Akram Zaatari, On Photography, People and Modern Times (2010)
Akram Zaatari at the MoMA
Lebanese artist Akram Zaatari, who was in the shortlist of the Southern Panoramas competitive show of the 18th International Contemporary Art Festival Sesc_Videobrasil, is exhibiting two of his latest works at the MoMA (New York) as part of the 100th edition of the Elaine Dannheisser Projects Series.
Dance to the End of Love (2011) is a study on YouTube as a public space and reviews how Arab people picture themselves based on their videos. The installation is composed of low-resolution material available on the internet and includes sequences shot from mobile phones in countries such as Egypt, Yemen, Libya, Saudi Arabia and Oman, and thematically combined into a 4-channel video.
In On Photography, People and Modern Times (2011), the artist presents photographs from the early days of the Arab Image Foundation, which Zaatari co-founded. The AIF works to collect, preserve and study photographs from the Middle East, North Africa and Arab diasporas, and has compiled over 600,000 items since 1997. In his MoMA installation, Zaatari questions his own work at the Foundation: intimate pictures are laid out anachronously as collection items; afterwards, an interview is shown with Armenian-Egyptian photographer Van Leo, who is reluctant as Zaatari tries to persuade him to donate three pictures to the AIF.
About the project
Since 1971, the Elaine Dannheisser Projects Series at MoMA has been an exhibition channel for emerging artists, while serving as curating practice for the in-house team of junior curators. Named in 2006 after a major collector who has left nearly her entire collection to the MoMA, the series features the latest, most experimental work on the contemporary international scene, showcasing pieces that do not fit into the museum’s regular programme.
About the artist
Akram Zaatari has featured in several editions of the Videobrasil Festival. He won the 17th Festival’s Southern Panoramas competitive show.
The holder of a degree in Architecture from the American University of Beirut, Lebanon, and a masters’ in Media Studies from the New School for Social Research in New York, USA, Zaatari explored the documental possibilities of video before embracing it as his medium of expression. He developed his research on photography and collecting as an art practice at the Arab Image Foundation, Beirut, of which he is a co-founder. Zaatari has exhibited at institutions such as Centre Georges Pompidou (Paris, France), Grey Art Gallery (New York, USA), Kunstverein München (Munich, Germany) and MUSAC (León, Spain), the Turin Triennial (Italy), and the biennials of Venice (Italy), Sydney (Australia) and São Paulo.
Find out more about this artist in our collection.
Service
The Elaine Dannheisser Projects Series 100: Akram Zaatari
May 11 to Sept 23, 2013
Curated by: Ana Janevski, Eva Respini, Katerina Stathopoulou
MoMA - The Museum of Modern Art
11 West 53 Street, Nova York, NY 10019
Projects Gallery, second floor
http://www.moma.org