauma and fragmentation in the history of the photographic subjects, giving the viewer a glimpse into the lives of the individuals, into their humanity and allowing the viewer to make new discoveries when puzzling the pieces together. It is the curator's combination of familiarity and not currently living near their origin that creates a space for them to analyze conceptually, both in a personal and broad sense, as seen in the contextuality and the ambiguity of the work, and undoubtedly it helps them interpret clearly for the viewer. [13]

Resources:

1. Resources: Mark Stevens, „Middle Eastern Studies. “ New York 38, no. 3 (2004): 84, retrieved 11. November 2020, https://search.proquest.com/docview/205143265?rfr_id=info%3Axri%2Fsid%3Aprimo. 

2. Ibid, 84. 

3. Daniel Baird, „Radicaal Politics Walid Raad.“ Border Crossings 24, no. 2 (2005): 40, retrieved 11. November 2020, https://search.proquest.com/docview/215549439/fulltextPDF/9C5A7EC6B4AD452CPQ/1?accountid=135943.

4. Stevens, „Middle Eastern Studies,“ 85. 

5. Ibid, 85. 

6. Ibid, 85. 

7. Hannah Feldman, „Excavating Images on the Border,“ Third Text 23, no. 3 (2009): 311, 316, retrieved 11 November 2020, https://doi.org/10.1080/09528820902954945. 

8. Akram Zataari, „Photographic Documents/ Excavation as Art,“ in The Archive: Documents of Contemporary Art, ed. Charles Merewether (Whitechapel and the MIT Press:, 2006), 183. 

9. Ibid, 83. 

10. Dore Bowen, „ This Bridge Called Imagination: On Reading the Arab Image Foundation and Its Collection,“ Invisible culture 

12(2008): 4, retrieved 11 November 2020, https://www.rochester.edu/in_visible_culture/Issue_12/bowen/bowen.pdf.

 11. Zataari, „Photographic Documents,“ 183-184. 

 12. Feldman, „Excavating Images on the Border,“ 314. 

 13. Stevens, „Middle Eastern Studies,“ 84-85.