Artists from the Middle East use historical records to discuss intolerance
Read below a story by Silas Martí, published on 10.22 on the cover of the Ilustrada section of newspaper Folha de São Paulo:
"Tell me what you see from there on up,” the president inquires. "I see my country in all its splendor and beauty, its magnificent beaches, mountains and undulating valleys," the astronaut retorts from up high, in a conversation aired live by the state-owned television channel.
The country was Syria, as seen from space by Mohammad Faris, a member of a 1987 Russian expedition, the last Arab cosmonaut to orbit around the Earth. The president was the dictator Hafez al-Assad, father to Bashar al-Assad, who now faces the bloody civil war that has killed over 100,000 and driven 2 million out of the country.
In a video by the Lebanese artist Ali Cherri, the conversation between the dictator and the astronaut is illustrated by footage from the beginning of the conflict, nearly three years ago, when Assad’s regime ordered for statues of himself and his father to be removed from the streets of Damascus, averting their destruction amid the wave of revolt.
This temporal short-circuit of Cherri’s work is the tonic of many of the works y artists from the Middle East and countries like Pakistan and Iran, featured in the upcoming edition of the Contemporary Art Festival Sesc_Videobrasil, due to start in November in São Paulo.
Scene from the film 'Pipe Dreams,' by the Lebanese artist Ali Cherri, featured in Festival Sesc_Videobrasil
This and other Lebanese and Israeli artworks delve into the region’s archives to draw an impactful parallel with the present – and show that nothing or next to nothing has changed since in that fertile ground for political convulsion.
"On the one hand we have Assad speaking at the height of his power," Cherri describes. "On the other, his son removes the statues, scared to death. That says a lot about the construction of image by totalitarian regimes. It also reveals a common dynamic of the region, where revolutionary leaders always turn into great dictators."
The parallel with historical images also helps reinterpret real-time videos from war zones around the world, the horror of the victims of chemical weapons in the outskirts of Damascus, the shocking scene of a rebel eating the heart of a Syrian soldier. "Instead of enabling a clearer view of the situation, these images lead to even greater confusion,” says Cherri.
Snowball
Attempting to clear up mistakes caused by images shown out of context, artists like Israel’s Dor Guez and Lebanon’s Akram Zaatari, who featured in the last Documenta, in Kassel, Germany, are creating archives with different types of historical records from that region.
Guez features in Videobrasil with a piece from his "Christian-Palestine Archive ," a project that collects pictures from the family albums of Palestinians who have scattered throughout the world since the inception of the State of Israel, in 1948.
"This is an important year to the archive,” says the artist. "It is a set of images that grows like a snowball. Already it contains thousands of pictures that have turned into a platform for preserving the memories of these Palestines."
At this point, even though he only addresses part of the population, Guez attempts to discuss what lies at the root of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict. "All of the struggles in the region are rooted in identity," says the artist. "But history has different layers, therefore there isn’t one single version. And nationality is an artificial concept."
Just as Guez builds a Palestinian and Christian archive, Lebanon’s Akram Zaatari has created a foundation that concentrates photographs if the Arab Diaspora around the world, starting with leftover pictures at photographic studios destroyed by the wars that wrecked Beirut.
Outside the Lebanese capital, what Zaatari shows in São Paulo is not those pictures, but rather an intimate piece of fiction where he portrays the beginning and the end of homosexual relationships, in a minimalist choreography where a man undresses another against a white backdrop.
"It is a parable about romantic beginnings and breakups," says Zaatari. "A dance in which the same type of human drama is always repeated."
In fact, Zaatari, one of the most relevant Middle Eastern artists, regularly takes on the minefield that is homosexuality within the Muslim universe to discuss broader issues – homoeroticism as a metaphor to several other impossibilities in the region.
"All of my films are commentaries on what takes place in Lebanon, in Syria," says the artist. "But I would rather think of them as being about the failure of love and the start of a new love. At least that is what I hope for."
Click here to find out more about the 18th Contemporary Art Festival Sesc_Videobrasil.