Presenting:
Akram Zaatari, Tomorrow, Everything Will Be Alight, 2010, 11’47”
Duration: 2017 June 1 – 30
Arthub is delighted to present Akram Zaatari’s short film Tomorrow, Everything Will Be Alright (2010). The movie has been nominated Best Short Film in Berlin Golden Bear Film Festival in 2010. Akram presents a fictional conversation on an old typewriter, which constructed the whole narrative, indicates the reunion of the lovers after 10 years, in the place where they first met to appreciate the sunset. The sunset scene is a tribute to the French new wave director Eric Rohmer’s movie Le Rayon Vert (The Green Ray, 1986), where the protagonist waiting for the green ray to appear when she was on the beach.
The following text is in response to the film in non linear narrative as a reaction to and demonstration of queer archive, after Akram Zaatari, a queer archival artist.
And the dark sky will turn blue,
Arthub invited Katy Roseland to compose an article and analysis about this short film.
Tomorrow Everything Will Be Alright is visually centered around typewriter as a online chat device. It is queer in its operation… its archival yet it texts in real time conversation.
Are you alone?
“The Arab Image Foundation (AIF) is a not-for-profit organisation established in Beirut in 1997, to preserve, exhibit and study photographs from the Middle East, North Africa and the Arab diaspora from the nineteenth century to today.
Founded by artist Akram Zaatari, the AIF currently holds a collection of more than 600,000 images, including negatives and prints sourced by its artist-members.
Rather than using these images to present a linear history of photography or as evidence of societies in the grips of modernisation, the artists use these images in exhibitions to discuss the role of photography in Arab societies.”
Production is masculine, collection is feminine.
Conflict contradiction and ambiguity. Those three words go together.
You left all of a sudden, and gave me your back.
Leave texts constructively ambiguous. Contradiction is something you live with.
From the film, we have context to the middle east from the music and the cuts to landscape.
But they type in English.
Chronology is a frame for memory.
Start with the image of the media but end with the images from your own life.
Use nostalgia like fossils. Queer the archive by inserting your life in it.
You don’t want to see me?
Two men respond to each other after ten years apart. The piece is titled in reference to time.
I don’t even know how your smile is now.
Perhaps people archive in anticipation of a future where they don’t have to speak discreetly.
I gave you the back you loved.
About Artist
Akram Zaatari (born in 1966 Sidon, Lebanon) is a filmmaker, photographer, archival artist and curator. In 1997, he co-founded the Arab Image Foundation with photographers Fouad Elkoury, Walid Raad, and Samer Mohdad. His work is largely based on collecting, studying and archiving the photographic history of the Arab World. Akram Zaatari has been selected to represent Lebanon at the 2013 Venice Biennale.
