Arthub Favorite: Week 57

AKRAM ZAATARI
AGAINST PHOTOGRAPHY. AN ANNOTATED HISTORY OF THE ARAB IMAGE FOUNDATION

In this week, Arthub would like to introduce an exhibition of our long term friend Akram Zaatari happening in Barcelona.

Duration: 2017 April 7 – September 25
Venue: Museu d’Art Contemporani de Barcelona (MACBA) , Plaça dels Àngels, 1

The archives of the Arab Image Foundation in Beirut, Lebanon, encompass a plethora of photographic material from the Middle East, North Africa and the Arab Diaspora. Initiated and developed by artists interested in photographic preservation, the AIF emerged as a place dedicated to the understanding of photography and the practices of collecting, preserving and sharing images.

This exhibition presents an artist’s perspective, which is critical for understanding the organisation’s practice. Through Akram Zaatari, one of AIF’s founding members who played a key role in its development, the exhibition reflects on AIF’s 20-year history and the multiple statuses of the photograph, as descriptive document, as object, as material value, as aesthetics and as memory. Zaatari’s expansive work on photography and the practice of collecting, takes an archaeological approach to the medium, digging into the past, resurfacing with new narratives and resituating them in the contemporary.

Photographic objects have been the centre of Akram Zaatari’s artistic practice since 1995. Photographic formations or emergences, as he calls them, are the focus of this exhibition: enigmatic objects that bear traces of past events and accompany people through key moments in their lives. Cherished at times, destroyed at others, photographs are capable of provoking diverse and extreme reactions. Initially, capturing instances, they change over time. The perception of an image changes, but sometimes the physicality of the object itself is also altered as a result of its contact with the natural, social and political environment. The desire to own these images, to look for them and collect them, is rooted in a spectrum of motivations from the personal to the commercial. They become currency for our emotional, cultural and economic desires.

The exhibition will look at the dual status of the AIF itself, as an archive of photographic and collecting practices and as an artist-led initiative that left a visible mark on the artistic landscape of its times, signalling significant moments in its history and the critical debates generated throughout its evolution. Past projects and new artist productions related to the collection will be presented.

Exhibition organised by the Museu d’Art Contemporani de Barcelona and the National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Korea.

Curators: Hiuwai Chu and Bartomeu Marí

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