November Paynter

 
Chourouk Hriech is an artist thriving on multiple belongings and constant travel. Born in France of Moroccan decent, she divides her time between Morocco, France and other destinations. Hriech’s drawings reflect this confluence of inspirations and experiences, also incorporating the mythological and imaginary, resulting in the creation of social-historic frescos that depict vibrant urban improvisations.
 
In her series Watching the Sea, the world’s oceans and cities are enveloped and entwined. As ships and liners become part of an architecture of bridges, skyscrapers and ultimately archeology, humanity encompasses all, and the horizon loops into invisibility.
 
Hriech plays with her pen in a self-styled geometrical zone between cultures, geographies and what she describes as ‘kingdoms of opposites’, which incorporate the public and private, visible and invisible, in accessories of black and voids of white. Weaving this particular series of drawings together is the outline of a floating character, one that survey’s Hriech’s merged topographies from a swing. One can imagine that with each of his swings a new perspective, of what is essentially the same urban sprawl, bursts into life below.
 
As imaginary as these places are, each one is a composite of recognisible building blocks that are inspired by Hriech’s shared existence between Morocco and France. Certain symbols and cultural traits are indicators of specific common histories and potentially shared futures, while other globally encountered references are repeated throughout. The result is a tangle of manmade and natural, and a condensing of time and space, where only the recurring boats in each image seem to maintain their autonomy in their international state while at sea.
 
Between the more structured horizontals and verticals of the buildings lurk the mysteries, evils and personal attributes of each city; one is inhabited by snakes, others by cannibals and books, horns and shells, a mysterious swarm, or arrows on the wind. These strange plagues, that are reminiscent in style to those that thwarted Egypt, are distinct, while at the same time part of a patterned succession. They refer to the failures of modernity and an unfurling of future dystopia, as well as to the tension between tradition and modernity.
 
In Hriech’s series The Nature and the Death Still Alive there are varying degrees of stress drawn between nature and man’s desire to use and abuse natural resources. In some drawings this tension is no more than a confrontation of organically outlined foliage versus geometric lines. In others the man-made consumes the nature, until trees appear as skeletal remains, pipes and cables prevail and the remaining plants appear to have been genetically mutated.
 
Yet in all Hriech’s drawings there are always injections of hope. In this series her spinning windmills find harmony between nature and technology, as well as bestowing a celebratory or carnivalesque air.
 

November Paynter is Director of the Artist Pension Trust, Dubai and an independent curator based in Istanbul. She has held the positions of Curator at Platform Garanti Contemporary Art Center, Istanbul; Assistant Curator of the 9th International Istanbul Biennial and Consultant Curator at Tate Modern for the exhibition Global Cities. Independent curatorial projects include As the Land Expands at Al Riwaq Art Space, Bahrain (2010), The Columns Held Us Up at Artists Space, New York with Vasif Kortun (2009) and New Ends Old Beginnings at the Bluecoat and Open Eye galleries in Liverpool (2008). Paynter often writes for art periodicals including Artforum, Bidoun and Artasispasific, as well as for artist and exhibition publications.

 
Chourouk Hriech was featured in the New Ends, Old Beginnings exhibition.

November Paynter

NP: We first worked together in 2003 when I invited you to present the Minibar project in an exhibition called Making Space that I curated for Platform Garanti Contemporary Art Center in Istanbul. The show aimed to open up the idea of using and experiencing the urban context beyond the planners’ intent, in more explorative and improvisational ways. I knew that we would likely show Minibar as a slide projection, but your participation went well-beyond the addition of a requested art object and ended up as an interactive arena where the public were invited to comment on their experience of authoritarian structures in the urban sphere and how they could be contradicted. In the end, the gallery walls became plastered with texts on the topic and the public seemed to really relish the opportunity to have and share a voice. The same year you presented We are Papermen, he said at the Istanbul Biennial. Due to its location on the pedestrian street Istiklal, Caddesi Platform had a very different audience to the Biennial; I wonder what it meant to show work in these two different venues and contexts? And to create collaborative work at Platform with your sister Deniz Altay, and in the end also with the public?
 
CA: I think that different modes of collaboration were at stake. The collaboration with Deniz Altay involved bringing together our research and interpretations around a common area of interest, as we were both working on the minibar phenomenon. This involved taking excerpts from a set of interviews that were mainly conducted with the young people who hung out at the minibars, and transforming this set of correspondences into the basic unit of the piece. We composed a wall narrative as a launching device, but multiplied copies of these statements – ranging from personal historical notes, to general commentary, to drunken drifts – to be at the audience’s disposal. Additional papers and two rolls of sticky tape left out on a table were our way of providing the basic tools for the piece to grow through time and in the exhibition space. All of these were inspired by the nature of how the minibars came about in the first place, and how a production of meaning (and function) grew to encompass a totally unexpected territory, by simple gathering, drinking, and making use of existing physical elements that were initially there to draw boundaries, and mark private territories or public infrastructures. Bringing all these statements from an unknown scene in Ankara, to the most crowded pedestrian street of Istanbul, where Platform Garanti was located, and the very strangely welcoming nature (as you recall there were hundreds of random passersby going in and out of that space) of the gallery itself, gave way to a kind of interpretation and reconfiguration that was performed solely by the audience/viewer/visitor/makers. Eventually the piece grew out of control, there was conflict within the system (just as in the minibars), and roles and actions had to be negotiated. So what seems at first glance to be a simple gesture of participation was actually a way to reflect on the minibar phenomenon from within the space of art.
 
We are Papermen, he said (2003) was quite similar in that, again, the installation was pretty much shaped by the issues being discussed within the work. You are right to suggest that the Biennial had an altogether different audience. But the work was also partly tackling the problematic relationship between artist (myself) and subject (papermen). Papermen in Turkey are the informal rubbish collectors that sort and select one type of rubbish to later take for recycling. The most common collectors are those of paper and paper-based materials. On the other hand, part of the piece invited the viewer/visitor to go through an excavation of pages of diary material, from which they could pile up their own sequence and story, and which included accounts (from the very personal, to scientific research findings, and newspaper clippings) and attempts to encounter papermen and figure out how they operate in big cities in Turkey. So in a sense, the audience now had access to an array of materials (that can also be seen as a pile of garbage), from which they made something for themselves, that they can take home and read. Here, the collaboration – if we may call it that – was quite choreographed or framed, but I still had no control over who takes what and how one reads the storyline. Well, one can say this is always the case, but the relation between work and viewer moved from the perceptive to the physical realm with this work.
 

NP: The next exhibition we explored together at Platform was ‘Art For…’ (implying art for export) a series of three shows that looked at the burgeoning interest from Europe in Turkey and its contemporary art scene. The series of three shows started by hosting works shown in Europe or elsewhere but never in Turkey and ended with the exhibition Normalization, which pushed the notion further to delve into a variety of concerns about the driving practice of ‘normalization’ both politically, socially and personally. The first two shows in the series saw some works being recreated for our space, but in more modest ways, such as Cevdet Erek’s work 2nd Bridge being scaled down, and a wall painting by Haluk Akakce first shown in Italy reinstalled in a more confined space; these ‘mimickings’ and the idea of working to normalize our own process of curating the show, resulted in your installation that initially condensed the first show into the second and then the first two shows into the third. Again the collaboration involved various other participants as you included works by the other artists in the exhibition in your own installation, sometimes asking them to recreate their own works within this new context. This shift, from working with the audience to working with other participating artists in the same exhibition as yourself, seems to be a practice that now drives many of your installations. How did the ‘Art For…’ installation come about? How was working with a group of artists selected by the curators? And did this experience feed into other projects?
 
CA: One can see it as a more violent gesture on my behalf in comparison to the previous pieces, but looking back I can say this was where the three pieces we’ve discussed so far culminated. In a way the questions around exhibition-making and exhibition-space return to the scene, bringing along the “unpredictable reconfiguration” (to quote Engin Oncuoglu) that was evident in the works that looked into the city for their subjects. It also brought forward questions of authorship and the boundaries between the artist/work of art/exhibition/audience; where does one start and the other end? Or do they end? I was also a bit obsessed with the pre-conceptions of how the spaces for art function, such as the periodical tabula rasa – the complete cleaning up of the space before each new show, which relates to the notions of whiteness and neutrality, which are not true! The physically claimed neutrality is a way to undermine the socio-economic-political frames and infrastructure of how art institutes function. So this action of condensing each exhibition and keeping it in the space, with samples from the original works, photographic documentation of installations, and existing elements or furniture to be re-shaped and re-composed within the same space, but for longer than usual durations and in a periodically growing sense, was a way to intervene in and reconfigure such pre-conceptions. It was also a challenge to the ‘short-term memory loss’ not only in art, but in life and politics – in a sense how the city or the country does not tend to accumulate knowledge of its recent past, and how it tries hard not to relate or learn from its recent past. In the end, the whole project involved many artists’ blessings and agreement, as the original pieces were to be re-configured. Not everybody agreed to this, I guess 2 out of 18 artists did not agree, so I ended up showing only photos of their work, taken by other people. However, these were balanced with the more inventive contributions, such as Leyla Gediz’s painting. The painting she had shown in the first exhibition of the series belonged to a collection that did not want to take the risk of showing the piece within my constellation. After discussing this situation, Leyla painted a detail of the original round canvas, in 1:1 scale, again on a smaller round canvas, which introduced further thoughts of originality, reproduction and art historical references via the painting being a ‘detail view’ to the first painting. This was an expansion to the original intentions, and really made the installation ‘grow’ and also allowed me to act more freely in the second round of condensation, of making the Normalization piece.
 
NP: The work you proposed for the exhibition New Ends Old Beginnings that I curated in 2008 for the Bluecoat gallery in Liverpool was a very different kind of piece. This time the curatorial request was that you respond to your experience of having spent time in Dubai. Was this an unusual experience for you given that so many of your art installations deal with the space of the gallery and the cross-referencing of your work in relation to the other works being exhibited? Perhaps you can describe Deposit (Spring Deficit: After Dubai, After Hammons, and after the politics of white noise) (2008) and how it came to be a more formal sculptural embodiment?

CA: I think that cross-referencing still exists in the piece, but I can also say it was my take on making a self-contained work, producing an object/system, and taking responsibility for its existence in the world of singularities. That cross-referencing eventually exists as the mirror surface captures its surrounding and those who are looking at the piece. But perhaps I should first tell you a bit about the ideas that made it.
 
Deposit (Spring Deficit: After Hammons, After Dubai, and after the politics of white noise) is a sculpture, which operates mechanically as a fountain, a fountain that mobilises sand instead of water- a sand fountain. The sculpture works through the range of potential meanings a fountain holds – from historically being associated with wealth and power, to its religious connotations, to the idea of the ‘spring’, to its uses as a public service or charity, its symbolic prestige, its use for acoustic blockage in secret diplomatic meetings, its importance in Baroque, and its resonance in 20th century art. I titled the piece before the global financial crisis emerged, but I see it resonating well with the conditions of today. In relating to Dubai it also reflected Western discourse about this city. It is a sort of mirror-world where certain things are reflected obliquely, or are simply reversed; all the while, what constitutes the reflection and the reflected remains rooted in capitalism and corporate development. The fountain that remains a fountain, but strives to function with sand instead of water, is an attempt to pin down that moment of mirroring, not only to illustrate, but to comment via a singular sculptural object (a totality – that circulates grains of sand) instead of other representational or documentational tools and narratives.
 
The process of making the piece was also interesting. After your invitation/commission and after deciding on the main principles and title, I discussed at length with Paul Bartlett, a friend and robotics wizard, about possible ways of making the fountain fully function as a closed circulation system that works with sand. We looked at mechanical devices used for grains or sanitary powders, I also started looking into what else was available, but all the time the piece was growing more complex and much larger than necessary. It was a focused brainstorm-sketching session with Asli Kalinoglu during a train-ride that first made me realise we could simplify the piece by chopping out certain mechanisms, forms and all that was unnecessary, until we came to the point where the movement of sand was not necessarily through circulation (which was Hammons’ way). Instead it could be achieved through sound, and we had already considered sound as integral to the piece. So, sand, sound, mirror, and pond or pool came together in the final form as Deposit.
 

This is an edited excerpt taken from an interview by November Paynter for a book on Can Altay’s work entitled Can Altay, (pigeons are people) published as part of the Contemporary Art Series in 2010 by art-ist, Istanbul.

November Paynter is Director of the Artist Pension Trust, Dubai and an independent curator based in Istanbul. She has held the positions of Curator at Platform Garanti Contemporary Art Center, Istanbul; Assistant Curator of the 9th International Istanbul Biennial and Consultant Curator at Tate Modern for the exhibition Global Cities. Independent curatorial projects include As the Land Expands at Al Riwaq Art Space, Bahrain (2010), The Columns Held Us Up at Artists Space, New York with Vasif Kortun (2009) and New Ends Old Beginnings at the Bluecoat and Open Eye galleries in Liverpool (2008). Paynter often writes for art periodicals including Artforum, Bidoun and Artasispasific, as well as for artist and exhibition publications.

Can Altay was featured in the New Ends, Old Beginnings exhibition.

Lisa Skuret

“…in order to think new thoughts or to say new things, we have to break up all our ready-made ideas and shuffle the pieces.”
Gregory Bateson (Steps to an Ecology of Mind, 2000)
 
Lara Baladi’s work is about time, (re)fabrications and methods of dispersion. This preoccupation may stem, in part, from her own nomadic history – being born in Lebanon, educated in London, lived in Paris and currently residing in Cairo. Having been shown worldwide, Baladi’s work also displays many international stamps in its passport. Soon to take part in Sydney Biennial (2010), she has also shown her work in exhibitions spanning from Liverpool to Mexico City and Tokyo. Similarly, the content of her work, which makes use of cliché and kitsch, as well as utilizes various modes of media dissemination, transverses formalized territories – especially that between high and low cultures. For example, an extracted version of her video installation, Shish Kebab (2004) – which was shown in Africa Remix the touring survey exhibition on contemporary African art, and which made it’s way to London’s Hayward Gallery in 2005 – was also included as part of an online exhibition on ‘identity’ for the British fashion magazine, i-D.
 
In the text accompanying the two-minute version of the video for i-D magazine, Baladi says that Shish Kebab was “an expression of a nostalgic desire for an imagined world”, revealing perhaps one of the fundamental concerns which inhabit her work. At first glance, this fragment from a more protracted quotation seems to contain a contradictory blend of past and future, of both nostalgia and sci-fi. It refers in part to the complicated relationship between fiction and the fabric of the known, as well as to the place and function of memory within the future. Simultaneously, this temporal imagined world could refer to the potential of the future, as well as to something which already exists, but in absentia. As in the case of nomadic emigration, it refers to the emigree’s absence from his or her place of origin, their exile, and points to the potential of conjuring a fictive, imagined world in relation to that place. Baladi’s work is concerned with these contradictions inherent within the constructions of time, and within her artistic explorations, she experiments with recycling as one potential method of projecting time beyond its frames.
 
Baladi works primarily within the photographic medium, where historically, the image can be seen as a stand-in, pointing to or documenting the validity of the past. Her work, which encompasses collage, video and installation, questions the authenticity (and authority) of memory as a type of museum culture, opening up the chronological flatness of these images, rendering their references unstable and their meaning unreliable. One could say that she uses images as cognitive collages, playing with the concept of a single photographic as well as temporal, and cultural frame.
 
Images within contemporary digital culture have an indefinite reproductive capacity and are therefore more expendable. How do we negotiate our media-constructed landscapes and what do we do with the excess of images? Easier access to the technologies of (re)production has historically led to the development of temporary, contemporary pop and ‘trash’ cultures. Baladi, not limited to the streets of Cairo, but also trawling the urban landscapes of countries including Japan, India, and the United States, works as collector-explorer of this (multi)cultural (or is it now global?) excess. In her artistic process, she often recycles found domestic waste and the ruins of commodity production which she then (re)distributes in a variety of ways. For example, she playfully repurposes collective memories (in the iconic images of domestic brands) of Egyptian childhood onto t-shirts, and through artworks such as Diary of the Future (2007-2008) and Roba Vecchia (2006-2007) she recycles the past as future.
 
Roba Vecchia (translated from Italian as ‘old stuff’, or more colloquially as the ‘same old story’) is not a fixed piece, but perhaps more akin to a work in progress, a progression that has thus far taken on two kaleidoscopic forms. The first form, an interactive installation entitled Roba Vecchia, The Wheel of Fortune (2006), has since been recycled into Roba Vecchia (2007), a piece in which images generated from the initial installation were mounted onto a sheet of mirror-polished, stainless steel.
 

Roba Vecchia (2007) and detail.

 
Looking at the work’s second incarnation with the perspective of distance, my first inclination was to divine a system. The work looks like an html color chart, but closer inspection reveals a series of quasi-Islamic mosaic patterns creating a decorative, tiled surface or zellige. Looking closer still and focusing on a single tile or framed ‘image’, one notices that it is itself comprised of many other images radiating from a central axis. Up close, there is nothing orderly or precise about these single compositions – similar to arabesque designs’ almost imperceptible non-symmetry, they arguably contain a human imperfection and appear incomplete. While each image is contained within the overall pattern created by the piece, like images momentarily created by a kaleidoscope, they give the illusion of activity beyond the artificial confines of the grid – a kind of psychedelic excess. The radiating patterns act like little vortices whose temporary configuration gathers everything in its path – including the viewer (the image religiously excluded from the classical arabesque) who, within the reflective surface of the work, seems to temporarily occupy an arbitrary point within an infinitely extending expanse.
 
In its alternate form, Roba Vecchia is an installation with the addendum The Wheel of Fortune in its title. In this (2006) piece, a mirror-lined tunnel provides vertiginous access to a temporal landscape constructed from a continuous reconfiguration of ready-made image fragments projected onto its surface. For this piece, Baladi used a computer program to momentarily code or assemble these new geographies or narratives from the old stuff, the old story, the leftovers. In this instance, the leftovers are fragments from her artistic process, which were in turn constructed from images of personal and cultural (over)production and ‘trash’ or pop cultures. In the interactive installation, this inherited surplus extends to include the participant whose image is captured, incorporated into the system and projected within the installation. Drawing from a pool of both presently captured and previously inputted images, in the ‘Wheel of Fortune’ the present is created by random (re)assembly and mutation. In this way, the work seems to be a continual and dynamic process of scrambling and assembling code, and creating new code in the form of questions such as: In what way is the ‘leftover’ like memory? What role do personal and collective memories play in constructing a landscape of the future? Has my memory mutated into fiction? And where am ‘I’ (perhaps presently existing as a leftover of memory) within it?
 
The images in both incarnations of Roba Vecchia are volatile. Momentarily capturing the image, reflective surfaces create an illusion of depth providing a multidimensional platform for projection and reproduction and, in simultaneous contradiction, for refraction and dispersal. The reflected image, like the photograph, acts to create a representation or an illusion of reality while inventing a fictional point of view. This also points to the role that recognition (or lack thereof) has to play in constructions of the future. We encounter different configurations of the same stuff, and this process of (re)configuration or (re)cycling becomes a mode of transport to alternative imagined worlds. Similar to the practical work of memory as a navigational tool, Baladi’s work draws on, and is in some sense determined by, images from the past. Despite this, the memory-work migrating into its present configuration does not seem limited by determinism. The old junk has been recycled in a way that is not immediately recognisable as domestically useful. The mirror has, in a way, been transformed into a window onto a temporal and fictional landscape.
 
In another progressional work, Diary of the Future (2007-2008), a recent photographic commission for the group show entitled New Ends, Old Beginnings in Liverpool’s Bluecoat Gallery, Baladi returns to a grid pattern or timeline – assembling and attempting to link (un)related temporal moments into a chronological system or code of meaning. The work of assembly began during a period of her father’s illness, as she documented the daily visits made by friends and relatives in an attempt to predict the future from the residue left behind in their coffee cups.
 
The title of the piece, Diary of the Future, like the earlier quoted fragment from i-D, alludes to the complex interaction of different temporalities, tenses and codes of language. The interaction of temporal discontinuities is perhaps an exercise in predictive futurities, a form of fortune-telling, and would imply that the future for Baladi already exists within the system and within the past. This conception of time is similar to the one depicted in many science-fiction films, in which the future is almost always recognizable, a variation on what is actually already there, and exists as the continuation of a cycle projected or predicted into the future. It is one consequential outcome out of many almost inevitable outcomes. Like fortune-reading, the function of psychoanalysis is the recognition of patterns which may exist as unconscious to the analysand. Fortune-reading, psychoanalysis, and one could argue art, explore the waste resonating from this both personal and collective, intercultural junkyard in order to break with habitual symbolic encoding. The temporal breaks or pauses, in Diary of the Future as in Roba Vecchia, interrupt our reading of the material and allow for a moment in which patterns may be reconfigured and a new story assembled – these variations on the old story point towards potentially different futures.
 
 

Diary of the Future (2007-2008)

(A) reading is often based on recognition and repetition of images, and one can only clearly come to decipher patterns from a perspective of distance. It is significant to mention here that Baladi’s work is often presented in large-scale formats, and has been described as ‘life-sized’. Being life-sized, her work often creates a landscape, which implies a potential human presence – an agency. Similarly, when immersed in any constructed landscape, urban or otherwise, unable to see very far into the distance, one can lose a sense of perspective. Thus Diary of the Future begs the question: Are we predicting the future or looking at the past? Are we reading a codified inheritance rather than an unknown future? Can we create a future by linking individual ‘futures’ into a new configuration? In this piece, as in Roba Vecchia, Baladi plays with these temporal contradictions, offering them up in the interplay as questions, while resisting closed explanation.
 
Throughout her travels, Baladi seems to be asking the question: Where is the future? The ‘old stuff’, or more likely the ‘old story’, seems not only to point backwards towards clues, but towards a way out of a cartographic holding pattern. The title of the exhibition for which Diary of the Future was commissioned, New Ends, Old Beginnings, asks a similar question: Where does the past end and the future begin? Perhaps the answers already exist within the terrain of the question. While the exhibition title (and the exhibition itself) functions to shuffle ready-made assumptions, it also suggests an inherent circularity which depends on recognition in order to temporarily fix its identity and give it meaning.
 

Lisa Skuret is a writer and artist. She studied Contemporary Art Theory at Goldsmiths College London (AHRC Research Award 2007-08), Interactive Media at University of the Arts London, and Psychology at Smith College (USA) and University College London. Currently, she is working with Vision Forum (Linköpings University, Sweden) on a two-year funded research project in London. Lisa contributes writing to international visual culture magazines and also writes fiction. Recent exhibitions include ‘Fig. 4:’ at David Roberts Foundation (DRAF) London, and recent publications include Time Capsules and Conditions of Now (2012).
www.lisaskuret.com

 
http://mep.metrohm.com.au/2015/08/19/nirs-for-blending-and-refinery-processes/
Lara Baladi was featured in the New Ends, Old Beginnings exhibition.

Rayya Badran

April 5-8, 2010 at the Beirut Theatre and the Beirut Art Centre
 
It is often a confounding moment when a performance of free improvised or experimental music starts or ends. A few seconds of silent hesitation denote the audience’s anticipation, is it time for applause or for more listening? In light of these frequent occurrences, musicians tend to take on a more relaxed body posture and less concentrated facial expressions to mark the end of a performance, often with a smile as if to say: “Yes, you can now applaud, boo, do what you want, it’s over”..
 
Since its inception in 2000, the Irtijal festival (Irtijal literally meaning improvisation in Arabic) has garnered an impressive record of both local and international talents, evolving and fine-tuning along with its ever-growing and changing local audience. Taking place every April, Irtijal aims to create a platform for musicians, sound artists and others to play, jam and experiment musically in a city where free experimental music is not only a rarity, but also something of an oddity to most listeners.
 
This year’s very special tenth anniversary edition highlighted prominent performers in free and experimental music from Europe and Lebanon with Franz Hautzinger, Paul Wenninger, vocalist Sabina Meyer and Axel Dörner, Uriel Barthélémi from France in addition to habitual musicians, Irtijal organizers and musicians, Sharif Sehnaoui and Mazen Kerbaj along with Raed Yassin, post-punk band the Scrambled Eggs as well as Court-Circuit, who were the newest addition to the array of improvisers. But the festival also highlighted an interesting turn in its increasingly diversified program, and proved successful in reeling in a wider, more eclectic audience. During Prelude to Irtijal, two nights prior to the opening of the festival, the organizers hinted at this shift through a range of musicians, including Japanese turntable talent DJ Sniff, French duo EVOLUTION and Canadian/Lebanese group Jerusalem In My Heart.

Among the guests was prominent trumpet player Axel Dörner who played, blew, paced and performed his way through his three appearances on stage in, heterogeneous performances with remarkable constancy. There was also the local audience’s seemingly favorite electronic musician Tarek Atoui, who invited his long-time collaborator, French drummer and electro-acoustic musician Uriel Barthélémi. The duo proceeded to hurl out a continuously loud, motional performance, captivating the audience as they strummed and gesticulated an awe-inspiring electro-acoustic set fueled by Barthélémi’s violent pounding, while Atoui was creating an encapsulating soundscape behind his set of computerized, electronic and sensorial machines.
 
Trumpet player Franz Hautzinger, who has previously played in previous editions of Irtijal, appeared this year with his Oriental Space project, which was formed in 2003 and includes Iritjal’s founders and musicians Mazen Kerbaj and Sharif Sehnaoui. This year, Hautzinger also took the stage with dancer Paul Wenninger for a duo performance at the Beirut Art Centre, which took the performative components of improvised music and dance to their apex, investigating sound but also movement within a delimited space with no clear guidelines as to how and why they interact. Though it may have been a coincidence, there seemed to be a particular, binding element connecting the Beirut Art Centre performances (starting with Hautzinger and Wenninger, Axel Dörner, with dancer Takako Suzuki and Raed Yassin on double-bass, and ending with Atoui and Barthélémi). Two of the three included dance and had a range of different props (like duck tape, paper, lamps etc…) the musicians utilized freely to emit sounds, delimit space, exploiting their potential usage in body and sonic movements. All props, seemingly exterior elements to the musicians themselves, were gradually stacked and piled up in a corner, duck taped or wrapped in cloth as if physically encapsulating the sounds, packed up to mark the end of the piece, reminding us of the ephemeral and experiential nature of the performance.
 
One of the most remarkable elements of the festival was the multiple instrumentation of free, experimental music, leading to a delicious discovery of various instruments’ rich and unexpected potential sounds. The almost endless possibilities of vocal and “throat” gestures where the larynx becomes the instrument of choice, whether it is plugged into electronics (literally onto Helge Hinteregger’s throat), or unplugged, such as Sabina Meyer’s powerful control of vocal modulations, with squeaks and grunts changing both modes of delivery and meaning.
 
The most noticeable vocalized show, which was a welcome change from the relative ‘stillness‘ that other experimental music demanded of the audience, was delivered by The EX. Formed as a four-piece band in the Netherlands in 1979 during the rise of punk, The EX is a difficult band to categorize. They have absorbed and appropriated many different musical trends and genres including experimental and improvised music, noise, and punk rock, in addition to numerous multifaceted collaborations with the likes of Ethiopian saxophone player Getatchew Mekuria and composer and cellist Tom Cora to name a few.
 
For their highly anticipated gig in Beirut, the band shambled the intimate confines of the Beirut Theatre into post-punk madness. Having very recently released two singles (Maybe I Was The Pilot/Our Leaky Homes Single), the EX’s carte blanche proved to be quite a delightful, ever-flowing set as musicians took turns on the stage, in the form of pre-fixed trios, quartets, quintets and a solo by the entertaining lead singer, Arnold de Boer (who showcased some of his songs with band ZEA).
 
For this year’s 10th anniversary edition, Irtijal’s line-up clearly manifested a growing desire to reinvent the somewhat demanding terrain of experimental music and noise, demonstrating that it can be done and undone, all the while remaining ‘accessible’ to a wider range of musical tastes and affinities. This year seemed dedicated to a broader audience of patient but passionate listeners prepared for the delicious moment of silent hesitation before they clap.
 

Rayya Badran is a writer based in Beirut. Her interest range from the performative nature of the voice, the characteristics of aurality and music in film and video to melancholy in music. Her first publication entitled Radiophonic Voice(s) (2010) was produced in the framework of Ashkal Alwan’s Homeworks 5 Forum on Cultural Practices in Beirut, and deals with two radiophonic events recorded and filmed in 2006 during the Israeli war on Lebanon.

Nora Razian

What do Jules Verne, Andree the Giant, Darth Vader and Sgt. Slaughter all have in common? Like a surreal game of Six Degrees of Separation, these characters are seamlessly linked in artist Michael Rakowitz’s latest exhibition at London’s Tate Modern entitled ‘The worst condition is to pass under a sword which is not one’s own’ (2010). Employing the humour, wit and research strategies akin to investigative journalism, he deftly exposes the finely spun webs connecting seemingly disparate elements across times, geographies and histories. Rakowitz is interested in making the invisible, visible, and in revealing the latent circuits of power and politics that shape daily realities.
 
Things are never what they seem; an old adage that takes on a new urgency in Rakowitz’s politically resonant productions. It is a maxim that sits at the core of his investigations and stems from personal curiosities awakened through familial links and everyday encounters. Over the last few years, Rakowitz has focused his attention on the ongoing war in Iraq and on what he calls the ‘cultural invisibility’ of Iraq in the U.S. It may be relevant to mention that Rakowitz himself is of Iraqi-Jewish heritage, and while for many others cultural affiliations are often considered taboo, Rakowitz is quick to point that his family history and lineage are primary motivators for his art practice.
 
The 2003 U.S-led invasion of Iraq, as well as the climate post-September 11th, spurred the already socially-engaged Rakowitz to focus his efforts on trying to reconfigure public understanding of, and relationship to, his country of heritage. Since then he has produced a number of projects which openly state that his focus on Iraq will continue as long as the matter remains obscured to the general public in the U.S.
 
He said in 2006 in Nick Stillman’s ‘Conversations with Michael Rakowitz’ “I really do believe in certain aspects of cultural exchange coming from this horrible situation, and also in finding ways in which one’s culture can be disseminated through things like crafts and food and bringing that into the artistic discussion rather than just using night vision video or the things you see on CNN.”
 
As such, an element of dialogue underpins much of Rakowitz’s work. He is, however, keenly aware of the complexities involved in engaging an audience in a productive dialogue, as well as the limited scope of his work in engendering any real social or political change. He posits himself as a problem maker rather than purporting to offer any solutions, pushing these problems to the fore in the hope of igniting some form of conversation.
 
In The invisible enemy should not exist (2007), Rakowitz reconstructs looted objects from Iraq’s National Museum out of recycled Middle Eastern food packaging. He painstakingly reconstructs each object using references sourced from Interpol reports, archeological archives and university research centers. The objects’ troubled trajectories are brought to light through illustrated wall panels depicting, in comic-book like fashion, the story of the Ishtar Gate and of Dr. Donny George, the former director of the museum, whose character is central to the narrative structure of the exhibition. George’s story of quiet resistance against the Ba’ath party, his role as a drummer in a Deep Purple cover band, and his forced flight from Iraq after the U.S invasion, provide the narrative arches through which the wider complexities of the war’s effects are elucidated.
 
In The worst condition is to pass under a sword which is not one’s own (2009), Rakowitz explores the links between fantasy and reality by probing Saddam Hussein’s’ fascination with Star Wars, linking this to Jules Verne, the French Revolution and the World Wrestling Federation. Similarly to The invisible enemy should not exist, he uses handwritten and illustrated wall panels to weave a narrative, connecting it to the more sculptural pieces on display such as reconstructed helmets that trace the design trajectory for those of Saddam’s Fedayeen forces, from Samurai head gear up to Darth Vader’s mask, or a replica of the Swords of Qādisīyah monument. In both works, the narrative follows arches of association, symbolism and meaning with no clear or distinct resolution – a structure that points to Rakowitz’s affinity for the fragmented structures of the post-modern novel, such as the writings of Dave Eggers.
 
These works illustrate his ambition to reveal obscure networks and relationships, connecting the pieces in each installation to other references and geographies. The hallmark of failure runs through each of his works – whether it was the failure to import one ton of dates into the US in Return (2006-ongoing), the failure of US forces in Iraq, or the failure of Saddam to hold on to his reign. The ‘spectacle of failure’ is something Rakowitz acknowledges to be an important, recurrent theme in his work. He does not allege to offer solutions, but to “problematize problems”, in order to create the context and content which engender enriching conversations. “There is a specific use in the spectacle of failure; it can create a conversation. When you drop a lot of books in front of a building, people will stop and help you to pick them up. That’s the kind of thing that can be a start for a conversation” (Nick Stillman’s ‘Conversations with Michael Rakowitz’).
 
Although Rakowitz has completed a number of distinct but interrelated projects over the years, a unique style of storytelling seems to lie at the core of his practice. His provocatively constructed narratives and symbolic storylines bind his projects together, in many cases acting as distinct chapters in what might be imagined as an overarching novel in progress. Storytelling, for Rakowitz, serves as a way of “coming to terms with the world and giving it form- through personal narratives and unique encounters that intersect and unfold to create a multilayered experience of reality.” Through his work we learn how fiction and fantasy have influenced political and military ambitions, and how the circuitous route of trade exports from Iraq mirrors those of humans seeking refuge. As such, he joins the ranks of artists such as Hito Steyerl, Walid Raad and Omer Fast, who employ storytelling in myriad ways to provide counter-narratives that interrupt and explode dominant media discourse and officially sanctioned histories which conventionally mediate perceptions of local and global events. As art historian T.J. Demos has commented in ‘Storytelling in/as contemporary art’ (2010), the drive to narrate in this way has “led to alternative forms of knowledge production, to new histories that include those who have suffered or otherwise been rendered invisible, as well as to innovative ways of relaying experience by rethinking representation.” Yet, while one is keenly aware of his voice within the narrative, Rakowitz resists presenting facile points of closure or conclusion.
 
Rakowitz’s personal voice is central to each of his projects, whether it is through his performative presence as artist and store clerk in Return (2006 – ongoing), the illustrated and handwritten wall panels in The worst condition is to pass under a sword which is not one’s own, or through narrated, written or presented accounts of his projects. He seems keenly aware of how interactive projects such as Return are disseminated following their actual completion, and how quickly their meaning can be deadened when placed within the sometimes static context of galleries and museums. As such, Rakowitz diligently controls how each project is presented to the public by wrapping it in a tight storyline that still allows for minor alterations depending on the audience. While he acts as a mediator for the work, he remains astutely aware of the “conventional division between artist as storyteller and the viewer as audience.” He provides alternative entry points and circumvents any facile answers, quite in line with philosopher Jacques Rancière’s notion that “emancipation comes only when we all become storytellers – that is when the audience joins the artists in the act of producing meaning.”(Quotes are from ‘Storytelling in/as contemporary art’ 2010).
 
Rakowitz’s position as storyteller is most clearly articulated in the ongoing project Return. Initially conceptualized in 2004 as Return (Drop Box), and commissioned by the Jamaica Center for the Arts and Learning in New York, the project took the form of a parcel service, where the public could drop off small items to be posted to Iraq. The initial project was set up in a Korean-owned clothing store and import/export business, and though some small items were in fact sent to Iraq, the project’s main objective remained symbolic.
 
In 2006, Rakowitz added a new dimension to it. During one of his habitual visits to Shahadi Imports, a grocery store in New York City specializing in Middle Eastern products, he came across a can of date syrup. Although it was labeled as a product of Lebanon, the shop owner informed him that it was in fact a product of Iraq. Although Iraqi goods were allowed into the U.S. at the time, prohibitive customs laws and exorbitant tariffs rendered engaging in any form of trade economically unviable. To reach the U.S. under such restrictive measures, the date syrup’s circuitous route — having been produced in Iraq, trucked over to Syria, packaged in and shipped from Lebanon – seemed to echo that of refugee and migrant bodies fleeing the violence in Iraq.
 
Spurred by this discovery and the marked absence of any goods bearing the label ‘product of Iraq’ in U.S shops, Rakowitz reopened his grandfather’s business, Davisons & Co., with the aim of importing the first Iraqi dates into the U.S. in over 30 years. The proposal for Return – produced as part of Who Cares (2006), a Creative Time initiative aimed at critically exploring relationships between cultural production and social action – sought to explore what kind of return, both fiscal and existential, could be acquired through this transaction. As Rakowitz says, “I wanted Return to isolate and examine all of the really horrible inequities that are involved in this war.”
 
The words ‘We sell Iraqi dates’ prominently displayed along with the Davisons and Co. logo (a stencil style portrait of Rakowitz alongside one of his grandfathers) in both Arabic and English, provided a visual jolt to passers-by unaccustomed to seeing signage related to Iraq in commercial settings. The storefront logo also provided contextual information with Rakowitz prominently displaying himself in relation to both his grandfather and Iraq, and thus highlighting notions of continuity, tradition, and lineage.
 
Upon entering, visitors were greeted with a set-up that looked something like a shop display: items posted on the walls included a timeline illustrating the history of dates, various versions of the Iraqi flag after each coup or revolution, a chronology of the the history of the Iraqi people, as well as an invoice for one ton of Iraqi dates. Not keen to provide merely a banal context, Rakowitz’s presence in the store and the narratives weaved around that, were key components in making the project work in the way it did. While on site in the ‘store’, Rakowitz’s simultaneous persona as artist and clerk worked to raise questions about his family history, the process of importing dates and the current state of crisis in Iraq.
 
In parallel to the actual store itself, Rakowitz kept a blog detailing events and interactions in the shop as well as documenting communication with his trade partners in Iraq. Functioning as an important component of the project’s overall narrative, the blog elucidates the transactions that took place across different aspects of the project, while providing insight into the artist’s doubts and triumphs throughout the process.
 

 
Rakowtiz’s motivations to provide access to counter-narratives and eclipsed histories tinge his undertakings with a distinct pedagogical air. He sees his projects as self-education, occurring within a shifting framework constructed through continually evolving relationships with audiences and stakeholders. His practice follows art historian Grant H. Kester’s notion of dialogical aesthetics, or what others have termed “new genre public art”, “conversational art” or “littoral art” (Theory in Contemporary Art Since 1985 (2005)). Kester categorized artists working in this way as challenging assumptions about the relation between art, society and the political world. Central to this is the continued implication of both the artist and audience in the production of meaning, where the outcome and form of the project remains undetermined until its allotted time ends. Rakowitz has firmly roots himself within this categorization, believing “full-heartedly in a public art that enlists its public as vital collaborators in the production of meaning” (‘Spectacles of Failure’, Provisions Library Blog).
 
As such, Return is a continually evolving work. In its current state, it has been relegated to the sanctified space of the gallery, and while this provides a form of access to the project, it also points to the largely numbing effect of display spaces on interactive projects. While the artist recognizes this, it is ignored for the aim of keeping the project alive, even if in an incubated state. As such, Rakowitz’s practice straddles both the display space and the public realm. While locating himself both within and outside the art world, he is mindful of the gallery space and of its potential impact on his practice.
 
In its current form, Return now functions more like a documentation of the interactive project; the multimedia display includes Iraqi products, a picture of the dates and their packaging, and most importantly, a documentary video of the project narrated by Rakowitz himself. Future plans for the reactivation of the project include the opening of an Iraqi restaurant in Chicago, fusing the format of Return with that of Enemy Kitchen, the latter being an ongoing project from 2004 where the artist collaborates with his mother to compile traditional Iraqi dishes and teach them to various publics.
 
The continual reincarnation of Return illustrates Rakowitz’s commitment to perpetuating an open conversation around the ongoing war in Iraq: “I prefer to keep these things ongoing; I refuse to say that it’s over because that would be admitting that the problem is solved. I would love for these projects to go away, because that would mean that the problem would not be around anymore.”
 

Nora Razian

Michael Rakowitz was featured in the New Ends, Old Beginnings exhibition.

Fatos Üstek

How long have you been living in France?
I moved to Paris in 2001 and have been visiting Beirut very regularly. In a way I could say I am driven by a sense of belonging which makes me want to spend more time there. I was commissioned to make some documentaries between 2004 and 2006, but my main practices have been video and photography.
 
What kind of documentaries have you made during your visits to Beirut?
They are mainly political in nature.
 
What is the relationship that binds your works?
I continuously come across this question about the subject matter of my works. I do not have a specific subject matter, my main concern is video, the medium. In other words, I am interested in video as a medium and how to produce video as work. So my video pieces can be on any given ‘subject’ while the shooting of the video is what is conceptually central to them. For instance, how does one shoot a video in one sequence and in one shot? My video works are not outcomes of pre-production processes involving researched projects seeking ways of translating ideas into images. Instead they are the product of production, of process, where each work is an idea and its creation.
 

Did you study film? What is your interest in investigating video as medium?
I did two years of cinema studies but was dissatisfied with the cinema school I attended, and they were not really interested in video art. I then went into digital art. After that I did a residency in Le Pavillion at Palais de Tokyo and École des Beaux Arts de Paris, where I developed my ideas on video making. My first drive was to make documentaries but I ended up shooting films as very long interviews. At the same time, I was developing my video work. I can say that I felt freer in video. The fact that my video works started to be promoted and in demand within French institutions has supported my choice of working with video.
 
Are you working on a project now?
I am working on projects that are not within video.
 
In the history of video art I can think of a long list of names that have investigated video and film as mediums. Some of those artists have placed restrictions on themselves in order to produce their work, and your way of making a video in one shot, in one sequence, is also a restriction.
I place restrictions or constraints because video has become a popular medium that is widely used by everyone with a camera. This requires bringing in a different kind of creativity to this medium. The same applies to photography, though they are two different mediums and have differing realities and contexts. If we look into the history of photography, it started as a very professional and private means of production with an identity. After its mass use in society, the discussion of photography as art came about. In that sense, I think video is also on a similar track. Hence, as an artist, I place restrictions on myself while making work because the necessary or basic conditions – such as having a camera and a film – are not enough to start a creative process. The restrictions, however, bring this about. I shoot a maximum of three minutes and have a minimal post-production phase. This is as with the first films and cameras used by the Lumière brothers, which had a length of film rolls of two and a half minutes.
 
Have you taken part in workshops or residencies?
In 1999 and 2000 I attended a workshop on film and video taught by Lebanese filmmakers Akram Zaatari and Mahmoud Hojeij entitled Transit Video Workshop in Beirut. They were very influential to my later practice. I am currently doing a residency with the Sharjah Art Foundation.
 
What was the Transit Video Workshop like?
The workshop was formed of artists from the Arab world and was composed of screenings of video art. Beside the informative, theoretical part, we were also handed cameras to make one-minute videos.
 
Did the resulting workshop films involve post-production?
Editing is a particular phase and another form of creation. As I have mentioned, I prefer to make a single shot of a scene or a sequence of scenes, connecting them with a fade in and fade out, and framing them with the title and credits. For instance, Tokyo Tonight (2003) is composed of three sequences added one after another. I am not against editing although I prefer to use minimal editing tools where the process of post-production becomes a simple act of bringing together the main body of work with its frame.
 
Your video works vary in their subject matter. For me, it feels like you are dealing with familiarities such as cooking a lentil dish in Mdardara (2007), as well as a feeling of strangeness in familiar surroundings, such as Tokyo Tonight (2003).
You have a point, especially with the concept of the familiar. I’ve made around fifteen videos and they have all related to things I have experienced around me. In WA (2004) I filmed my niece and nephew singing. I work with my surroundings first and foremost, and try to translate what I am familiar with. I also enjoy and choose to work with the minimum, in the sense that my productions require a very low production budget. You could relate this to Arte Povera somehow. And this aspect is an advantage when applying for funding from production houses or in getting support for projects. As you might guess, asking for 1,000 Euros for a video work is easier than 15,000. One of the reasons I work on small scale productions is also due to their manageability.
 
How do you perceive yourself in the international arena?
I try to keep my practice away from discussions within the international art market around identity, or interest in artists from “emerging” countries. My interest is how to continue working with video, and my subject matter is not directly related to the usual

Still from Tokyo Tonight (2003)

topics emerging from ‘developing’ countries.
 
Let us focus on one of your video works, Terres de Pomme de Terre (2009), which formed part of your recent solo show at the Galerie Almine Rech in Paris. This piece depicts familiar objects, namely potatoes, alongside a composition of strange relations to that object, namely using the potato as a body building tool rather than a food product. Can you say more about the merging of these two aspects within the work?
What I tried do in this piece was a little new. It’s related to a former series of photographs of potatoes (in different stages of transport, storage, planting, etc.) in Europe in the form of a documentation of the trade of potatoes from one continent to another and the economic and political relationships this produces (in the sense that potatoes grown in Lebanon came from seeds bought from the Netherlands, for example). The photography project took place over the course of five years while I was travelling between Northern Europe and Lebanon. The video piece started from a single photograph in that series. It was shot with an 8mm film, and the medium worked to underline the fact that potatoes are mostly cultivated by families and relatives. Hence their farming is done by a close group of people that are members of a family. By using 8mm film, I wanted to reflect on the notion of memory and the significant (familial, constitutive) act of working/producing together.
 
What about the bodybuilders in Terres de Pomme de Terre, what is their relation to this context?
For each piece you need to have a margin of some sort. I think it is my tendency to deconstruct the documentary style through a personal game that causes a shift in its nature. In other words, filming images of potato farming, farmers, the hard labour associated with it, and so forth, on their own would have been a mere documentary. I wanted to break this with something irrelevant at first sight. This apparent irrelevance also relates back to the fact that the basic means of producing food and its consumption are distinct. Labour is something that is very social and embodied, and this is different from consuming French fries. My approach to this difference is to show bodybuilders using potatoes for their training.
 
In that sense, we can talk about power and the agencies, policies of power…
The business of agriculture and farming sometimes can be more profitable than banking! I studied and trained as an agricultural engineer at the American University of Beirut. I also personally believe in the power of agriculture. After my studies, I worked in the fields, as well as working as Akram Zaatari’s assistant on a number of his photography and video projects.
 
How did you grow interested in art to begin with?
In the beginning I was interested in video. My family had a high-8 camera, but when I was young I did not have artistic interest and did not know much about it. Before my studies in engineering, I had applied to the arts department. Hence, my real involvement started when I was still studying, through my assistantships with a number of videomakers and filmmakers. That is how I got involved with the Arab Image Foundation and met Jean-Luc Moulene during his residency in Lebanon. That was quite a significant encounter for me.
 
What is your relationship to image, what is an image for you?
An image is an idea.
 
 

Fatos Üstek (1980, Ankara, Turkey) is an independent curator and art critic, based in London, UK. She is founding editor of Nowiswere Contemporary Art Magazine (with Veronika Hauer); member of AICA TR; currently guest tutor at Vision Forum, Linkopings Universitet, Sweden; main writer of www.artchive.org.tr; regular contributor to magazines Camera Austria, Austria; Kunst(h)art, Belgium; Artluk, Poland.
 
In 2008 Üstek received her MA at the Contemporary Art Theory Department at Goldsmiths College London, after completing her BA in Mathematics at the Bogazici University. Additionally, where she also acquired a degree from the Film Studies. Üstek curated exhibitions in Istanbul, Berlin, Rotterdam, Basel, Bern, Luzern, Aarhus among other cities. Specialized in photography and film, her curatorial practice follow thematic investigation of concepts, such as ‘now’, ‘time-presence’, ‘agency-subject’, emerging as collaborative projects with artists, writers and other curators. www.fatosustek.com

 
Ziad Antar was featured in the New Ends, Old Beginnings exhibition.

Jim Quilty

A Play by Rabih Mroué and Lina Saneh
April 28-30 2010 at Monnot Theatre, Beirut, Lebanon
 

 
Over the last decade or so, a small cluster of Lebanese artists have attracted a certain degree of international critical attention. In an effort to distinguish them, writers have noted that all these artists came of age during Lebanon’s long civil war and that politics plays a more or less latent role in their practice.
 
Rabih Mroué and Lina Saneh emerged from this generation of Lebanese artists. Like their colleagues, both have generated a wide array of solo work in a range of media – video and on-line installation, photography and theatre – yet Saneh and Mroué are best known for their collaborations in performance.
 
At their best, these thoughtful, critically informed and formally innovative works speak to local and international audiences with a seriousness that does not eschew humour, and a political engagement that usually avoids the pitfalls of partisan pamphleteering.
 
Photo-Romance, the duo’s latest collaboration, continues this dialogue between politics and aesthetics.The play is premised on the efforts of a pair of playwrights named Lina Saneh and Rabih Mroué to make a Lebanese adaptation of an (unnamed) Italian film (the way the play oddly averts its gaze from its source text will be taken up below). The action finds Saneh’s fictive self presenting the work to an unnamed male character (Mroué). His job is to evaluate the adaptation’s “legality and originality”, and therefore his role corresponds to that of censor and critic.
 
If Photo-Romance ranks among the team’s more successful works, it isn’t because it necessarily breaks new formal ground, or proposes new narrative and technical innovations to elaborate them. Its success as theatre springs, rather, from its generous embrace of its audience(s).
 
Attitudes about audience differ amongst Saneh-Mroué and their Lebanese colleagues. New York-based Walid Raad, a contemporary of comparable international stature, offers a point of departure. During an interview conducted at the opening of ‘A History of Modern and Contemporary Arab Art _ Part I _ Chapter 1: Beirut 1992-2005’, the artist’s first Middle East solo exhibition in 2008, a journalist asked Raad about audience and reception.
 
“There are two ways of viewing this question of audience and reception,” Raad replied. “On one hand we could see art as communication and learn something from the tools of public relations firms – with their focus groups and the like [and all that suggests about embracing the commodification of art] … If, on the other hand, you believe that the function of art is not reducible to communication … [then you can perceive the relationship between audience and artist differently].
 
This attitude is to be contrasted with that of Mroué-Saneh. Though, like Raad, their work is more often shown abroad than in Lebanon, both Saneh and Mroué have gone on record as saying that their plays are written primarily for the Lebanese audience.
 
That said, their embrace of the audience is an ironic one. Photo-Romance is, among other things, an amused rumination upon the challenges of delivering a work to its intended audience, with the conceptual distinction between collaboration and censorship made playfully vague. Saneh and Mroué’s Lebanese audience is intimately aware of these challenges because so much of their theatrical work has run into problems with the Lebanese censor.
 
Who’s Afraid of Representation? provides one case in point. This work premiered in Beirut in November 2006 during Ashkal Alwan’s Home Works forum on cultural practices. The play was doubly offensive to the Lebanese censor. On one hand it drew upon art history depictions of performance pieces that work in self-abuse, nudity and scatology. On the other, it recounts a massacre carried out by a fictive civil servant, one that echoes an incident from recent Lebanese history.
 
Consequently, Who’s Afraid of Representation? had three different incarnations during its three-night Beirut run, as the players’ worked to reconcile their demands for free expression with those of the Sureté-Géneral’s censor.
 
The reaction to 2007’s How Nancy Wished that Everything was an April Fool’s Joke was more dramatic. The play, co-written by Mroué and Fadi Toufic, depicts Lebanon’s history of civil conflict from 1975 to 2007 from the perspective of four fighters, each of whom belonged to a succession of different Lebanese parties. The piece was first mounted in the Tokyo International Arts Festival in March 2007, and was scheduled to be staged in Beirut in August of the same year, followed by shows in Paris, Rome, Cairo and Rabat. Efforts to get the censor’s permission to stage the play in July 2007 resulted in outright ban, later overturned.
 
Photo-Romance has had a similar performance history. Created in 2009, it has lived most of its life overseas, remaining invisible to Beirut audiences until the spring of 2010, when it was staged three times to capacity audiences.
 
If these audiences saw more or less the same play, it was because the artists didn’t submit the text to the censor beforehand. Like all of Mroué and Saneh’s theatrical collaborations, Photo-Romance was well attended but had a brief run of less than a week, so it didn’t attract mass public attention.
 
It would be reductive to characterise this play as a theatrical condemnation of state restrictions to artistic expression. Its playful dissection of the various stages of a creative process engages with the different facets of collaborative art, from creation to reception. Indeed, the play’s closing gesture – in which Mroué’s character literally abandons his censorious role for a performative one – suggests that the urge to make art is intrinsic and, ultimately, more important than questions surrounding its reception.
 
The play unfurls before the audience to reveal a work dismantled – like a clock disassembled in a workshop – whose ‘plot’ revolves around the characters’ picking up these components and interrogating them.
 
In this regard, the play’s set design (by long-time collaborator Samar Maakaron) is less a naturalistic simulacrum of an office than a dramaturgical microscope – a precision tool for scrutinising the work as it unfolds.
 
A pair of leather chairs and a coffee table sit down stage left, where Saneh and Mroué’s characters have their formal exchanges. Nearby is a lectern, where Saneh repairs from time to time to read from the film script. Next to the lectern is a cinema-sized film screen, upon which excerpts of the adaptation are projected.
 
On stage, Saneh plays her fictive self. The audience also finds Saneh on screen, where she portrays the female lead in their film, also named Lina. Similarly, Mroué’s on-stage character is complemented by his on-screen portrayal of the film’s male lead, also named Rabih. They play themselves as not themselves.
 
The third on-stage presence is Lebanese indy rock and free improvisation guitarist Charbel Haber, who – nestled with his guitar among an array of peddles and other sound equipment down stage right – awaits cues to perform the film’s soundtrack which he was commissioned to compose.
 
This film-within-a-play is comprised of two “plots”. The “film” – a series of black-and-white photos presented as stop-motion animation – depicts an encounter between two Beirut neighbours. Both characters find themselves alone at home while their neighbours have joined the rest of the city in two opposing demonstrations in downtown Beirut. Saneh’s character is a divorced mother who lives with her mother and a large extended family while Mroué’s is a leftist journalist whose political views have recently got him sacked.
 
The framing narrative – a play about adapting a film – consists of Saneh’s depiction of the film project and Mroué’s evaluation of its various components. At times he will interrupt to ask questions. At others he will interject that some lines (references to the Lebanese army, say, or the Islamic resistance) must be struck from the script.
 
Local and international audiences who have followed their past collaborations will immediately recognise Mroué and Saneh’s fingerprints in Photo-Romance. Yet, for all the evident continuities linking the play to their previous work, there are also discrete departures.
 
The question of representation, artistic or otherwise, has been a leitmotif in Mroué and Saneh’s writing, and the mediating screen and use of projected images have long been a part of their stagecraft. ‘Photo-Romance’ marks the first time the team works with a director of photography, Sarmad Louis.
 
As its title and much of its discursive content suggests, Photo-Romance ponders the love affair artists and audiences have shared with beautiful images. In this regard, the beauty of Louis’ photography provides an appropriate object for audiences’ photo-romantic obsessions.
 
The title also signals Saneh-Mroué’s first flirtation with popular sentimentality – the sort of auteur engagement with popular melodrama that can be detected in some art house cinema. In Photo-Romance, the soap-opera aesthetic is embedded in the climactic moment of the film adaptation, when Mroué and Saneh’s on-screen personae embrace.
 
As an enactment of the many fingers in the pie of artistic creation, presentation and consumption, Photo-Romance raises a plethora of themes upon which audiences – whether art-headed foreigners or politically-informed locals – can reflect, between chuckles.
 
The play is replete with dualities. Discussions of “adaptation” immediately evoke dual notions of the “original” and the “copy.” This aesthetic duality has an ironic political Other in the two armed camps into which the Lebanese polity has a history of dividing itself – most recently, the “March 8” and “March 14” political groupings, which the play references.
 
Once you start evoking dualities, others crowd into the frame. By enacting a process of adaptation, the play affords ample opportunity to masticate amusingly upon the at times false dichotomies littering the landscape of artistic practice – authorship and audience, actor and character, fact and fiction, cerebral and sentimental, individual and group, man and woman.
 
One of the themes the artists have picked up to run with is the aesthetics and politics of absence. This has been a self-conscious element of the duo’s previous works, such as the disembodied antagonism of the interviewer in Biokhrafia (2002), or the multiple absences of the employee in Looking for a Missing Employee (2003).
 
In Photo-Romance, variations on a theme of absence are tossed about like playing cards at an all-night poker game. It begins with the opening gesture of the play, which appears to have a false start as, a couple of minutes into the opening video presentation, Saneh strides on stage screaming to stop, upbraiding Mroué and Haber for starting without her. The play – that is, the depiction of the film and the evaluation of its ethical creative worth – commences, literally, without its author.
 
This absence seems to signpost one of the themes the artists have repeatedly addressed in their work – namely the lamentable primacy of the group, family, sectarian or tribal – over the individual. “[Once one] gets lost in all these crowds,” Mroué’s on-screen character remarks of the film’s off-screen political rallies, “One becomes invisible, a mere number.”

 
Elsewhere, absented information is used for comic effect. When, during Saneh’s presentation, the photo of a mysterious woman appears on-screen for a couple of seconds, the censor asks who she is. “Images are like ghosts,” Saneh tells him. “They suddenly appear and just as suddenly disappear. We must respect their ways.”
 
Later in the presentation, the censor asks what Saneh’s on-screen character keeps clutched to her chest while she’s visiting Mroué’s apartment. It’s her character’s cat, she explains. A few scenes earlier, the pet had escaped from its cage and flown across the street to the neighbour’s balcony. This departure from the Italian original (in which the escaped pet is a mynah bird) is made all the more comic by the fact that its absurdity warrants no mention by any of the characters.
 
Audiences would also find the play littered with references to absences that – like Hizbullah’s “hidden” weapons cache – have more explicit political referents. Most prominent is the censor’s repeatedly reiterated order to excise certain lines from the script. A “racist” reference to Sri Lankan domestic workers must be cut, he says, as does any mention of the Lebanese army or the Islamic resistance, including a well-known anecdote involving party Secretary-General Hassan Nasrallah and one of his admirers. It is tempting to see this abundance of absence as an ironic reflection upon contemporary art’s fetish with erasure as a spiritually emptied approximation of the sublime.
 
Perhaps the most-significant absence in Photo-Romance, however, is the name of the source text that the artists want to adapt. For the cognoscenti in Saneh and Mroué’s audience, the unnamed original is obviously Ettore Scola’s 1977 film A Special Day.
 
The political setting of this minor classic is Rome on that day in 1938 when Adolf Hitler made a state visit to see his confrere Benito Mussolini. In this film, the entire city seems to be off attending a rally to honour these two variations on a theme of national socialism, leaving the film’s protagonists – Antonietta (Sophia Loren), an overworked, barely literate housewife and mother of six, and Gabriele (Marcello Mastroianni), a radio announcer sacked from his job because he’s gay – to have their comic, humane encounter.
 
Were it made explicit, the setting of the source text would reverberate loudly in Lebanon, where it has long been a trope of anti-Hizbullah criticism that the party’s theatrical instrumentalisation of anti-Zionist militancy is a discomfiting echo of national-socialism. To the playwrights’ credit, ‘Photo-Romance’ suggests that both the political camps into which contemporary Lebanon has divided itself, live up to the fascist epithet equally well. It can be assumed that any implied parallel between Fascist Italy and contemporary Lebanon would not survive the censor’s flensing knife.
 
Yet the politics of adaptation that linger, latent, in this play is not simply a creature of Lebanese parochialism. One of the tales that has arisen about Photo-Romance has it that Saneh and Mroué actually did approach Scola’s estate requesting permission to make a Lebanese adaptation of the film. The project was never realised since they were not granted the permission to go ahead. This meta-textual anecdote goes far in explaining the least naturalistic element in Photo-Romance, which is Mroué’s on-stage character.
 
Designated “the Judge” in the English-language version of the script, Mroué’s character is the gatekeeper of both the legal and aesthetic worthiness of the adaptation. He embodies both censor and critic. But insofar as both censor and critic purport to labour on behalf of “the public”, he stands in for the audience as a whole. Insofar as the gatekeepers of the source text were themselves asked to collaborate – and ultimately blocked, the adaptation – he speaks for the original text as well.
 
If this character suffers from contradictory demands, the point underlines the near impossible task facing the contemporary playwright, personifying the contradictions facing any artist concerned with creating work with an audience in mind.
 
At times, Mroué’s character seems well-read and discerning. When Saneh tells him their work is inspired by a film set in Rome in 1938, he recognises it immediately without hearing the title. Later he reveals that he’s familiar with the works of the famed Argentine fiction writer, Jorge Luis Borges.
 
At the same time, his response to Saneh’s explanation of the work is often confused and child-like. Early on, Saneh explains how her troupe struggled to economise on the number of actors, though the opening scene includes an extended family preparing to go to a mass demonstration in downtown Beirut.
 
In the opening sequence of the film extraneous characters are in bed — hidden beneath duvets, their voices heard on a soundtrack. Later, the camera finds the duvets thrown back and the beds empty. “Wait a minute,” interjects Mroué’s character. “What is this? I can’t make heads or tails of it. Who’s speaking and who’s answering? … It’s a mess.”
 
Saneh then plays a second version of the scene, in which all the characters have been rendered in a child’s drawing. This time, the image-fixated audience’s job is made easier because each cartoon figure is coloured in bright crayon each time it speaks.
 
“What do you think?” Saneh smiles. “Isn’t it better like this?”
 
“Excellent,” Mroué’s character nods. “Excellent.”
 
Here, he represents the popular audience’s bafflement with Saneh and Mroué’s more-cerebral work – the function of the Lebanese censor being to lower the creative and critical bar to the lowest possible notch. The role of Mroué’s character isn’t restricted to cutting content, however. Like other censors, he sometimes suggests how an offensive passage of a play can be re-written to make it acceptable – making the censor the artist’s de facto collaborator.
 
In the final moments of the work, Mroué’s character is anxious to abandon his role as gatekeeper and to fully embrace the role of creative collaborator. He crosses the stage, picks up a toy harmonium – the actor-playwright having also worked as a musician, collaborating most notably with Lebanese vocalist Rima Khsheish – and joins Haber in playing the final bars of the film’s soundtrack.
 
Near the end of the play, Saneh’s character suggests that the “point” of the play’s concern with both absence and dualities is the conundrum she and Mroué have often confronted during the creative process. Contrary to what the whole movement of the play would suggest — that art is limited by the fact that, from conception to execution to reception, it is collaborative — this problem lay in the question of origin.
 
“The question remains,” she says, “What does original mean? Is there an origin to start with? According to us, there is no such thing […] And all our work today is about how there is no longer anything to create. So rather than […] believing that one is creating something new, let’s reveal the truth of the creative process as nothing but a construction on and a diversion from a previous work, which was itself a construction on and a diversion from a previous work ….”
 
All art is derivative, Saneh suggests. But more importantly, the putative origin of art, the “original”, is a phantom. It is an appropriately Janus-faced conclusion. As Mroué crosses the stage and brings the bright-green plastic harmonium to his mouth, it is difficult to see the gesture as anything but optimistic.
 
– fin
 

Jim Quilty is a Beirut-based Canadian journalist, and the editor of the arts and culture desk of the Lebanese English language newspaper The Daily Star. He has written about the arts, cultural production and politics of the Middle East and North Africa for over a decade. He is a big fan of physical comedy, with a special interest in the thump and crack of politics and cultural production as they knock against each other. His published articles appear in such magazines as Bidoun, FlashArt, ArtReview, Majella, Variety and MERIP.

Sønke Gau

(Originally printed in Camera Austria)

Unfinished (2007) and InBetween (2006) are the titles of the two series of works by photo-artist Hrair Sarkissian, born in Damascus in 1973, that we will discuss in this text. Both titles describe phases of transition, an ‘in-between’ in terms of both space and time. The photos of building shells in various Middle East cities (Unfinished) and the views of snowy landscapes, buildings and monuments in Armenia (InBetween) depict various transitory stages on the level of representation. In addition, the staging of the visible, the lavish, almost theatrical illumination of the rooms and the elegiac-style sepia effect refer to a real or imaginary past or future. Hrair Sarkissian’s works revolve around individual and ‘collective’ memory and identity.
 
Architecture that, on the one hand, shapes everyday social life and, on the other, visualises society and ideology, acts in this context as a medium of observation. Maurice Halbwachs already pointed out how architectural phenomena evoke a ‘collective memory’ – but the meanings are not easy to read, but must rather be created by way of discourse and may be overwritten and redefined. According to Ernesto Laclau’s theories on hegemony and democracy, practices of spatialisation work on a ‘hegemonisation of time’ and thus on a cementation of meaning. Because the ‘dislocational’ effects of time, to which every structure is subject, can never be completely eliminated, it is necessary to articulate the codification and perpetuation of meaning on an ongoing basis. This is achieved by means of a practice of repetitions, manifested, for example, in national, religious or historical myths of memory. The past is articulated on the level of hegemonic representation as a ‘dominant fiction’ (following Kaja Silverman), that attempts to suppress heterogeneous allocations of meaning by means of homogenisation. A selection of specific points of reference in the past is intended to create a we-identity in their “spatialisation”. This was and is often achieved by means of a process that we might, going back to Nietzsche, refer to as ‘monumentalistic historiography’ – i.e. the selected points of reference are intended to construct a heroic self-image of a group that is often exaggerated in myths with the aid of demonisations. An expression of a ‘monumentalistic historiography’ may, for example, be national holidays or, in the literal sense, ‘monuments’, that, on the one hand, also constitute a ‘spatialisation’ in the sense of Laclau, but, in addition, also manifest themselves palpably in physical space.
 
Hrair Sarkissian’s InBetween series presents photos of socialist architectures and memorials in the context of the military conflict between Armenia and Azerbaijan. The weapons intended to remind us of the conflict for the Nagorno-Karaback region, from which Armenia emerged victorious, are symbolically aimed at Turkey, in which most of Armenia’s historical settlement area is today located. The heroic memorials are a visible expression of ‘spatialisation’, that proclaim a ‘collective identity’ through monuments. With his photos, Sarkissian, who was born in Syria, but whose family comes from Armenia, spotlights the discrepancy between the image of a proud nation that state-run educational institutions draft of the Armenian Diaspora for the rest of the world and reality in the country itself. He contrasts the concrete representations of state-proclaimed identity with views of barren landscapes and slums. The deserted hotel complexes date back to the time when Armenia was a Soviet Union republic and a popular holiday destination in the Soviet Union thanks to its warm climate. After the declaration of independence in 1991, holiday-makers stopped coming and new investors were not to be found. The partially incomplete building shells are already falling into disrepair but because it is too expensive to demolish them, they remain as ‘unwanted’ monuments to the fact that the country was not able to realise its objectives of economic upturn and prosperity. Laclau refers to the fact that every system is pervaded with constitutive ambivalences preventing complete totalisation as “dislocation”. Unlike ‘spatialisation’, dislocational effects are a temporal phenomenon. The temporalisation of space leads to a defixation of codified meanings. The fog and snow and the brownish coloration of Sarkissian’s photographs emphasise the aspect of temporality in a non-stabilised hypothetical construct of ‘collective identity’ intended to generate a certain we-consciousness but that is obviously full of cracks.
 
With reference to the importance of ‘memory as a legitimisation resource’, Aleida Assmann writes that the history taught in textbooks and commemorated on anniversaries is something like the collective biography of a nation, but that – just like the individual biography – is recounted differently particularly after crises or political turning-points. “The history that is remembered consolidates the self-image of an individual and of a group. Hence, what we remember is determined not by what actually happened, but rather by what we can and want to tell a story about later. What we do and do not remember from the past ultimately depends on who uses the history and for what purpose. Aleida Assmann in Erinnerung und Geschichte states that Hrair Sarkissian tries to illustrate this by contrasting different narrations. The ‘stereoscopic’ effect that this causes spotlights the constructed nature of history and identity. The resulting image is an imaginary one but illustrates the powerfully effective ideologies underlying the staging of the visible layer. The theatrical aspect of his photographs highlights the significance of images in constructions of history and identity, as our relationship with the past is determined and regulated to a substantial degree by, through and in the image medium.
 
Sarkissian also pursues his interest in the ‘invisible in the visible’ in his Unfinished series. The photographs, taken in various cities of the Middle East, show details of buildings still under construction and not accessible to the public. With reference to popular historical photographs of architecture from the region, that often feature picturesque ruins, archaeological finds or other places with ‘history’ and that, for the artist, are to be seen in the context of the stereotyping of the ‘Orient’ by European artists, writers and scientists, he presents places that are still ‘under construction’ and forward-looking. The focus is on considerations as to whether architecture or the representation of architecture can tell us something about the ‘architecture of society’ both in terms of ascription by others and self-perception. Architecture is, on the one hand, a mirror, expression and testimony of a society and, on the other, a medium of the social and hence socially constitutive. As an apparatus of perception, architecture is also a ‘theatre’ of representations. Places are increasingly staged and received through images, the perception of places is increasingly structured by the media. In their outward representation, façades act as a masquerade that promises something hidden behind them, it is an ‘architecture of promising’, a material manifestation of desire. The buildings that Sarkissian photographs from the inside are in a stage before their ‘appearance’ as images in public perception and representation. They are insights into the building sites behind the façades that, by dint of their set-like staging, emphasise the performative nature of architecture that is always equally an expression of an economy of desire. At the interface between projections from the outside and inside, in the sense of Lacan, they also spotlight the fact that a completed identity cannot be achieved as desire is defined by reality, that always appears only as imperfection. But at the same time, the ‘unfinished’, ‘in-between’ aspect also offers the possibility of de-fixing meaning in the sense of a productive renegotiation, a temporalisation of space.
 

Sønke Gau

 
Hrair Sarkissian was featured in the New Ends, Old Beginnings exhibition.