My Sister Who Travels Curated by Martina Caruso — Noor Abed Jananne Al-Ani Halida Boughriet Ursula Schulz-Dornburg Corinne Silva Esther Boise Van Deman Paola Yacoub Foreword

A path is a prior interpretation of the best way to traverse a landscape. Rebecca Solnit, Wanderlust: A History of Walking, 2006

In the summer of 2013 The Mosaic Rooms launched an open call for exhibition proposals from independent curators. From the submissions received, we are delighted to have selected My Sister Who Travels by Martina Caruso.

Landscape art is often considered in Romantic terms. Human analogies between the concrete world and the inner world are frequently drawn, and the open space of the land can be seen as a space for imagining, for thinking freely. But these public spaces are also contested sites, layered with histories and the implicit legacies of control, power, occupation and exclusion.

This exhibition offers the viewer new perspectives on this genre, through the landscapes in the work of six women artists. At a time when life’s spatial experiences are increasingly bound up within interior spaces or virtual screens, it is easy to feel removed from these wider plains, to forget the depth of horizons and the politics of place they contain. Perhaps it is time to discover new paths in order to best imagine new ways of travelling forward. For this The Mosaic Rooms would like to thank Martina Caruso and all the participating artists.

Rachael Jarvis Head Curator

3 travel through space, but travel through time. They are either explicitly or implicitly connected to My Sister Who Travels a history of layers of civilisation and empire, to the ghosts of the victors and the oppressed. The choice of the Mediterranean as a confined geographical area through which to express ideas of empire and colonisation complicates the narrative of the exhibition, creating points of contact between art practices that use lens-based media within postcolonial visions. The Mediterranean To travel is not to think, but to see things in succession, with one’s life sensed in the measure of space. remains a contentious term for that which it represents and signifies. While it has been dismissed Isabelle Eberhardt, In the Shadow of Islam, 1920 as a ‘mere geographical expression’ by some scholars, others have followed in the steps of Must we be forever condemned to study territories rather than networks? Fernand Braudel’s pioneering study The Mediterranean (1923-1949 and 1949-1966), exploring its Bruno Latour, Why We Have Never Been Modern, 1992 ambiguous potential as a region rather than an empty term for a random grouping of neighbouring countries around a sea.4

The risk inherent in an all-women’s art exhibition is to (re)create a marginalised category, only In an increasingly archaic, yet still prevalent Orientalist framework regarding the able to exist in terms of its binary relationship to the dominant category of implicitly male artists. Mediterranean, the cardinal points ‘South’ and ‘East’ have implications of ‘exotic’, poor and ‘Other’, Most contemporary women artists prefer their work not to be identified according to their gender. while ‘North’ and ‘West’ have connotations of developed, rich and ‘European’. Embodying its most And yet, one of the aims of My Sister Who Travels is to explore potential connections between Romantic (Western) concept, termed by Edward Said ‘imaginative geography’, the Mediterranean sexuality and contemporary representations of landscape. Antecedents to this idea have existed is nearly metonymous for blue seas and umbrella pine trees, hot deserts and pleasant coastal towns. since the mid-1980s, with the publication of photographer and scholar Deborah Bright’s seminal In short, holiday destinations. On the other hand, as a political space, it has become an arena in essay Of Mother Nature and Marlboro Men: An Inquiry into the Cultural Meanings of Landscape which tensions have escalated, a symbol for the political and economic inequalities inherent in Photography (1980). Bright was writing thirty years ago, suggesting that it was necessary to the division between the Global North and the Global South. The invisible line which separates question the assumptions about nature and culture that landscape photography has traditionally the Mediterranean into two polar areas has been reinforced through a scalar political practice served. Since then, the number of celebrated women artists working as land artists or using theorised by political scientists and philosophers like Etienne Balibar. International policy- video and photography to represent landscape has increased, as have their methods to interrogate makers work hegemonically to keep capitalism afloat while the circulation of human bodies for or subvert the gaze. Where W.J.T. Mitchell was struggling with the question of ‘ownership’ of labour from North Africa and the Middle East to Southern Europe rises. landscape in his seminal book Landscape and Power (1996), My Sister Who Travels circumvents Taking historian David Abulafia’s concept of the Mediterranean as ‘the most vigorous place of this patrician preoccupation, diverting from the idea of landscape as pleasing vista.1 interaction between different societies on the face of this planet’ and the unsurpassed role it Pleasure connected to viewing landscape was first explored in a politics of vision in the early has played ‘in the history of human civilization’, the exhibition brings together six artists from 1990s by the feminist geographer Gillian Rose, who argued that cultural geography needs to different regions and countries who work in the Mediterranean.5 By placing a historical figure, remain aware of the accepted ‘encoding of nature as feminine’ implicit in landscape.2 The visual Esther Boise Van Deman, in their midst, the exhibition does not imagine an easy alliance or pleasure that is derived from looking at a landscape, in Rose’s view, is ‘specifically sexual’ and solidarity between their heterogeneous visions, but explores the artistic and political boundaries needs further exploring. My Sister Who Travels brings together those who have created views with which each of their practices contends. of landscapes in which an expected aesthetic is curtailed, undermined or ignored in favour of The figure of Van Deman, an archaeologist active during the early twentieth century, whose alternative systems of viewing. The exhibition explores a ‘psychology of landscape’ where the extensive body of photographs has come to define her position in the field, places the exhibition artists have contended with the Romanticism implicit in the idea and history of [a Mediterranean] within a colonial framework. During her career, the British and French empires ruled most of landscape, exploring questions that might prefer to remain unearthed.3 The idea of digging North Africa and the Middle East, although large areas of the Mediterranean were also dominated through the actual layers of earth as well as the layers of meaning that form a landscape connect by the Ottoman Empire, including Turkey, the Balkans and Libya. the works in the exhibition to a form of archaeology; the landscapes are not just the subject of

4 5 This was a period when the Grand Tour, while in decline, was still a tradition among the wealthier Hogenberg. Using a lens she made herself and attached to a Lomography camera, Yacoub went to strata of society from the United Kingdom and the of America, as immortalised by Southern Lebanon to experience the geography of a region that had been forbidden to civilians E.M. Forster’s novel A Room with a View (1908). While the Suffragette Movement had achieved throughout the bitter protracted Lebanese Civil War (1975-1990). The sites Yacoub visited, where voting rights for women in a number of countries by then, it was still a time when women who you could see ‘only clumps of grass, a few rocks...’ corresponded to places of massacre where major chose an ‘alternative’ lifestyle tended to be considered as admirable yet reprehensible eccentrics Israeli operations left hundreds dead in 1978, 1982 and 1996.7 Mediterranean cypresses, symbols of or outsiders. Many of these, like Countess Markievicz who led the Easter Rising in Ireland in 1916 mourning since Classical Antiquity, dot the land, nearly invisibly. or Isabelle Eberhardt, the well-known author of her adventures in Algeria in the 1900s, were from Walter Benjamin’s words on the stories that lie within buried layers of civilisation echo within privileged, powerful or aristocratic backgrounds. Elegiac Landscapes: ‘There is no document of civilization which is not at the same time a document Esther Van Deman, however, was from a hardworking family of pioneers that had settled in South of barbarism.’8 Yacoub’s images embody an amnesia, a psychological trauma that cannot be Salem, Ohio and moved to Sterling, Kansas in the 1870s. A committed scholar, she became the expressed save through the unseen and the unsaid, through that which has (been) disappeared. first woman to gain a PhD at the in 1898. Arriving in at the age of 39 Yacoub’s work tells a story of perception and can be read as an investigation of the gaze. As in her in 1901, Van Deman had rather uniquely begun using photography as part of her archaeological lecture-performance ‘What do I do?’ the artist asks whether you see a ‘battlefield’ or an ‘elegiac research on Classical Roman ruins. Her focus on photography as a method of research was landscape’, leaving the answer up to the viewer.9 uncharacteristic in the discipline at the time, which relied predominantly on drawing. She On the surface, Corinne Silva’s Imported Landscapes (2010) seem remote from Yacoub’s verdant developed an ‘unconventional and “not-feminine” topic’, focusing on Ancient Roman building valley: her terrains vagues show unloved, dystopian spaces in which the depthless surface of techniques.6 Combined with her aesthetic sensibility and her desire for very precise images (she a billboard dominates. Her subversion of the advertising space, an ubiquitous presence that used an obsolete lens aperture — f-stop 128 — on her wooden view cameras in order to maintain interferes with the landscape on motorways around the world, momentarily disorients the viewer. a high level of sharpness), Van Deman produced a meticulous archive of 2700 photographs taken The sense of something familiar, yet oddly displaced, resonates through the disjunction between mostly in , France, Algeria and Tunisia between 1898 and 1930. two landscapes, one fictional, the other seemingly real. Silva creates a surface within a surface, Through her archaeological practice, Van Deman was participating, in an indirect way, in the precluding the viewer from seeing any further, while her titles open up meaning in the landscapes colonising project. Archaeology, like cartography, geography or even military operations, was a she has captured: ‘New suburb of Tangier placed in former mining region La Unión, Murcia’. Layers discipline complicit in the imperialist colonial mission. And yet, coming as an American to Rome, of empire emerge in a geographical mise-en-abyme with the shooting of Moroccan landscapes, where archaeology was principally an aristocratic occupation both for Italians and foreigners, once under Spanish rule,10 and bringing them to Spain, once under Moorish rule, Silva’s work, Van Deman remained an outsider on three accounts: her American origins (the United States was closely cropped and in some ways impenetrable, is both interrogating the gaze and a history of not colonially implicated in the Mediterranean), her sex, and her class. She has been recognised occupations. for her determination and fortitude in carrying out a lifetime’s project and working within a Pleasure in viewing landscapes is subverted in Noor Abed’s video, We Both Know (2012) in which male-dominated discipline in the face of criticism, in particular from her Italian colleagues. The the frame is locked onto a sun-burned mountainside with no horizon on which to extend the eye. mysterious figure of Van Deman combined with her vast photographic legacy roots the exhibition The viewer follows the strangely Sisyphian efforts of a young woman in a black dress struggling in unpredictable territories, between feminism, archaeology and postcolonialism. across inhospitable terrain. Both the heavy-seeming objects with which she is burdened on her Having spent her formative years from 1995 to 1999 working as head draughtswoman at the journey as well as her bare arms and calves blending into the vibrant ochre of the surrounding French Institute of Archaeology for the Near East, artist Paola Yacoub has a personal connection rocky landscape. Carrying a broken mannequin on her back, the figure never quite reaches the top to archaeology. Her Elegiac Landscape: Southern Lebanon (2001), shown as a diptych in the of the screen, before the video loops back to her beginning from the the bottom of the hillside once exhibition, is a suppressed form of death in life, akin to an archaeological discovery of a grave again. The scene is both hypnotic and claustrophobic with the seemingly endless task of the woman in an unsuspecting landscape. Printed onto a slim landscape format, the hills turn to blue in the bent beneath the doppelganger figure of the plastic mannequin. distance reminiscent of the exquisite seventeenth-century cartography of George Braun and Franz The occupation of the woman’s personal space by the defunct mannequin adds to a sense of

6 7 oppression and futility, reinforced by the repetitive ascent and the heat. Working within a Travel is a connecting theme of the show and a central part of Ursula Schulz-Dornburg’s practice. powerful lineage of performance art and land art, Abed’s work evokes Ana Mendieta’s ritualistic In 1980, accompanied by a sculptor friend, the artist gained permission from UNESCO to go to Iraq actions. And yet a Dadaist nonsensical narrative underlies the work, voided of any notion of only weeks before the Iran-Iraq War (1980-1988) would explode. On learning that Saddam Hussein sacrality. Abed takes these ideas of performance into a new direction, working more within a intended to destroy the marshes in southern Iraq both to punish the Shiites and to obliterate the surrealist frame. The figure’s regular movements animate a deathlessly still quasi-lunarscape. possible entry points for infiltrators as the marsh channels extended into Iran, Schulz-Dornburg wanted to document them. Reaching Mesopotamia, the artist shot her first photographs of Jananne Al-Ani references the military use of lens-based technologies in warfare and surveillance archaeological ruins. Since then, she has developed a practice in which documentary activism in the still images taken from Shadow Sites II, a film ‘that takes the form of an aerial journey’.11 combines with a conceptual artistic vision. Her work Necropolis, Palmyra was shot in Syria in With a resemblance to a cell-culture dish seen under a microscope, Al-Ani’s works test vision in a 2010, six months before the Syrian Civil War, with the idea of making a minimal work. Thirteen different way to Abed’s, Yacoub’s or Silva’s by creating an illusion in terms of scale. Her vision of photographs of walls in different states of decay compose her work on the Valley of the Tombs in Jordanian landscapes seen from above draw attention to the reality of a dehumanised perspective. Palmyra, a 1km long necropolis. The industrial typologies of Bernd and Hilla Becher photographs With the impartial focus of an image taken by a drone, her stills concentrate on the surface of come to mind, creating a question in the viewer’s mind about the difference in repetition among an earth, encrusted with man-made geometries that may include military bases, archaeological the archaeological fragments. The artist’s work is uncannily connected to Van Deman’s quasi- fortresses or agricultural crops. Working closely with the Jordanian Royal Film Commission forensic photographs of walls. Schulz-Dornburg imitates the technical rigour of the archaeologist to gain authorisation from the Jordanian Army, Airforce and Intelligence Bureau, Al-Ani shot while expressing obsession of a different kind, an obsession with perception. the images from a light aircraft. Referring to art historical, photographic and photojournalistic images, the artist’s work directly comments on the media coverage of the 1991 Desert Storm In questioning the meanings and symbols of landscape, the artists in the exhibition have detached campaign in the First Gulf War, during which the movement of journalists on the ground was themselves from the automatic or stereotyped equivalences between landscape, nature and the heavily restricted. Removed from any form of human contact, they were only able to witness the feminine. Their works move out into less categorised directions. Stepping out into the unknown, a conflict from a bird’s eye view. Seemingly black and white, the stills are sepia toned, referencing metaphor for any creative practice, involves leaving traces where there have been none before. The early aerial reconnaissance photographs including Edward Steichen’s work from the First World works in My Sister Who Travels momentarily meet in the space of The Mosaic Rooms; moving away War over the trenches of the Western Front and the French archaeologist Antoine Poidebard’s from ghettoised territories, they inhabit a network of journeys, creating new connections between photographs of sites in the Middle East taken in the first half of the twentieth century. visions of landscape. Turning from an airborne lens to one looking from the earth and up into the sky, Algerian artist Martina Caruso Halida Boughriet’s looped video Transit (2011) shows a cloud of starlings moving through the Curator dusky orange skies of Istanbul. The birds work as a single formation swooping from dizzying heights and swerving in unexpected directions, within what appears to the human eye a calculated Art historian, writer and curator, Caruso lectures lectures in the history and theory of photography frenzy of movement. Quasi-invisible birds of prey on the edges of the chattering are creating the at Camberwell College of Arts, University of the Arts London. formations, diving in threateningly and reshaping their choreography. Different voices narrate their stories off-screen. Men and women speak in a mixture of French and Arabic describing the difficulties they have met and the travels they have undergone in order to seek work abroad. A correlation is created between the voices in the background and the starlings, both eternally in ‘transit’ within urban spaces, with the human element at the mercy of circumstances, geography, economics and politics. Boughriet’s practice does not centre on landscape, but on developing a humanist angle on historical events through performance, installation and video. The association between the absorbing movements of the birds and the voices of migrants expresses the melancholy of transience and the loss of that which has been left behind.

8 9 Noor Abed Still from We Both Know, 2013 HD video, 9’15 looped

10 Jananne Al-Ani Aerial I, 2011 Production stills from the film Shadow Sites II Digital pigment prints Photography Adrian Warren Courtesy the Artist

12 Halida Boughriet Still from Transit, 2011 HD Video 16/9, 7’50 looped

22 Ursula Schulz-Dornburg Necropolis (Palmyra, Syria), 2010 49 x 49 cm , silver gelatin prints

24 Ursula Schulz-Dornburg Necropolis (Palmyra, Syria), 2010 49 x 49 cm , silver gelatin prints

32 Corinne Silva Resort town of Al Hoceima placed in former industrial zone, Cartagena from the Imported Landscapes series, 2010 179 x 143 cm, c-type print

38 Esther Boise Van Deman Algeria, remains of Roman fort (?) on road to ancient Biskra, 1913 17 x 21 cm

44 Paola Yacoub Elegiac Landscape (Southern Lebanon), 2001 35 x 94cm, Diptych, chromogenic handprint

46 Artist Biographies Noor Abed

Born in 1988 in Jerusalem, Noor Abed is a Palestinian artist who uses performance, video, installation and drawing. Abed is interested in the relationship between the female body and landscape, as well as notions of enclosure and openness, claustrophobia and dialectics of power and control. Useless performative acts related to concepts of gender inform her work where positions of power are not fixed but transformative.

Since graduating from her BA in Contemporary Visual Art at the International Academy of Art in Palestine, Abed has been on an exchange with the Department of Sound and Moving Image at Brighton University in 2011 and is currently completing an MA in Fine Art/Photography and Media at California Institute of the Arts, Los Angeles. Her exhibitions: include I See You, a mid-residency solo show at the California Institute of the Arts, Los Angeles in 2013; This is Me, They are Us, You are Here at the Birzeit University Museum (2012); On/Off Language in the 2011 Jerusalem Show; and the Ninth Annual Performance Festival in Hamar, Norway (2011). Abed has also participated in numerous events, including the Palestinian Art Auction in Jerusalem in 2011, Truth is Concrete, Art Marathon in Graz, Austria (2012) and has coordinated events like And And And for the 100 days of exhibition at Documenta (13) in Kassel, Germany.

49 Jananne Al-Ani Halida Boughriet

Born in Iraq in 1966, Jananne Al-Ani lives and works in London. With a focus on photography, Born in France in 1980, Halida Boughriet is a Franco-Algerian artist living and working in film and video, her early works are located against a backdrop of larger historic, geopolitical Paris. Playing on the dichotomies between reality and fiction, she works with different artistic forces while allowing occasional glimpses of personal narratives and family histories. She has an languages influenced by the Situationists and Fluxus in her use of performance, photography and ongoing interest in the representation of contested landscapes filtered through the technologies video. Boughriet also works from within two cultures — Algerian and French. From her distinctly of surveillance and reconnaissance in modern warfare. Al-Ani studied Fine Art at the Byam Shaw humanist perspective, she explores the complex relations between the global north and the global School of Art and graduated with an MA in Photography from the Royal College of Art (1997). She is south, capturing the tensions within human relationships on questions of war, politics and currently Senior Research Fellow at the University of the Arts London. religion.

Solo exhibitions include Excavations, Hayward Gallery Project Space, London (2014); Groundwork, Since graduating from the Ecole Nationale des Beaux Arts in Paris, Boughriet went on an exchange Beirut Art Center (2013); Shadow Sites, Arthur M. Sackler Gallery, Washington DC (2012); programme with the Film Department of the School of Visual Arts in New York in 2005. Her Jananne Al-Ani, Darat al Funun, Amman (2010) and The Visit, Art Now, Tate Britain (2005). She works are held at the New Media Center of the Centre Pompidou in Paris and the Musée d’Art has participated in the 13th Istanbul Biennial (2013); Sharjah Biennial 11 (2013); 18th Biennale of Contemporain du Val-de-Marne in Vitry-sur-Seine. Boughriet participated in recent international Sydney (2012) and the 54th Venice Biennale (2011). events including Elles@centrepompidou in Paris (2010), the Festival of Contemporary Art in Algiers (2011) and the latest chapter of Video et Après at the Centre Pompidou in 2014. Recent group exhibitions include Concrete, MUMA, Melbourne (2014); She Who Tells Story, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston (2013); Catalyst: Contemporary Art and War, Imperial War Museum North, Manchester (2013); Before the Deluge, CaixaForum, Barcelona and Madrid (2012) and Topographies de la Guerre, Le Bal, Paris (2011). Al-Ani has co-curated exhibitions including Veil (2003/4) and Fair Play (2001/2).

Recipient of the Abraaj Capital Art Prize (2011), her work can be found in the collections of the Tate Gallery and Imperial War Museum, London; Centre Pompidou, Paris; Smithsonian Institution, Washington DC; SFMOMA, San Francisco; Mori Art Museum, Tokyo, and Darat al Funun, Amman.

50 51 Ursula Schulz-Dornburg Corinne Silva

Born in 1938 in Berlin, Ursula Schulz-Dornburg is a German artist and photographer who lives in Born in 1976, Corinne Silva is a British artist living in London whose practice explores the use of Düsseldorf. Her encompassing vision brings together what appear to be opposites: conceptual art the still and moving image to suggest metaphysical space. Her quiet, meditative visual language and documentary photography. Schulz-Dornburg is drawn to remote areas of the world, seeking engages with the potentials and restrictions of lens-based media and the evolving relationship places of silence, forgotten landscapes, archaic situations. She almost exclusively uses black and between politics, landscape and art histories. Silva forms imaginary landscapes that connect white photography and prefers architectural themes: buildings as shelters and refuges, or as ideas of human mobility and porous frontiers to translate, re-organise and re-construct material signs of growth and decay. Schulz-Dornburg first began taking photographs in Iraq in 1980, a few landscape. While her work emerges out of late twentieth-century critical and conceptual theories months before the Iran-Iraq War exploded. The things recorded in her work often no longer exist; on landscape practice, Silva subverts these visual languages by avoiding both the disinterested they have become history salvaged through her camera. Since 2003, Schulz-Dornburg has been gaze and the ‘monumental’ landscape. Her photographic and video works create new narrative exploring the endless desert along the abandoned Hejaz railway, a project begun in 1908 and never possibilities through disrupting traditional modes of landscape image production and refusing a completed. definitive or authoritarian position.

In 1959 and 1960, Schulz-Dornburg studied photography and journalism in Munich. Living in After graduating from a BA in Photography at Nottingham Trent University and Universidad New York in the mid-1960s she encountered the work of Robert Frank, Dorothea Lange and Walker de Barcelona in 2002 and from a Photography MA at the University of Brighton in 2007, Silva Evans, finding their social critique inspiring, while at Venice Biennales, the artist encountered completed her practice-based PhD at the London College of Communication in 2013. She is now a the works of Dan Flavin, Michael Heizer and Walter De Maria. She also maintained a long-standing Postdoctoral Research Fellow at Photography and the Archive Research Centre, University of the connection with Laurence Weiner. Schulz-Dornburg has been exhibiting her work since 1975. Arts London. Recent group and solo exhibitions include Gardening the Suburbs at the Makan Art Highlights include Sonnenstand, Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington DC, (1996) and The Art Space in Amman (2014); I See Europe! at the Kunstbezirk in Stuttgart (2013); the Brighton Photo Institute of Chicago, (1997); Across the territories, Institut Valencia d’Art Modern, Valencia, Spain, Biennial and The Photographer’s Gallery (2012); the Flash Forward festival in Toronto and Boston (2002) and Galeria Casa Vallarta, Guadalajara, Mexico, (2004); presencia y ausencia, Fundación in 2011/2012; Wandering Abroad at the National Media Museum/Ways of Looking Festival in BBK, Bilbao, (2008); Objectivités — La photographie à Düsseldorf, Musée d’Art Moderne de la Bradford, UK, (2011); Imported Landscapes at Manifesta 8 in Murcia, Spain, (2010); Badlands at Ville de Paris, (2008); Solar Position. Horizon Desert, The Lichfield Studios, London, (2009); From the Noorderlicht Photofestival, Netherlands (2010); and Wandering Abroad at Leeds Art Gallery, Medina to the Jordanian Border, Pergamonmuseum, Berlin, (2011); Niemandslicht, Kunstmuseum, UK, (2009). Silva also won the Magenta Foundation Flash Forward Award in 2010 and 2011 and was Bochum, (2011); Abans del diluvi. Mesopotàmia 3500–2100 B.C., CaixaForum, Barcelona, (2012) and resident artist at the A.M. Qattan Foundation, Ramallah in 2013 and 2014. Madrid, (2013); and Kurchatov — Architecture of a Nuclear Test Site, AEDES, Berlin, (2014). Recent publications include Ursula Schulz-Dornburg: Light of Photography, Silence of Architecture (Müller & Böhm, 2008) and Horizontabschreitung (Walther König, 2009). The artist’s works are present in numerous public collections including IVAM – Institut Valencià d’Art Modern, Valencia, Spain; Kunstmuseum, Bochum, Germany; Musée d´Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris – MAM/ARC, Paris, France; Museum Ludwig, Cologne, Germany; Pinakothek der Moderne Munich, Germany; Tate Modern, London, United Kingdom; The Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago, USA; and The Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C., USA.

52 53 Esther Boise Van Deman Paola Yacoub

Born in 1862 in South Salem, Ohio, Esther Boise Van Deman was a leading American classical Born in Beirut in 1966, Paola Yacoub is a contemporary Lebanese artist based in Berlin and Beirut. archaeologist who lived and worked between Rome and the United States. Her interest in building In 2000 Yacoub began an artistic collaboration with French artist Michel Lasserre, noting the materials stemmed from her research on the Atrium Vestae in Rome while she completed her PhD variations of aspects of Lebanese territories in war and post-war situations through photographic dissertation on The Cult of Vesta Publica and the Vestal Virgins. She began investigating Ancient and performative works. Yacoub and Lasserre exhibited at the 2001 and 2003 Venice Biennales, Roman concrete and brick constructions supporting her technical research through extensive and the Kunst-Werke Berlin 2000 and the Witte de With Rotterdam 2003 among others. Their expert use of photography, which she used to categorise and analyse her findings. The excellent performative lectures include Tsunami at He Xiangning Art Museum, Shenshen, China (2008), The quality and conservation of Van Deman’s negatives demonstrate the care with which she executed Edifying Story of Li Guoxing at the Beirut Art Center (2011), Something you should know at the Ecole her photographic work and the important role it played within her archaeological research. Her des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales (EHESS) in Paris (2012) and Travelling Féministe in 2013 photographs are now held at the American Academy Photo Archive in Rome. in Paris. Yacoub and Lasserre’s photo-essays have been anthologised in the publication Beirut is a Magnificent City: Synoptic Pictures published by the Fundació Antoni Tàpies in Barcelona in 2003. Van Deman gained a BA in 1891 and an MA in 1892 in Latin and German from the in Ann Arbor. After teaching Latin at and the Bryn Mawr School in Before collaborating with Lasserre, Yacoub studied at the Lebanese Academy of Fine Arts in , Maryland, she became the first woman to receive a PhD from the University of Chicago Beirut and graduated from the Architectural Association in London in 1994. From 1995 to 1999, in 1898. Van Deman then taught Latin and classical archaeology at and she worked at the Institut Français d’Archéologie du Proche-Orient where she was in charge of until 1906, when she moved to Rome as a Carnegie Institution fellow. She then the excavation’s drawings in downtown Beirut. In 2005, she received a DAAD fellowship of the became the first American woman archaeologist in Italy and was a well-known figure in the Berlin Artists-in-Residence programme. She has recently taken up the position of Director of the Archaeology world in Rome, where she was friends with people like Thomas Ashby, the Director Artistic Research Practices (ARP) at ALBA in Beirut. Yacoub’s recent exhibitions include Paola of the British School at Rome, and met and befriended the explorer and travel-writer Gertrude Yacoub, Drawing with the things themselves at the Beirut Art Center in 2011 and Paola Yacoub, Bell on her visit to Rome in 1910. Between 1925 and 1930, Van Deman taught Roman archaeology kiss the black stones at the Haus der Kulturen der Welt in 2012. Yacoub has also given numerous at the University of Michigan. She died in Rome in 1937, and was buried there in the Protestant presentations including: What do I do? at The Photographers’ Gallery in London (2010); Do we Cemetery. Her major work, The Building of the Roman Aqueducts, was published in 1934 while her agree? at Le Bal in Paris (2011); L’archive qui vient at the Centre Pompidou (2012); and Under this magnum opus, Ancient Roman Construction in Italy from the Prehistoric Period to Augustus, was trail at Ashkal Alwan in Beirut (2013). Her works are held in public collections including FNAC completed and published posthumously by Marion Elizabeth Blake. in Paris, the Musée des Beaux-Arts in Nantes, the FRAC Poitoux-Charentes and the Centre pour l’Image Contemporaine/Mamco in Geneva.

54 55 Notes Bibliography

1 W. J. T. Mitchell, Landscape and Power (London: University of Chicago Press, 1996), p. 29. D. Abulafia, The Great Sea: Mendieta’, in Mendieta. Earth the Gaze and Masculinity’, A Human History of the Body 1972–1985, ed. Olga M. in Human Geography: An 2 G. Rose, ‘Geography as a Science of Observation: The Landscape, the Gaze and Masculinity’, Mediterranean in Human Geography: An Essential Anthology, eds. J. Agnew, D. Linvingstone and A. Rogers (London: Allen Viso (Berlin: Hatje Canz, 2004). Essential Anthology, eds. J. Lane, 2011). Agnew, D. Linvingstone and (Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 1996), pp. 341 - 350, p. 343. K. Einaudi, ed., Esther B. A. Rogers (Oxford: Blackwell J. Al-Ani, Footnote to a Project: Van Deman (Rome: American 3 Z. Cahill, ‘Earth Without Aura: Notes on the Psychology of Contemporary Landscape’, Mousse Publishers, 1996), pp. 341-350. Magazine n. 35, October 2012. The 2011 Abraaj Capital Art Academy in Rome, 1991). Prize, ed. Sharmini Pereira D. Deriu, K. Kamvasinou and 4 P. Horden and N. Purcell, The Corrupting Sea: A Study of Mediterranean History (Oxford: K. Gresch, She Who Tells A (London: Abraaj Capital Art E. Schinkle, eds., Emerging Blackwell, 2000). Story: Women Photographers Prize, 2011), pp. 105-207. Landscapes: Between from Iran and the Arab World, 5 D. Abulafia, The Great Sea: A Human History of the Mediterranean (London, Allen Lane: 2011), Production and Representation W. Benjamin, ‘Theses on exhibition catalogue Museum p. 648. (London: Ashgate, 2014). the Philosophy of History’, of Fine Arts, Boston, 27 August 6 K. A. Geffcken, ‘Esther Van Deman — A Profile’, in Esther B. Van Deman, ed. K. Einaudi in Walter Benjamin: 2013–12 January 2014 (Boston: M. Weiss, ed., Light from the (Rome: American Academy in Rome, 1991), p. 13. Illuminations, ed. Hannah MFA Publications, 2013). Middle East: New Photography, Arendt (New York: Schocken exhibition catalogue V&A, 7 Jean Said Makdisi, Beirut Fragments, a war memoir (New York: Persea Books, 1999), p. 200 D. Harris and D. Fairchild Books, 1969) reprinted edition London, 13 November 2012-7 cited in P. Yacoub, Beirut is a Magnificent City. Synoptic Pictures, eds. Paola Yacoub and Michel Ruggles, eds., Sites Unseen: (London: Fontana, 1992). April 2013 (Gottingen: Steidle/ Lasserre (Barcelona: Fundaciò Antoni Tapiès, 2003), p. 101 Landscape and Vision V&A, 2012). 8 W. Benjamin, ‘VII’, from ‘Uber den Begriff der Geschichte’, Geschichtshistorische These (1940), D. Bright, ‘Of Mother Nature (Pittsburgh: University of trans. Harry Zohn, ‘Theses on the Philosophy of History’, in Walter Benjamin: Illuminations, ed. and Marlboro Men: An Inquiry Pittsburgh Press, 2007). L. Wells, Shifting Horizons: Hannah Arendt (New York: Schocken Books, 1969) reprinted edition (London: Fontana, 1992), p. 254. into the Cultural Meanings of Women’s Landscape P. Horden and N. Purcell, The Landscape Photography’. See Photography Now (London: IB 9 Paola Yacoub, What do I do? The Photographer’s Gallery, London, 2 November 2010. Corrupting Sea: A Study of www.deborahbright.net/PDF/ Tauris, 2001). Mediterranean History (Oxford: 10 With the exception of Ceuta and Melilla, which Spain currently governs. Bright-Marlboro.pdf Blackwell, 2000). P. Yacoub, Beirut is a 11 J. Al-Ani, Footnote to a Projects: The 2011 Abraaj Capital Art Prize, ed. Sharmini Pereira Z. Cahill, ‘Earth without Aura: Magnificent City. Synoptic W.J.T. Mitchell, ed., Landscape (Dubai: Abraaj Capital Art Prize, 2011), pp. 105-207, p. 106. Notes on the Psychology of Pictures, eds. Paola Yacoub and and Power (London: The Contemporary Landscape’, Michel Lasserre (Barcelona: University of Chicago Press, Mousse Magazine, n. 35, Fundaciò Antoni Tapiès, 2003). 1994). October 2012. G. Rose, ‘Geography as a Science C. Iles, ‘Subtle Bodies: The of Observation: The Landscape, invisible films of Ana

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