'Light From the Middle East: New Photography' at the Victoria and Albert Museum: A Review

\"The break,\" from the series Upekkha, 2011 by Nermine Hammam. Archival inkjet print, 60 x 90 cm. (Copyright V&A. Art Fund Collection of Middle Eastern Photography at the V&A and the British Museum.) \"The break,\" from the series Upekkha, 2011 by Nermine Hammam. Archival inkjet print, 60 x 90 cm. (Copyright V&A. Art Fund Collection of Middle Eastern Photography at the V&A and the British Museum.)

"Light From the Middle East: New Photography" at the Victoria and Albert Museum: A Review

By : Mariam Motamedi-Fraser

Light from the Middle East: New Photography
Exhibition at the Victoria and Albert Museum, London, UK
13 November 2012 – 7 April 2013

The photographer Abbas’s images of the Iranian revolution have been described as “the memory of the event.”[1] I certainly remember them. Or I remember the event. I remember anyway my parents deciding that we had seen enough of these images on the streets, so they folded up their newspapers and unplugged our television at home.

Abbas`s images are the first ones you see upon entering the rather dark space of Light from the Middle East. There is the photograph of handprints, dipped in the blood of martyrs; the photograph of protestors, burning a portrait of the Shah; the photograph of chadori women, receiving military training. If you are my height, the first visible image is the photograph of the bodies of four executed generals laid out on the shelves of a morgue. These are the first images you see if you follow the exhibition in the direction of the English language, starting in the room on the left, as the exhibition intends you to do, and walking your way around the semi-circular space to exit on the right. If you travel in this direction, then the exhibition invites you to reflect on the work under three headings, in this order: Recording, Reframing, Resisting. There are other ways to “read” the exhibition of course. You could, for example, go from right to left, the direction of Farsi and Arabic. This would give you a very different sense of what is on view here, a point to which I will return.

There is a lot of interest in the contemporary Middle East art market right now. All the photographs in this exhibition belong either to the British Museum or to the Victoria and Albert Museum collections, or to their recently formed joint collection of contemporary Middle Eastern photography (funded by the Art Fund). Moreover, Light from the Middle East is one of at least eight shows in major international galleries and museums that, since 2004, have either featured or focused on Middle Eastern photography. This is timely. Given how much information about the region is mediated through photographic images–whether they are produced by governments, embedded reporters, the global press, or by citizen journalists–it seems important to be paying attention to photography today.

Odd then, and frustrating, that the lively and exigent work in Light from the Middle East should be constrained by a structure and sequence–recording, reframing, resisting–that reflects the very conception of photography that the exhibition seeks to interrogate. The artists in the show have more confidence than this. For most, the photographic project does not begin from the premise that there is a moment of “pure” recording that can subsequently be reframed or resisted. Instead, the works generate vigorous debate about process, perspective (position, scale), practice and belief. In an interview in the exhibition catalogue, for instance, the artists Joana Hadjithomas and Khalil Joreige do not ask whether the images of “our wars” (in Lebanon) record the truth or manipulate reality. They ask: “How could we believe in them? This question is still valid today. It deals not only with how much we still believe in images, but also how can we believe in this world and the images it produces.”[2] Some of the most compelling pieces in this exhibition–like Hadjithomas and Joreige’s Wonder Beirut: The Story of a Pyromaniac Photographer (1997-2006), Walid Raad’s Notebook Volume 38: Already Been on a Lake of Fire (2003), and Nermine Hamman’s Upekkha (2011) series–build entire worlds that we both believe and disbelieve, that are both fact and fiction, true and imagined. These pieces have already stepped quite some way away from recording, reframing, and resisting.

There are thirty artists on display here, and they come from a generously defined “Middle East” that stretches from North Africa to Central Asia. In keeping with geo-political circuits of visibility, artistic legitimacy and networks, however, note that a substantial proportion of these artists/photographers are also based outside the region, mostly in New York, London or Paris. In order to impose some coherence on this extensive range of material, each individual piece is obliged by the exhibition to demonstrate how–usually on account of a political prompt–it illustrates and/or disrupts an established way of understanding or doing photography. The problem with this approach is that it diminishes both politics and photography. Insofar as these images are said to be about politics–where politics is a topic to be recorded, reframed, or resisted–the exhibition has the curious effect of reproducing dominant, recognisable representations of “the Middle East.” It is all “about” revolution, war, religion, gender, censorship. Insofar as these images are said to be about photography–where photography is a range of techniques for recording, reframing or resisting–the exhibition can offer only a limited account, within a conventional framework, of why these pieces are provocative. In its weaker moments, the organization of the exhibition tends to confuse and conflate political and photographic strategies. These problems manifest themselves differently across the exhibition, but two examples will suffice here.

Ahmad Mater’s Magnetism I and II (2012) appear in the section entitled “recording” because, according to the exhibition catalogue, the works record a sculptural installation–iron filings spiralling around a central, black, magnetic cube. They also however (again, according to the catalogue) exploit the limitations of the camera’s recording capacity because, at first glance, they (the iron filings, magnetic cube) do not look like what they are but rather appear to be aerial photographs of pilgrims circling the Ka‘ba. In this way, the work “playfully calls into question the reliability of the photographic image.”[3] True, but Magnetism only does this insofar as the notion of “reliability” is anchored to a particular conception of photographic recording, in which the camera represents, without interference, something that once passed before its lens (something that has/had a physical reality). Consider alternatively the artist’s own account of his work, in which he suggests that his photography “records experiments and experiences.”[4] With this simple claim, Mater opens up recording to an entirely different referent–for him, what passes before the lens is “experiences.” And he offers a reliable representation of it: Magnetism faithfully portrays the pull, the force, “the feeling of being at the centre of the Islamic world.”[5] The “recording, reframing, resisting” triad also creates its own exclusions. The catalogue is noticeably silent, for example, on Mater’s use of the photogravure printing process, presumably because it is not perceived to interfere with the recording of the iron filings and magnetic cube which takes place, roughly speaking, in a single moment and at a specific location. This, in the context of the exhibition, would seem to be the only way the technique could secure any relevance. The space and time of experience however, which is Mater’s alternative referent for recording, is far more expansive. Experience roams around history and folds in different people and places. It is under the sign of experience therefore, and not of physical reality, that photogravure, the technique that ‘Abd al-Ghaffar deployed in the first printed photographs of Mecca during the 1880s, acquires its real significance.[6]

The main problem with the organization of the exhibition is this: if we already know in advance what politics and photography are, then how is it possible to find something new, and something newly challenging, in these images? A second example–the images from Amirali Ghasemi’s series Party (2005), which are included in the section “resisting” –illustrates this point, which is arguably broader than the exhibition itself.

Ghasemi’s Party portrays people at parties in Tehran with their flesh and faces whited-out in order to protect their identities from the media and the Iranian authorities. As Ghasemi himself notes, these images are inevitably understood to be about “censorship, women’s rights, the hijab, and Islam.”[7] In Light from the Middle East, Ghasemi is described as “[rebelling] against photography … while depicting acts of social rebelliousness.”[8] It is “very tricky” however, Ghasemi says, “to glorify young people’s desire for having a good time as a rebellious act against the authorities.”[9] And even trickier to imply, as the catalogue does, that Ghasemi’s work is an act of rebellion because his whiting-out reminds us “of how easily photographs can be manipulated” and “is suggestive of the unsubtle techniques employed by the Iranian censors of imported magazines”.[10] It is tricky because, whether these photographs are or are not about censorship, they are themselves censored. The assumption that these images engage with censorship at the levels of both content and technique gives rise to an uneasy tension: for even if the topic of the photographs, censorship, is political–and it is worth noting that the artist himself is deeply ambivalent about this interpretation[11]–should a pre-emptive act of censorship, in effect, of self-censorship, necessarily be considered an act of resistance?

“Artistic images don’t bring weapons in the struggle,” Jacques Rancière has written. Instead, “they help frame new configurations of the visible and the thinkable, which also means a new landscape of the possible.”[12] A more productive way to think about the political intervention commanded by the use of photography in this exhibition might be to consider how the images create what Rancière calls “dissensus” around consensual “ways of seeing.” For Rancière, a dissensus challenges what has already been decided in advance; it is a “dispute on what is given, on the name that can be given of it and the sense that can be made of it.”[13] Importantly, a dissensus does this not by denouncing a given reality or by reduplicating it (only “better”) but by building “other ‘realities’ or other forms of `commonsense,` which means other settings of time and space, other communities of words and things, of perceptions and meanings.”[14] It means building other worlds, as Hadjithomas and Joreige might put it. This, Rancière says, is where “[a]rt and politics begin.”[15] Exploring how the works in Light from the Middle East create dissensus would prevent any single piece from being reduced to being “about politics” and, at the same time, would open up photography to a more intensely charged notion of the political. Consider, in this regard, one of the images in Newsha Tavakolian’s Mothers of Martyrs (2006) series, which appears in the section “recording.” The image shows a mother, sitting on a chair, holding a portrait of her martyred son in front of a black banner on which is written the word Moharram. According to the logic of the exhibition, the poignancy of this image must be explained either in terms of “the photographic” (the catalogue discusses Tavakolian’s ability to show, in a photograph, how a photograph can capture the likeness of an absent person) or in terms of “the political and cultural” (here it refers to her allusions to Shi’i martyrdom). But the power of Tavakolian’s work arguably lies in how it brings these elements (and more) together, without collapsing them into each other. Tavakolian’s image creates new connections, in Rancière’s terms, between word forms and visual forms, between different spaces and times, a here and an elsewhere, a now and a then: between the portrait of the boy and the word on the banner, between the martyrs of the Iran-Iraq war (1980-1988) and the Shi‘i martyrs of 680-683, between the individual martyr in the hands of his mother and the “myth of martyrdom” that Abbas decries in his book Allah O Akbar.[16]

Why do Abbas’s images start the exhibition? They do so for two troubling reasons: because photojournalism is framed as the originary technique in a narrative of photography that begins with a particular conception of recording; and because the Iranian revolution is framed as the originary event in a narrative of the contemporary Middle East that is too often unwilling to tear its eyes away from political Islam. But what if you reversed the direction, and read the exhibition from the right to the left? Beginning from “resistance” allows you to immediately recognize that the force of the work in Light from the Middle East derives not solely from its engagement with politics (understood as a topic) or with photography (understood as a set of techniques) but from its challenge to organized, historical, given ways of looking at the world, of making sense of it, of “common senses.” The sequence “recording, reframing, resisting” is one such common sense, as are the oppositions that sustain it: real/illusion, reliable/unreliable, censorship/rebellion, past/present. Reversing the direction transforms Abbas’s IranDiary from the definitive starting point of the exhibition (the point from which to measure how far politics and photography have travelled) into the exhibition’s conclusion. This concluding position is not so much a final summary as it is a final question, a question, in keeping with dissensus, as to what fresh senses can be made of IranDiary, as it joins the other worlds and novel connections created by the work in the exhibition.  


[1] Shiva Balaghi, “Writing with Light: Abbas’s Photographs of the Iranian Revolution of 1979,” in Picturing Iran: Art, Society and Revolution, eds. Shiva Balaghi and Lynn Gumpert (London and New York: I.B. Tauris, 2002): 103-126.

[2] Hadjithomas and Joreige, quoted in Marta Weiss, Light from the Middle East: New Photography. Göttingen, Germany: Steidl/Victoria and Albert Museum, 2012, 148.

[3] Weiss, 15.

[4] Mater in Weiss, 149.

[5] Ibid, 154.

[6] Ibid.

[7] Quoted in Rose Issa, Iranian Photography Now. Germany: Hatje Cantz, 2008, 60.

[8] Weiss, 27.

[9] Ghasemi quoted in Weiss, 148.

[10] Ibid, 27.

[11] Issa, 60.

[12] Jacques, Rancière. `What makes images unacceptable?`, ZHdk

http://culturalgenderstudies.zhdk.ch/veranstaltungen/documents/jacquesranciere/FORUM_JRanciere.pdf (2007).

[13] Ibid.

[14] Ibid.

[15] Ibid.

[16] Abbas, Allah O Akbar. London: Phaidon, 1994, 10.

The Swallows of Syria

[Note: The views and testimonies herein are the refugees’ own, and do not necessarily reflect the views of the author or of Jadaliyya.]

Somaya left Homs, Syria after finding the corpse of her tortured son in a sewage ditch. Zaynab escaped with her family when she discovered that Syrian soldiers kidnapped, raped, and killed three of her schoolmates. Aziza fled after snipers killed both her husband and sister-in-law. Reports indicate that refugees and residents have also been subjected to abuse and assault by unknown, non-regime, fighters.

Thousands of other Syrian women like them have escaped to Lebanon and are hiding in small villages within a few kilometers of the border, at the mercy of secret service agents allied with the Assad regime. Far from the safety of the refugee camps in Turkey, here, Syrian women live in constant fear of being kidnapped or killed. Frightened that registering with the UN will make them vulnerable to a potentially hostile Lebanese government, these women hide in filthy basements and makeshift tents while consuming their last meager savings to barely survive in a country that doesn`t want them.

Ignored by the Lebanese government, which refuses to recognize them as refugees, they cannot work and raise money for their families. While local Lebanese families initially host some of them, they soon must look for a place to rent. Separated from their relatives and friends, and unable to send their kids to school, some are even starting to question the outcome of the Syrian revolution, regretting the peaceful life they used to live before the Arab Spring.

I collected the personal stories and pictures of more than twenty Syrian women, and recorded their feelings of grief, bitterness, and hope for the future of their country. All of them are face-covered to protect their safety.

Captions

Jdeideh, Lebanon - Karam, twenty-eight, from Homs. Her house was in Baba Amr, right in front of the Syrian Army tanks. The Free Syrian Army helped her during the clandestine trip to Lebanon. “They showed us the way, they kept my little baby safe ... If it weren`t for them, we would not be here today.”

Jdeideh, Lebanon – Asma, thirty, from Al-Qusayr. "One day they knocked at the door. When I opened it, I was carrying my baby in my arms. They asked me where my husband was, and I told them he was not in. So one of the soldiers took out a knife from his pocket and cut my baby`s throat who died in my arms."

Jdeideh, Lebanon - Tara, twenty-five (left, holding her son), escaped from Baba Amr, Homs. She left Syria after they destroyed her house. Her husband stayed to help his father. She is still hoping to hear from him. Unfortunately, her family knows that the Syrian army killed him one month later, but they would rather not tell her.

Jdeideh, Lebanon - Rasha, twenty-seven, from Soran. Besides her husband and two children, the rest of her family is still in Syria. Rasha would like to settle in Lebanon. One of her brothers serves in the army, and she is concerned the Free Syrian Army might kill him.  

Sahl el Faqaa, Lebanon - Somaya, fifty-six, from Talbiseh, on the outskirts of Homs. Masked soldiers arrested her 31-year-old son Ali during a raid on her house. Three days later, his severely tortured body was found in a nearby sewage ditch. “He had a huge wound in the stomach, one of his arms was broken, and both kneecaps had been removed,” she recounts. She now lives in Lebanon with two of her sons, who work as laborers in the nearby fields to raise some money.

Jdeideh, Lebanon - Nour, five, from Al-Qusayr, escaped Syria with her mother and brothers after living in an underground cave for almost three months. A Lebanese family is now hosting her. Nour is still psychologically traumatized by the war. Every time she hears the bell ring, or someone knocking at the door, she starts to panic and cry thinking that the Syrian army is here to get her.

Tripoli, Lebanon - Samira, twenty-eight, arrived from Hama, with her four children. She had to take five cars and bribe her way through the military checkpoints up to the Lebanese border. It cost her four hundred dollars, four times her husband’s average monthly wage. She now lives in Tripoli. “I miss the soil of Syria, the land”, she explains, before bursting into tears. “We live in misery here. The kids do not go to school, and every time my husband is late I become hysterical, fearing that he might have been stopped at a checkpoint and sent back to Syria.”

Jdeideh, Lebanon - Najiba, sixty-three, from the village of Soran. She arrived in Lebanon after the first protests erupted in Hama. “The Army was shooting at everyone, I remember seeing fifty or sixty people dead.” She now lives in a concrete shed in an orchard. In exchange for looking after the trees, she can stay for free. “I would go back to Syria tomorrow, if it were not for the kids. I am very worried about their safety,” she explains, pointing at the four grandchildren she lives with.

Jdeideh, Lebanon - Aziza, thirty-five, a Turkmen Syrian from Al-Qusayr. She fled her home after sniper fire killed her husband and sister-in-law (whose kids she is now raising) while going to the souq. She constantly goes back to Al-Qusayr to check on her father, whose health is deteriorating fast. She lives in a makeshift tent camp in the Beqaa Valley, where she picks fruit to survive. She gets paid less than five dollars for seven hours of work per day.

Tripoli, Lebanon - Zaynab, sixteen, from Al-Khalidiya, in Homs. She fled with her family after the army repeatedly knocked at their door to look for her father. An honor student, she was unable to attend lessons after soldiers kidnapped, raped, and killed some of her schoolmates in January. Zaynab is taking care of her father and her siblings who are all mentally disabled. When asked what it is that she misses the most from home, she replied: “The smell of Homs.”