Mark Westmoreland:
Akram’s Reproduction Machine: Reimagining Lebanese Resistance - Abstract

Akram Zaatari recently had his first solo show in Beirut. As one of the most successful artists in Lebanon, Zaatari has shown his work at exhibitions and biennials around the world. Due to the focus on war and memory, Lebanese art in general has become a fetish in the international art world. Considered part of the first generation of postwar artists (followed by two since), Zaatari has a prolific body of work dating from the mid-90s, and earlier if you consider the way he incorporates photos and diaries from his childhood into his exhibits. The rarity of solo shows in Lebanon means it is unusual to experience one artist's entire body of work at a single event. While I am interested in what this tells us about the shortages of public venues for artists in Lebanon, the limited access to previous works, and the global flow of these discourses, in this paper I want to consider instead how Zaatari's collection resonates with a broader effort by artists in Lebanon to trace the violence of the past into the present (and perhaps the future) by engaging the strengths and weaknesses of modern media. In Zaatari's solo show, Earth of Endless Secrets, most of the pieces focus on the way that political violence in southern Lebanon has been experienced by the people, places, and objects that have "survived" it. Indeed, much of his work examines media objects as fossils of forgotten histories. By using photography and video as "reproduction machines" to document and catalog his research materials, he does not so much reveal behind the scene "secrets" of video production as show the "endless" amount of secrets as yet unearthed. According to Zaatari, this identifies the boundary of permissible representation.
Two galleries hosted Zaatari’s solo exhibition during the summer of 2009. Sfeir-Semler, a Hamburg-based gallery, featured a presentation of four of Zaatari's video projects. These videos and an exhibition of their supporting materials provide illuminating perspectives on "the state of image-making in situations of war". For instance, Zaatari's 1997 video, All's Well on the Border, uses documentary and experimental motifs to retell stories from the Lebanese resistance in an effort to critique the codes of heroism and suffering. His documentaries operate according to the logics of avant-garde art and advance a postcolonial critique of representation, however, overtime his videos have shown a trajectory toward observational studies and ethnographic pursuit. Both Nature Morte (2008, 11m) and Letter to Samir (2008, 32m) feature a central static shot that last the bulk of the video's duration. The second part of the show takes place at the new Beirut Art Center and focuses on his most recent work under the title, Writing for a Posterior Time. This exhibit features the letters and photographs of a former resistance fighter, Nabih Awada, who was imprisoned in Israel for ten years. This is the material Zaatari used in 1997 when he scripted his characters' stories in All's Well on the Border. In this exhibit he is less interested in the words per se and more attentive to the experience and performance of resistance. Letter to Samir shows Awada writing a letter in a 20 minute frontal shot, followed by a 10 minute over-head close up of him elaborately folding and sealing the letter into a capsule as for smuggling in or out of prison.
Although coming with different definitions of documentary, I am interested in how Zaatari's work parallel's that of ethnographic filmmaking. Both are attentive to lived experience and the production of visual knowledge. Furthermore, extensive research informs his observational studies and visual productions. As co-founder of the Arab Image Foundation, he has worked to collect hundreds of thousands of photographs made by professional and amateur photographers in the Arab world. Working extensively with photographers, like Van Leo in Cairo and Hashem el-Madani from Zaatari's hometown Saida, Zaatari examines the rise and decline of studio photography within modernizing Arab societies. Indeed, from the archive to the studio Zaatari's work shows a fascination with these image factories, which engenders a reflexive relationship with found images. This incredibly revealing pursuit simultaneously grapples with the erasure of history, the destruction of homes and cities, and the deterritorialization of lived experience. Zaatari's effort to reimagine the political violence in Lebanon, deserves a closer examination in order to reevaluate the type of questions asked of a society in a cycle of violence and consider alternative forms of visual research being done in conflict zones.

EASA Media Anthropology Network