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A Lebanese Archive Please choose one colour for your portfolio from the ones below, and then change the swatch called “REF Folio OWN COLOUR” accordingly. This will automatically change the colour of the cover page, as well as of page numbers and other elements throughout the portfolio. 255 154 50 125 72 143 216 72 65 0 154 114 0 164 221 251 207 0 0 34 91 151 10 47 134 179 226 ANIA DABROWSKA A Lebanese Archive LONDON METROPOLITAN UNIVERSITY THE SCHOOL OF ART, ARCHITECTURE AND DESIGN ANIA DABROWSKA This document was published by London Metropolitan University as part of the School of Art, Architecture & Design series: AAD Practice Research Portfolios. Series Editors: Matthew Barac and Jane Clossick Editorial Coordination: Beatrice De Carli Academic Advisors: Wessie Ling and Nicholas Temple Administration: Hannah Parr Concept Design: Lisa Wallius Research Assistant: Hannah Parr © the author Suggested citation: Ania Dabrowska, A Lebanese Archive. AAD Practice Research Portfolios (London: London Metropolitan University, 2020). 2 A LEBANESE ARCHIVE Project details Output author Ania Dabrowska Collaborators Diab Alkarssifi, Contributing Photographer and Collector. Project title A Lebanese Archive Output type Q – Digital or visual media Location UK: London and Nottingham / Lebanon: Beirut and Balbeck. Dates 2013–2018 Budget £50,000 Partners Publishers: Book Works, London and The Arab Image Foundation, Beirut / Galleries: Four Corners Gallery, London, SPACE Studios Gallery, London / International Art Residency Centre: Ashkal Alwan, Beirut. Funders Arts Council England; Crowd funding by Book Works and the Arab Image Foundation; SPACE Studios; Ashkal Alwan International Art Centre, Beirut; Polish Cultural Institute, London; Polish Consulate, Beirut; Four Corners Gallery, London; Nottingham Contemporary Gallery; Ognisko Polskie, London. Supplementary information submitted via URL: Dabrowska, A. (2015). A Lebanese Archive. London: Bookworks & Beruit: Arab Image Foundation. 3 ANIA DABROWSKA Figure 2. Ania Dabrowska, Untitled 15. Diab’s brother, Baalbeck Temple, early 1984, clockwise: Botros Rizq, military training, all by Diab Alkarssifi, Lebanon, Collection of 1970s; Hasan Flaha, hunting trip, 1986; Diab Alkarssifi, Drift / Resolution, 2014. 38 39 4 A LEBANESE ARCHIVE Figure 3. Ania Dabrowska, Untitled 16. 1977; Freemasons’ meeting, Baalbeck Photo clockwise: Cable cars, Russia, 1970s; Funeral Print Studio, 1940s/50s, Collection of Diab of a war fighter, Lebanon, Diab Alkarssifi, Alkarssifi, Drift/Resolution, 2013. 38 39 5 ANIA DABROWSKA Research content and significance DESCRIPTION A Lebanese Archive is a practice based research project about a collection of archival photographs from the Middle East in the form of authored book, photographic series, exhibitions, public engagement programme and project website presented to global audiences from 2010 until present. RESEARCH QUESTIONS • How does a collection become an archive? • What are the problems surrounding authorship and ownership of archives? • What is lost, changed or gained in the translation of photographic archives? • What is the archival agency and cultural diplomacy of an archive in its ability to restage a global cultural perspective? PROCESS This work follows my long-standing interest in processes that impact the formation of collective and personal memory which informs production of work and practice-based research through a combination of personal, collaborative and participatory methodologies using mediums of photography, moving image, sound and installations. 6 A LEBANESE ARCHIVE DISSEMINATION The project was developed following a discovery of the archival collection at the Arlington homeless people hostel in Camden, where I was a SPACE Studios artist in residence 2010-2012. It launched in 2013 with the Conversations About Archive exhibition, Four Corners Gallery, London, followed by a research trip to Lebanon and an artist’s residency with Ashkal Alwan in Beirut in 2014. The book was launched in 2015 and led to an exhibition commission comprising a new body of photographic work together with archival material at the Nottingham Contemporary Gallery in 2017-2018. STATEMENT OF SIGNIFICANCE At the time of growing political tensions in Syria and across the Middle East in 2013, the project attracted attention of mainstream global media for its portrayal of an alternative view of life in the Middle East as well as artists and researchers who were interested in referencing it in their own work. 7 ANIA DABROWSKA Introduction A Lebanese Archive is a visual arts engagement programme and where Diab and cultural heritage project which Alkarssifi was resident at the time. was inspired by a collection of 27,000 photographs belonging to a former The project aimed to preserve the Lebanese photojournalist, Diab Alkarssifi. Alkarssifi collection and to explore It culminated in multiple outputs, centred the impact of archives in a wider around an exhibition and an authored contemporary context. It was produced book A Lebanese Archive: From the in form of successive artistic and Collection of Diab Alkarssifi (2015) curatorial responses, disseminated produced in partnership with Book over time across international locations Works, London and the Arab Image - as an artist book, a digital archive, a Foundation, Beirut. touring exhibition of work inspired by the collection and a public engagement Covering over 100 years of cultural and programme including lectures, talks, political history of Lebanon and the workshops, critical exchanges with other Middle East (c.1889 – 1993), the Alkarssifi archival initiatives in Beirut, London and collection consists of photographs from Poland. It was my aim to see how the three sources: Diab’s personal work, project evolves over time following a collected family albums, and photographs key question of an interdependence of from several small photographic studios. authorship, ownership and agency of this We see the history of three generations archival material when contextualised in of the Alkarssifi family, the Baalbek these multi-platform works, over time and community and his student life in 1970s in different locations. Moscow and Budapest, all set against public narratives of political and military We are not supposed to believe that a conflict. treasure might one day unexpectedly land on our doorstep. Yet, this is precisely The collection was split up when he what happened when Diab Alkarssifi’s immigrated to the UK in 1993, bringing collection came into my life in 2010. I as much as he could carry with him had just started a residency at Arlington, to London. It was hidden for 17 years, London and when he visited my until 2010 when Diab Alkarssifi brought studio, bringing two big bags filled with it to my studio at Arlington, a landmark negatives and photographic prints, I was London hostel for homeless men intrigued by the content of the bags, and and women where I was running an no less by the man who stood before me. 8 A LEBANESE ARCHIVE Figure 4 & 5. Ania Dabrowska, Documentation of working on Diab Alkarssifi’s Archive, SPACE STUDIOS, London, 2014 9 ANIA DABROWSKA Research context Diab Alkarssifi was born in Baalbek, (Osborne, 2015). The process of Lebanon in 1951, into a land and recording and interpreting the spatial, family that has survived many wars. He temporal qualities of the collection thus contracted polio during his childhood and allows us to present it as the afterlife of the resulting disability later saved him the specific context in which it relates from being drafted into the army. Instead, too - ‘In this respect, the work includes he became a photographer working for a its own documentation and, to the extent local communist party paper. that it proliferates and its materialisations are collected, its own archive’ (Osborne, In one of the conversations I recorded, 2015). Each particular manifestation of Diab explained, “For many years these the archive through its curatorial practice photographs were hidden. In these preserves the works in a new setting, bags lay my life and passion, but I often and thus with a new afterlife. It is the wondered if that really mattered and what porosity and temporality of each new I could do with them. After we started representation of an archive that gives life working together, I felt as if I remembered to the object, whether it is authentic or myself again. I kept this archive safe for artificial. (Groys, 2008) many decades. Now, the forgotten lives, friends that died, places and ideas that Working with the collection often no longer existed, were brought back. reminded me of Borges’s Garden of The light was shining on them again.” Forking Paths (1941). There were many ‘meaningful coincidences’, moments of The question of when a collection serendipity, thresholds through which becomes an archive has been one could approach it, seemingly repetitively broken down in recent endless possibilities of orienting oneself years due to changes in exhibition and developing a project. Every time practice. Discourse around this subject I focus on links between memory focuses on Benjamin’s concept of and construction of identity, I marvel ‘afterlife’ (Nachleben), in the context at how we repeat certain stories like of the changing artistic function of incantations to anchor our own existence. documentation. It thus asks, ‘What does We mix fact and fiction, more or less the becoming art of documentation have conscious of the fact that we are doing to tell us about the historical ontology it or of keeping a balance between
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