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Akram Zaatari: Against Photography. an Annotated History of the Arab Image Foundation

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Akram Zaatari: Against Photography. an Annotated History of the Arab Image Foundation Installation view, MMCA Akram Zaatari: Against Photography. An annotated history of the Arab Image Foundation 11 May 2018 – 19 Aug 2018 MMCA Seoul The National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Korea will open the exhibit <Akram Zaatari: Against Photography>, co-organized by Museu d’Art Contemporani de Barcelona. It is the first monographic exhibition of Akram Zaatari in Korea, bringing 30 works such as photography, video and installation. It will be one of the most massive large-scale exhibitions of Akram Zaatari, which will be held from 11 May to 19 August at gallery 5 in MMCA, Seoul. The director of MMCA, Bartomeu Mari and Hiuwai Chu, curator at the Museum of Contemporary Art Barcelona, initiated the show in 2009; it has been on global tour starting in Barcelona last April (7th of April to 25th of September). It was also shown at K21 Nordrhein- Westfalen from last November 2017 to February 2018. After its presentation in Korea, it will be shown at the Sharjah Art Foundation (United Arab Emirates) the coming Fall, among other venues to be confirmed. Akram Zaatari participated in the 2006 and 2014 editions of the Gwangju Biennale, 2018 Gangwon Biennale and was awarded the Yanghyun art prize in Korea in 2011. He is a co- founder of the Arab Image Foundation (AIF) an artist-initiated, independent institution dedicated to the collection, study and preservation of the photographic object in the Arab World. Several artists were behind this ambitious photographic research in different Arab countries. They assembled the core of the AIF collection following their own interests. Photographs came from family albums, professional studios, and other types of vernacular practices and ended up at the AIF. The AIF collections represent those photographic practices but represent artists’ reflections as well. And these records are, physically, present. They introduce different narratives and concepts related to the current status of photography, at a time when the mechanical and chemical processes have disappeared. Through them, photography is no longer about image, it is about material, according to Zaatari. Photographic objects have been the center of Akram Zaatari’s artistic practice since 1995 and the photographic formations or “emergences”, as he calls them, are the focus of this exhibition. The show stems from the interest in this critical intersection between archive and artistic practices. It also presents a subjective look of the artist at the activities and evolution of the AIF, an institution that, in its 20 year history, has amassed over 500,000 photographs from the Middle East and North Africa. The artist mentions that this exhibition “it is a subjective outlook that assumes a particular set of positions about photography and its institutions. It is also about addressing photographs and history and the desire to own and show a collection in addition to writing its history”. The show is made with analytical annotations, equally referenced with facts of historical and of desired natures and here, the artist wants to expand the notion of photography and its roles in our society. The title of this exhibition as well as the title of Zaatari’s work, <Against photography> implies multiple meanings. It literally means ‘opposition’ but it also could be ‘bond’, ‘comparison’ and ‘reference’. The title’s interpretation as “in opposition to Photography” refers to photography’s reduced definition, but indeed it also means “leaning against”, and learning from the history of photography in order to move elsewhere, where we can save photography from its fate. Regarding the show, the co-curator Bartomeu Mari (currently director from MMCA) states that “this project does not attempt to present a historical chronology of AIF, but rather a subjective look at the practices of this institution in 20years of its history. As the artist involvement is central to the essence of the AIF, a critical reflection on its practices should be an artist-led endeavor”. There will be various education programs organized by MMCA such as lectures, workshops and MMCA exhibition talks which will be leaded by the director, Bartomeu Mari for a better understanding of the show. There will be detailed information on MMCA website (http://www.mmca.go.kr) For more information, visit the MMCA website (http://www.mmca.go.kr). □ Public inquiry: 02-3701-9500 (MMCA official contact) Akram Zaatari (1966–, Lebanon) Akram Zaatari was born in 1966 in Lebanon. He currently lives and works in Beirut. Akram Zaatari has produced more than fifty videos, a dozen books, and countless installations of photographic material, all pursuing a range of interconnected themes, subjects, and practices related to excavation, political resistance, the lives of former militants, the legacy of an exhausted left, the circulation of images in times of war, and the play of tenses inherent to various letters that have been lost, found, buried, discovered, or otherwise delayed in reaching their destinations. Zaatari has played a critical role in developing the formal, intellectual, and institutional infrastructure of Beirut’s contemporary art scene. He was one of the few young artists who emerged from the delirious but short-lived era of experimentation in Lebanon’s television industry, which was radically reorganized after the country’s civil war. As a co-founder of the Arab Image Foundation, a groundbreaking, artist-driven organization devoted to the research and study of photography in the Arab world, he has made invaluable and uncompromising contributions to the wider discourse on preservation and archival practice. Zaatari represented Lebanon at the Venice Biennial in 2013. His work has been featured at Documenta13 in 2012. On the Photograph and the Vehicle Akram Zaatari’s early projects with the AIF shared an anthropological approach and derived from the predominant patterns he observed in family albums from the mid-twentieth century. These projects were concerned with the representation of the body and social classes. The Vehicle: Picturing Moments of Transition in a Modernising Society (1999) examines two significant inventions of the late nineteenth century: the camera and the motor vehicle. It was an exhibition about self-representation as it was an exploration of modernity infiltrating the lives of people in the Arab world. Partly returning to The Vehicle, this display is informed by the artist’s ongoing work with archival objects. Both sides of the photograph are reproduced to size and given equal importance, allowing viewers access to both the family and the institution’s annotations on the back. On Displacement and Performativity Cairo studio photographer Van Leo was inspired by cinema, especially the wilder side of the entertainment industry. His work provides insights into the social transformations that took place in Egypt during the second half of the twentieth century and the performative nature of posing in front of a camera. Zaatari’s interest in Van Leo hinges on ‘the possibility of raising through him a wider question about those dying traditions of image production and building around them an informed contemporary practice’. His examination of Van Leo takes an experimental stance, performing or re-writing the original images, transposing them from analogue black-and-white photography into digital color. On Photography, People and Modern Times The two volumes of Zaatari’s research for pictures within AIF, are presented here facing each other On Photography, People and Modern Times (2010) and On Photography, Dispossession and Times of Struggle (2017), which are pivotal to understanding the artist’s stance towards the archive and photography’s social function. The films are shown consecutively, on facing screens, creating an extended dialogue between them. First, two- channel projection set in the former premises of the AIF, explores the transformations through which photographs pass in their transition from original context to the archive. Taking the idea of loss and dispossession as a starting point, the second part looks into the individual’s position within the context of war and how photographs become the sole record of that displacement, despite the risk of them being dispersed. On Photography, People and Modern times, 2010, MMCA Object Narratives The images presented in this section are photographic close-ups of 35mm and sheet-film negatives, and glass plates of various sizes. Each image recorded on them tells a story, but the whole object that contains the image tells another story. Some objects carry traces of retouching, the photographer’s fingerprints or tape. Some have been consumed and eroded by external conditions or simply by the passage of time. They are composites of past events together with the remnants of history that form an inherent part of the photographic object. The stories told by the deterioration of the negatives add another layer of information to the narratives inscribed onto those images. Against Photography The series entitled Against Photography (2017) employs gelatin negatives that have been scratched or suffered other abrasions. Without recording the images, the artist only extracted the relief of their surfaces, and reproduced this into prints from digitally engraved plates. Here it is not the image that bears the historic information, but the material on which it is ingrained. Each sign of wear tells a story of the object, which is entirely different from that of the recorded images. Against Photography, 2017, MMCA Twenty-Eight Nights and a Poem Hashem El Madani has been the core subject of Zaatari’s research since they met in 1999. El Madani established Studio Shehrazade in artist’s hometown of Saida in South Lebanon in 1953 and has photographed the city’s community over decades. Artist considers Studio Shehrazade as a site for an archaeological intervention that seeks to unearth not only the negatives and photographs taken in the studio, but also the stories behind them, and the social and economic framework that sustains a photographic practice in a small town.
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