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
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,
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. Zaatari has been interested in the multiple lives of artefacts and the transformations they undergo throughout multiple generations and contexts. He believes it is impossible to measure the power of an archive that is less than a generation old: it starts to enable vision and make sense only after it lives through changes across generations. Twenty-Eight Nights and a Poem (2010) refers to a set of works centered on the archive of Studio Shehrazade and includes three cabinets containing photographs of 28 selected objects from the studio, Studio Shehrazade—Reception Space (2006) and Endnote (2014).
Archives of the Future
Installed on the external wall of gallery 5 is a representation of the collections of the AIF. It starts with a timeline that indicates the growth of the collection over the past 20 years with a Book of All Collections, and ends with a representation of conservation boxes in the AIF cool storage room. This is a representation of a place where light, temperature and humidity are normally controlled, and traces of past events rest dormant. The artist intended to select the most private things in an archive and have them on display.
■ Artist Curriculum vitea
Awards: 2011Yanghyun Prize, Seoul.
Festival Awards: 2015 Special Jury Award. DMZ International Documentary Film Festival, Korea. 2015 Grand Prize. New Horizons, Films on Art competition. Wroclaw, Poland. 2013 Lawrence Kasdan Award for Best Narrative film at Ann Arbor Film Festival for Refusing Pilot. 2011 Grand Prize Videobrasil for Tomorrow Everything Will Be Alright 2004 Prix Son –FID Marseille for This Day
Recent Books - Rifat Chadirji: Architecture Index, Edited with Mark Wasiuta, published by the Arab Image Foundation –Khaph Books, 2018 -(Upcoming in September 2018) - Against Photography. Macba -MMCA, 2018. - Akram Zaatari, Tomorrow Everything Will Be Alright. Texts by Farkas, Solange -Bogossian, Gabriel –Dos Anjos, Moacir –Westmoreland, Mark. Videobrasil, Sao Paulo 2016. - Akram Zaatari, All Is Well. Texts by Vicky Moufawad Paul and Judith Rodenbeck. Published by the Agnes Etherington Art Center, and The Carleton University Art Gallery, (Kingston and Ottawa, 2014.) etc.
Exhibitions (A selection) 2019 AGAINST PHOTOGRAPHY, Sharjah Art Foundation (Upcoming in 2019) 2018 New Art Exchange (Upcoming in July 2018) 2018 The FOLD, CAC Cincinati (Upcoming in October 2018) 2018 Turner Contemporary (Upcoming) 2018 AGAINST PHOTOGRAPHY, MMCA Seoul (Upcoming) 2017 AGAINST PHOTOGRAPHY, K21 Dusseldorf 2017 AGAINST PHOTOGRAPHY, MACBA 2016 Tomorrow Everything Will Be Alright, Videobrasil Galpao, Sao Paulo 2016 This Day at Ten, KunstHaus Zurich 2016 THE END OF TIME, The Common Guild, Glasgow 2015 UNFOLDING, Moderna Museet, Stockholm 2014 SALT, Istanbul 2014 This Day at Ten, WIELS, Brussels 2013 All Is Well, AEAC Kingston Ontario 2013 This Day @ Ten, Sfeir Semler Gallery, Beirut 2013 Thomas Dane Gallery, London 2013 The End of Time, Kurimanzutto, Mexico 2013 Lebanon Pavilion at Venice Biennial. 2013 MoMA Projects100. NY. etc.
Performance: 2017 “Register of Anxious Memory,” HKW, Berlin 2010 “A Conversation with an Imagined Israeli Filmmaker Named Avi Mograbi,” Laboratoires d’Auberviliers, Paris.
Public Collections: (A selection) Cerralves, Porto | Bristol Museum | Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris | Guggenheim, NY | K21, Dusseldorf | Louis Vuitton, Paris | MACBA, Barcelona | MoMA, NY | MCA, Chicago | Moderna Museet, Stockholm | Tate Modern, London | Walker Art Center |
Teaching 2015 Against Photography. ALBA 2006 History of Contemporary art in Lebanon. North Western University 2004 Art and the media. American University of Beirut. 2002 IESAV. St Joseph University, Beirut 2002 Université St. Esprit, Kaslik 1990-92 School of Architecture and Design, the American University of Beirut. 1995-96 School of Architecture and Design, the American University of Beirut.