By Gemma MangionePLAY Writer
War, displacement, sex, politics, identity – the issues raised in Akram Zaatari’s work are complex ones.
Yet he’ll be the first to say he is inspired by “simple objects.”
“I like to look at the banal that is around me,” says the 40-year-old Lebanese video artist and curator. “I am interested in objects as possible documents that radiate with information – I study them, with a curious eye. “
Zaatari, who is based in Beirut, has turned his curious eye to Northwestern, courtesy of the Fulbright Visiting Specialists Program: Direct Access to the Muslim World. According to its Web site, the program aims to promote “understanding of Islamic civilization and the history, politics and culture of today’s Muslim world by people in the U.S.” – and do it all in just six weeks.
Still, Zaatari is up for the challenge. Since his arrival on Oct. 14, he has given two lectures at the Block Museum of Art and screened his 2003 film This Day at the Gene Siskel Film Center downtown. He is also teaching a 24-student class on contemporary arts of the Middle East with art history professor Hannah Feldman, who nominated Zaatari for the Fulbright program and wrote the grant that helped bring him here.
In these dual roles as artist and teacher, Zaatari said he hopes to “unmake” preconceived definitions about Lebanon, the Middle East and the larger Muslim world.
“I am not interested in a national art,” Zaatari said. “Above all, I am interested in a critical art of existing ideas.”
Zaatari’s films, many of which can be found at the Northwestern library, are testaments to his ability for sustained, meticulous investigation. This Day is a classic example of his nuanced insight into the intricate history of a highly charged region. The film explores three sets of images: photographs of Bedouin populations in the Syrian desert compiled by a historian in the 1950s, Zaatari’s own photographs from the Israeli bombings of Lebanon in 1982 and pictures circulated on the Internet during the Second Intifada in 2000. These images, taken together and set to the music of subject interviews and personal narratives, illustrate a poignant system of representation within a half-century history of photography.
“What This Day makes critical is the desire to take any image seriously – from wartime photography to something as kitschy as the Internet,” Zaatari said. “It invites people to orient themselves to a certain message in a certain way.”
Also seen in This Day are several photographs from the studio of Lebanese photographer Hashem El Madani, whose work is being archived by Zaatari through the non-profit Arab Image Foundation he co-founded. The wide range of commercial images in the ongoing project span from family pictures to I.D. photos to more performative staged portraits, but all reflect, in Zaatari’s own words, both “the social and economic history of photography as well as people’s attitudes when facing the camera.”
One particular photo in the project features a young woman with raven hair and pale skin, leaning against a wall with one hand on her slim hip and barely a smile on her face. The woman was photographed by Madani without her husband’s permission and in a fit of anger, the husband forced Madani to scratch the portrait negatives. What is left on the resulting image is a face cut up by harsh surface diagonals and a photograph imbued with a much more complicated layer of meanings.
“I do not think (the husband) knew what was being done here,” said Zaatari during his talk at the Block on October 18. “He did not know he would engrave this picture with the challenges and constraints of a complex social context.”
According to Feldman, the interplay between Zaatari’s various projects is part of what makes the artist’s work so distinctive.
“I appreciate Akram’s work in the way that it is simply that – work,” says Feldman, “There is much less of a distinction between his scholarly projects, his archival work, his personal videos and photos – he has a multi-platformed approach to intellectual activity. That is important. And it is pretty rare.”
In the classroom, Feldman has joined Zaatari in his efforts to “unmake definitions.” Students like Jane Hutchinson, a Weinberg senior, say the class establishes an innovative framework for exploring current history and the way that affects a certain kind of art.
“I think the challenge is to reconsider what we think of the Islamic world, what we think of identity and how that can or can’t be defined by geography,” Hutchinson says. “These systems of representation and documentation are a great way to study art history and also of approaching the world in general.”
And in this forum for exchange, even Feldman considers herself a student.
“I’ll teach the course again without Akram, but definitely only because and with the great gift of having been able to learn a huge amount from him about the material, his approach to it, the region, etc.,” Feldman says. “And as the history evolves, so too will the class.”
Medill senior Gemma Mangione is a PLAY writer. She can be reached at [email protected].
