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Seeker of Traces: Akram Zaatari

Martina Corgnati

The working strategy of the Lebanese artist Akram Zaatari (born in  Saida, 1966; lives and works in Beirut) over the last decade can probably be summed up by his own description of his work, one that may seem simplistic, but is actually very complicated to put honestly into practice.  His attempt to gather together a collection of points of view corresponds to the effort to reconstruct or, to be more accurate, give witness, through fragments, to a landscape, a society, an intensely fluctuating and dynamic state (to be understood always in non-unitary terms, as a heterogenous plurality of factors and conditions), which we can denominate as contemporary Lebanon, even though Zaatari’s interests often push beyond, in the direction of the Middle East taken as a whole. 

Zaatari’s starting point is to understand sight, literally, as a means and instrument of communication;  hence his interest in those who use vision to produce images, those who are responsible for palimpsests and television programs:  today,  reporters, cameramen and directors, website designers and online communications managers and, in the past, studio and street photographers.    It is perhaps for this reason that Zaatari was one of the first to hold the fascinating and pioneering idea of an Arab Image Foundation, which he co-founded in Beirut in 1997, and why he dedicated considerable energy (and artistic efforts) to publications and videos about historical photographers, such as the Lebanese Hashem El Madani and Armenian Egyptian Van Leo, the subject of the wonderful documentary video, Her + Him, Van Leo (2001).

To take on the history of a place, in its cultural context, undoubtedly means to also attempt to reconstruct the history of the images of this place and context:  a difficult feat, often overlooked by professional historians and all the more important and urgent in this Middle East which has always been seen and interpreted under Western eyes, as Edward Said’s classic theory of Orientalism instructs us.   However, it is only in very recent times that there have been attempts to have one’s own gaze and leave a trace of one’s own point of view—or to be more precise, points of view. 

What it meant to pursue one’s art with respect, attention and care within the studio system and to practice one’s profession in an unforeseen way is the subject of  Mapping Sitting: On Portraiture and Photography (a project by A.Zaatari and W.Raad and a book by K.Bassil, Z.Maasri, A.Zaatari in cooperation with W.Raad, Foundation Arabe pour l’Image 2002), a work which focuses on four photographic practices: studio and street portraiture in Lebanon and Egypt in the first decades of the twentieth century. The book gives evidence to the simple and almost primitive quality of these photographers’ relationships with their potential clients, immortalized often in the course of long daily wanderings, deliberately geared to this artistic aim.  Zaatari enjoys his subject and falls in love with the personal stories and details, endorsing this rupture from stereotypes or official contemporary points of view.  He explores the feelings, fascination and attraction which combine in unexpected circumstances, in places that are apparently uninhabitable, such as an obscure doorway which offers shelter to a chewing gum street-vendor in  Red Chewing Gum (2000), one of Zaatari’s video devoted to representations of male sexuality.

Perhaps the most successful synthesis of the polyvalent complexity that Zaatari searches for and the most convincing representation of the formless chorality that, without ever taking form, converges in the flux of history,  which actually determines this flux, can be found in the 2003 feature film entitled    This Day.  It is indeed difficult to describe the subject of this film:   images taken by the anthropologist and historian Jibrail Jabbur in the Syrian desert, a new trip to Syria taken by the artist on the scene of the crime,  then a sudden spatial shift and an instantaneous return to a Beirut with water and ships almost suspended in the horizon, the war hovering in the background, the past and present conflict somewhere nearby, all merged and confused by a repetition of continual email messages.  The computer screen shows stratified images in the background of a local landscape composed of a few objects, a table and some items placed on the table.  The landscape is anything but static, but in it time stays still, especially in contrast with the fast sequence of images and messages that pass in the monitor window.  Then something happens:  a tea.  An envelope falls in the water of a glass receptacle and the camera stops and does a slow take, in a virtuoso move, on waves of color that compose, decompose and recompose like fibrous traces of an abstract watercolor portrait.  At the end, a new equilibrium of color appears, the beginning of a new fragment of open and unconcluded history, like the others.

The war and conflict are omnipresent, pervasive, infiltrated in the folds of things, and yet does not affect the calm stagnation of time that the artist captures in phases of suspension with his fixed camera, which serve as a container of a classically unified time, the day of a Greek tragedy, a day of life in which nothing special happens, but in which the past and present interconnect and interweave in countess connections which break the apparent continuity of lived time: personal memory converges and absorbs the memories of others, a collective memory, and at the end, there is no synthesis, no unique credible or reassuring truth.  Meaning takes form  (or loses form) continuously by casual gatherings of directed instants towards a momentary aim.  Exactly like life itself. 

Hence time itself is perhaps the invisible subject of Zaatari’s admirable work:  a subjective fleeting time, slowly experienced in daily existence, and by definition discontinuous and complex, the condition of complexity itself,  influenced by meanings of a past that are subjectively various and variable.  And there is no end unless through an arbitrary and/or violent interruption.

If we look at the ensemble of recent Lebanese artistic production and documentaries, it becomes obvious that Zaatari’s interests are largely shared.   The need to conserve, protect the memory of a landscape in which one feels its precariousness, its unstable condition, its state of being “at risk”, and to along with preserving the landscape, the city and the sites, inhabit this landscape, with a human presence, to find precious and fleeting traces,  both discontinuous and incoherent, and to merge one’s own unrepeatable existence with these traces, is a common and nearly obsessive need in contemporary Lebanon.  Zaatari  is among the first to have identified this need without however compromising his own personality and originality as an autonomous visual artist.  He knew how to give consistency and profundity to a truly great cultural project.  

The war of the 2006 summer and the difficult situation in which the country still finds itself, both in its politics and institutions, continues to give terrible validity to these artists and to make their work of visual recognition urgent and necessary. One could say there is a need for on-site interpretation.