One of the most influential Lebanese artists in activity today, Akram Zaatari is the author of an oeuvre—including films, video installations, and texts—that reflects upon the importance of images as fragments of a time and their complex relations with politics, desire, and memory. In Tomorrow Everything Will Be Alright, these relations are brought to bear again, lending us an image of our time as seen from the perspective of contemporary Lebanon. Taking its title from one of its constituent works, the exhibition expresses its hope for a future in which all of today’s potential may finally flourish.
The six video installations collected here shift between public and private space, on the one hand, and between images of the past and aspirations for the future, on the other, investigating at one and the same time the delicate expression of a certain homoeroticism and aspects of the Lebanese social context. On the more public side, Tomorrow Everything Will Be Alright reveals something of Zaatari’s predilection for anonymous or grassroots sources and their little histories, which often shed large light on the present. In this sense, the artist operates as a documentarian or archaeologist: he excavates the past in search of a snapshot of our sensibility that is at once the final image of a passing world and the first in the burgeoning world to come.
Exploring the image of desire from their respective exhibition niches, the video installations create a sort of chronicle of loves lost, evoked through letters, video, and pictures. In many of these, homoerotic affection flowers in abstract places, almost entirely excluded from the real geography, as if the memory of desire peeled the objects away from their contexts to better highlight and rearrange them. Even Hamra, a Beirut street that is the pretext and setting for one of these works, is shown only as a projected image, phantasmagoric and stripped of all materiality.
Tomorrow Everything Will Be Alright is Akram Zaatari’s first solo show in Brazil, and it crowns precisely twenty years of collaboration between the artist and Associação Cultural Videobrasil. His participation in various editions of the Festival is explored in depth in The Akram Zaatari Archive, an exhibition-within-an-exhibition that takes stock of Zaatari’s significant presence in the Videobrasil Collection through works, interviews, publications, and texts. With that, the Galpão VB continues with its policy of tapping into the Collection and its commitment to bringing the very best of international contemporary art to the city.
Solange O. Farkas
Gabriel Bogossian
Curators
The Ministry of Culture and Associação Cultural Videobrasil present
Tomorrow Everything Will Be Alright
Akram Zaatari
CURATORS
Solange O. Farkas
Gabriel Bogossian
_ASSISTANT
Camila Schmidt Veiga
PRODUCERS
Rafael Moretti
Carolina Câmara
_assistant
Elton de Almeida
ART DIRECTORS
Celso Longo
Daniel Trench
_art assistants
Alexandre Drobac
Manu Vasconcelos
EDITORIAL COORDINATOR
Teté Martinho
_producer
Deborah Moreira
_translation
Alexandre Barbosa de Souza
Anthony Doyle
_revision
Regina Stocklen
GENERAL SET-UP
Mauro Coelho
Metro Cenografia
_architecture
Ricardo Amado
_audiovisual support
Alessandro Reis
Caio Gomes
Images Soluções Audiovisuais
_lighting
Pedro Vargas
Electrica Cinema e Vídeo
_wall panels
Olho Digital
PUBLIC PROGRAMS
_coordinator
Thereza Farkas
_assistant
Juliana Caffé
_educational actions
Luis Filipe Porto
_guests
Carla Caffé
Carlos Nader
Eduardo de Jesus
Gui Mohallem
Michel Sleiman
Moacir dos Anjos
_monitors
Luam Anastacio Marques
Mariana Hope Sartori
DOCUMENTATION
_video
Maria Farkas
Marcelo Moraes
_photo
Clovis França
Everton Ballardin
Pedro Napolitano Prata
RESEARCH AND PLATFORM:VB
Juliana Costa
Leonardo Zerino
Luan Ferraz
Régis Alves
Ruy Luduvice
COMMUNICATIONS
_coordinator
Ana Paula Vargas
_web development
Eduardo Haddad
_social media
Kátia König
Thiago Felix Galvão
_press relations
Pool de Comunicação
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
Amelia Hinojosa
Carlos Roberto de Abreu Sodré
Eduardo Yoshio Yokoyama
Ivail José de Andrade
Jorge Mendes
José Kuri
Juliana Cappi
Kiko Farkas
Luis Fernandez
Marcelo Araújo
Marcelo Santos
Maria Felisa Moreno Gallego
Monica Manzutto
Renato Gadelha
Richard Vainberg
Roberto Bitelman
Sam Bardaouil / Till Fellrath
Samuel de Castro
