Dissonant Archives: Contemporary Visual Culture and Contested Narratives in the Middle East 9780755607419, 9781784534110

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Preface A Note on the Visual Culture in the Middle East Series

In 2011, the Kamel Lazaar Foundation responded to the need for access to critical and historical texts about visual culture in North Africa and the Middle East by launching our research and publishing initiative Ibraaz (www.ibraaz. org). In 2014, continuing the success of Ibraaz as an online research and publishing forum, we also published Volume 01 in our Visual Culture in the Middle East series. It is therefore a great pleasure to announce the publication of Volume 02 in this series. Dissonant Archives: Contemporary Visual Culture and Contested Narratives in the Middle East grew out an of awareness of the considerable number of artists who produce work that specifically engages with regionally defined, historically localized forms of archived knowledge in the Middle East. Two distinct elements emerged in this process. On the one hand, it was notable that our shared collective, global history has recently seen an extraordinary level of growth in terms of knowledge production, especially in relation to visual culture. This unprecedented growth has nevertheless also seen a relative regression in knowledge production: a fragmented and increasingly compartmentalized way of thinking has come to dominate not only ways of understanding cultural production but also the world in which we live. Just as artists engage in processes of archiving and critically explore the nature and function of archives, the very institutions and depth of vision needed to maintain archives seems to be also failing. This failure can be seen across the Middle East and the Maghreb, where archives remain neglected, under-funded and in varying degrees of dilapidation. An immediate consequence of this is that the very knowledge needed to produce and develop cultural knowledge is being lost at the same moment that a renewed effort is being made to focus on it. In these contexts, the role of the Foundation and Ibraaz is not just a horizontal, immediate one (focusing solely on contemporary visual culture and its manifestations), it is also about a vertical, historical engagement with visual culture from the past and key developments in the

history of global artistic production. Our role, like that of archival practices more generally, is ultimately about maintaining and imparting knowledge from one generation to the next and analysing it in a sustainable and critical manner. To these points, we need to note how the development of public museums, libraries, educational institutions and private foundations worldwide has largely mitigated the losses we have experienced in knowledge and cultural production. These institutions take time to develop and need support. Again, it is striking that across the Middle East the commitment to the very infrastructure needed to maintain and produce viable archives and research facilities has been found wanting. There are many reasons for this, personal, political and private; however, we are on the cusp of a new historical epoch in the region and these issues need to be addressed. I hope, in all modesty, that Dissonant Archives, and this series in general, goes some way to raising these concerns but also directs us to an important, if not crucial, element in the broader scope of the archive: they are always future-oriented and, in detailing the dynamics of the past and present, they inevitably direct us towards that future. Although the focus of this series is and will remain on North Africa and the Middle East, the concerns raised within it are not simply regional; rather, they are global issues. The fact that Ibraaz has become an archive in its own right means that we have to redouble our efforts to not only produce critical knowledge but to also make it as accessible as possible to a global audience. To further this in terms of action, rather than rhetoric, we already have two more volumes in production for this series, one looking at institutions across the region and how artistic, critical and curatorial practices can produce more open and engaged models of cultural production; the other volume is on the history of performance art across the Arab world. I would like, finally, to thank friends and family for their guidance on these matters and the contributors to this volume who have been so generous with their ideas and support. The broad reach and scope of the essays and artists’ projects included here hopefully provides ample acknowledgment of our ambition to see the region develop a better understanding of itself and, in time, allow the world to better understand the region and the interconnections, rather than divisions, that continue to define our shared histories. Kamel Lazaar Chairman Kamel Lazaar Foundation.

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Notes on Texts and Artists’ Inserts

A number of essays included in this volume were published as part of Ibraaz’s online platform in 2013 and 2014. We are grateful to all our contributors for revising their work and reviewing anything that has changed substantially since the original online publication of their essays. The style guidelines follow Ibraaz’s style guide for Arabic, Persian and Turkish transliterations. We are also grateful to the artists included here for giving us the permission to publish their projects as inserts in this volume. Some projects were originally intended for online viewing and we have preserved image quality throughout and present them here in accordance to the artists’ wishes and intentions. A number of artists’ inserts were edited for inclusion in this volume, but full versions, including videos and interviews with the artists, are available at: www.ibraaz.org/projects www.ibraaz.org/interviews

Contingency, Dissonance and Performativity Critical Archives and Knowledge Production in Contemporary Art Anthony Downey

[T]he question of the archive is not […] a question of the past. It is not the question of a concept dealing with the past that might already be at our disposal or not at our disposal, an archivable concept of the archive. It is a question of the future, the question of the future itself, the question of a response, of a promise and of a responsibility for tomorrow. Jacques Derrida1 How do we define the ongoing relationship between contemporary art and the archive? Considering the unprecedented levels of present-day information storage and forms of data circulation, alongside the diversity of contemporary art practices, this question may seem hopelessly open-ended. In an age defined by the application of archival knowledge as an apparatus of social, political, cultural, historical, state and sovereign power, it nevertheless needs to be posed. In what follows, I will suggest that we can more fully refine the question and offer a series of conditional answers if we consider, in the first instance, the extent to which contemporary artists retrieve, explore and critique orders of archival knowledge.2 A central, if not defining, element in this process has been the co-option of archives as both primary resources and structuring devices within contemporary art. Although difficult to fully determine (in terms of its historical, sociological, pedagogical and theoretical cogency), this has invariably produced systems of archival knowledge that are often at odds with more formal, institutional archives. It is within this nexus, the point where art practices create alternative, often speculative archival forms, that we can begin to formulate a provisional answer to our prefatory question. The collation and storage of information within the archive, in the second instance, is an international concern. As a global reality, however, the archive does have a regionally defined, if not national, inflection that is located

in a series of formal contexts, including the architectural site-specificity of the archive; the localized politics of admission to it; the categorical terms of collation and dissemination that underwrite its procedures; and, of course, its increasingly virtual, digitized dimension. All of these determine access (and denial of access) to the information contained within archives. These patterns of access and non-access, utility and redundancy, materiality and immateriality are defined, in turn, by historical circumstances and localized, regional dispositions. Whilst not necessarily hermeneutically or historically definitive as such, we encounter a phenomenon here that has come to define, to varying degrees, significant elements in the work of artists as diverse as Emily Jacir, Walid Raad, Akram Zaatari, Khalil Rabah, Mariam Ghani, Joana Hadjithomas and Khalil Joreige, Zineb Sedira, Ruanne Abou-Rahme and Basel Abbas, Benji Boyadgian, Lamia Joreige, Maryam Jafri, Adelita Husni-Bey, Héla Ammar, Roy Samaha, Uriel Orlow, Amina Menia, Vahap Avşar, Lucien Samaha, Eric Baudelaire and Jananne Al-Ani. These artists have produced and continue to produce work that specifically engages with regionally determined, historically localized forms of archived knowledge, be they photographic, art historical, cultural, sociological, anthropological, textual, institutional, oral or digital.3 To observe as much is to propose a more manageable field of enquiry: how do we understand the historical relationship of contemporary art to the regional archives of, say, the Maghreb, the Levant or the Gulf States? What, furthermore, do the artists mentioned above reveal about the archive across an admittedly broad region and, as a consequence, what do they disclose or make manifest about the politics of cultural production in, for example, Iraq, Lebanon, Afghanistan, Tunisia, Algeria, Morocco, Syria, Jordan, Turkey Egypt, and Palestine? These enquiries are admittedly far from straightforward, but there is an imminent critical need to ask why a commitment to working with archives has become an apparently dominant aesthetic strategy for contemporary artists engaged with the heterogeneity of cultural production across the Middle East? If we provisionally accept that significant gaps have emerged in archives in countries such as Egypt, Palestine, Tunisia and Iraq, does it follow that these epistemological fissures have offered a productive aperture for artists to situate their research and subsequent forms of engagement? A primary consideration here is the extent to which archives are used to explore conflict and the reconstruction of individual and collective histories, be they revolutionary or national. Which begs a further question: do these practices ultimately foster a nostalgic fetishization of the archive as a locus of knowledge production or, conversely, suggest an ongoing, possibly systemic, crisis in institutional and state-ordained archiving across the region? What forms of knowledge, we also need to ask, are being produced in the moment that art interacts with archives and how do we articulate the epistemological substance of these forms? In posing this question, we need to

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note that art does not produce verifiable knowledge as such, rather it engages in a series of ruminative gestures that give rise to non-definitive narratives and tentative forms of suppositional knowledge. A further consideration here is how the archive circulates as an apparatus that discursively produces knowledge and is often utilized by artists to reveal a set of mechanisms that are simultaneously situated in the present but inevitably projecting meaning into the future. The archive, to recall the epigraph from Jacques Derrida above, ‘is a question of the future, the question of the future itself, the question of a response, a promise and of a responsibility for tomorrow’. This allusion to an ethics of the archive is an acknowledgement that, as a collation of historical documents that records and orders information about people, places and events, the archive should take responsibility for the functioning and formal application of its knowledge systems.4 It is within the context of these demands that contemporary art engenders archives that are troubled and contentious spaces haunted by their own repressions and occlusions. In works by artists as diverse as Zineb Sedira, Jananne Al-Ani, Joana Hadjithomas and Khalil Joreige, Walid Raad and Akram Zaatari, as we will see below, alternative forms of archiving and archival knowledge emerge that question the material, formal aspect of an archive and its immaterial, informal procedures of archiving. In exploring and producing archives, be they alternative, interrogative or fictional, these artists are not simply questioning veracity, authenticity or authority, or, indeed, authorship; rather, they interpose forms of contingency and radical possibility into the archive that sees it projected onto future rather than historical probabilities.

Contemporary Art and the Archive in the Middle East In 2010, Zineb Sedira produced Image Keepers, an installation that includes a documentary film of an interview with Safia Kouaci, the wife of Mohamed Kouaci. Considered one of the pioneers of photography in independent Algeria, Mohamed Kouaci was responsible for many of the images that have today become inextricably linked with the events of that time.5 Kouaci died in 1996 and his extensive archive, or what is left of it, is currently under the custodianship of Safia Kouaci, who houses it in her apartment in Algiers. Sedira’s complex film, which is made up of two parts, takes Kouaci’s photographic archive as a starting point for discussing a number of interrelated matters, ranging from the intimate and familial (love, loss and ensuing solitude); the socio-historical (the war of independence and its aftermath in Algeria); the aesthetic (the importance of Kouaci’s images in offering a counter-narrative to Eurocentric representations of Algeria); and, crucially, the notion of historical transmission (in the context of relaying history from one generation to another).6 At the time of the film’s making, over the summer of 2010, the Contingency, Dissonance and Performativity

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archive had yet to be formally organized and it becomes obvious that Safia has not only become the archivist, the eponymous ‘keeper’ of the images, but the interpreter too insofar as her husband’s death left little by way of time to classify his images (nor, as we discover, did it leave adequate time to discuss what to do with the archive in the long term). Safia Kouaci’s memories function here as an archive of sorts against the more tangible and yet decomposing archive of photographs she safeguards in honour of her husband. One of her laments is that, following her husband’s death, the clearing out of his studio was done in such a chaotic way that some photographs were discarded or destroyed. We witness here a precariousness emerge in the status of the archive, a sense of its instability and susceptibility to time. These images may be a record of the past, but they are contingent on the circumstances of the present and, in that moment, foreshadow future uses (and abuses) of the archive. Towards the end of Part I of the film, Safia suggests that ‘an archive should never change. It should remain the same until the end of time’. These comments, made in the context of the overthrowing of a political party or government, where archives are often instrumentalized within collective or nationalist versions of history, are provisional and, as Safia eventually admits, the archive is always in flux. It is this radical instability that would appear to attract historians and others, including artists and filmmakers, to archives in the first place. Ongoing disruption and dissolution, rather than continuity and aggregation, underscore an inherent dissonance within the archive as a material and immaterial form. This dissonance, this refusal to ‘add up’ or unquestioningly reside in the present, gives rise to a further degree of historical contingency. The fact that Kouaci’s archive, perhaps the single most extant and authoritative archive of a period that included wars of independence and the emergence of the Algerian state, remains neglected and in a state of confusion must, in due course, say something of the current priorities of the Algerian state and how it continues to be riven by its own private discords, public denials and historical disavowals. Image Keepers tells us more here about the concerns and exigencies of the present than it does about the past. Crucially, as we will see throughout this volume, those concerns look to the future and to how people will understand and judge the motives and motivations of present-day attitudes towards an archive. This sense of the archive as a ‘question of a response, of a promise and of a responsibility for tomorrow’, to recall Derrida’s point, together with the way artists consistently encourage readings of the archive’s latent potentiality, are a significant feature of Jananne Al-Ani’s The Aesthetics of Disappearance: A Land Without People (2007–ongoing). Consisting mainly of images of archaeological sites, the research for these works — which also includes two films, Shadow Sites I (2010) and Shadow Sites II (2011) — involved visiting and interacting with relatively disparate archives containing landscape and aerial photography, including the extensive holdings of the Arab Image Foundation (AIF) in Beirut.7

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Here Al-Ani came across publications relating to the work of early pioneers of aerial photography in the Middle East, including the French archaeologist and Jesuit missionary Antoine Poidebard, who was responsible for the production of aerial photographs of Roman sites in Syria in the mid-1930s. Observing how, when the sun is low in the sky, the outlines of archaeological features on the ground are thrown into sharper relief, Al-Ani has remarked that the long-term result of her research into these archives was ‘the revelation that the discipline of aerial archaeology had developed as a direct result of the discovery of previously unknown sites during aerial operations carried out in the course of the First and World War IIs’.8 To this already extensive formal archival research, the artist interpolated material found on blogs, in oral history archives and from transcripts of war crimes tribunals, including interviews with anthropologists and sociologists who had worked with survivors of mass killings in Kosovo, in the late 1990s, and in Iraq following the downfall of the Ba’athist regime there in 2003. Influenced by the work of Margaret Cox, a forensic anthropologist who had worked in Kosovo in the 1990s and, latterly, in Iraq in 2003 to identify victims of Saadam Hussein’s regime, Al-Ani relates how she became increasingly interested in ‘what happens to the evidence of atrocity and how it affects our understanding of the often beautiful landscapes into which the bodies of victims disappear’.9 The Aesthetics of Disappearance: A Land Without People explores inter alia political, military, archaeological and personal archives and how they relate to historically contested landscapes and the topography of the Middle East, specifically Iraq. Implicit within this work is the understanding that newer, less linear and latent narratives emerge out of what first appear to be fixed sites of archival documentation. Aerial reconnaissance photographs from decades ago presage the work of forensic anthropology and, consequently, articulate a demand that justice be served on behalf of those who are no longer able to petition for it. The artist becomes an archivist who — in collating, rearranging, and interpreting forms of archival information — produces alternate, perhaps unconventional but no less convincing, narratives of near disappearance and eventual re-emergence. These concerns reflect an abiding interest in the archive as a central component in unearthing, so to speak, and bringing together apparently disparate strands of historical narrative and testimony. The juridical, moral and political claims of the present provoke, in this framework, a contemporary rereading of archival images and their aesthetic repurposing.10 The hermeneutics of the archive, the interpretations wrought from it and their simultaneous dissemination, reveals the performative, contingent and ultimately dissonant, if not anachronistic, elements that underwrite archival procedures. In Joana Hadjithomas and Khalil Joreige’s Wonder Beirut (History of a Pyromaniac Photographer) (1997–2006), we encounter the elusive photographer Abdallah Farah, who published a series of postcards of Beirut in 1968. In 1975, according to the artists, Farah began mutilating the archival Contingency, Dissonance and Performativity

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Stills from Zineb Sedira, Gardiennes d’images, 2010. Part I: Double projection with sound, 19 min — Format 16/9. Production SAM Art Projects, 2009. © Zineb Sedira. Image courtesy of the artist and Galerie Kamel Mennour, Paris.

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negatives so that they mirrored the destruction he was witnessing during the Lebanese Civil War (1975–90). In 1997, Hadjithomas and Joreige began working on a project with Farah (whom they had met at the beginning of the 1990s) and his archive. The fact that Farah’s postcard images were still available in bookshops, although the scenes they depicted — including buildings and monuments — had long since been destroyed, led the artists to consider a number of issues, not least the difficulties associated with archiving civil conflict. This sense of hermeneutic anxiety and an impending collapse, if not utter destruction, of the archive becomes all the more evident in the second phase of the project where, the artists record, Farah added other injuries to the negatives that were not directly related or attributable to bombings or destruction. This phase was termed the ‘plastic process’ and seemed to predict, through the use of archival images, future disasters. The archive here is riven by a troubling anachronism whereby events that are yet to happen are proleptically projected into the future. These portents of doom, out of place and out of time, signify the latent element in these images — that which is repressed and yet nascent.11 Wonder Beirut reveals a monitory premonition of what can happen to archival images; the sense that they are inherently predisposed to radical forms of destruction and deconstruction — both literal and conceptual — and can, in the face of trauma, become both withdrawn and indeed destroyed.12 What authority, in this defaced and withdrawn state, can they bring to the representation of historical events and our understanding of conflict? It is this concept of archival withdrawal that remains key to the work of Walid Raad and the Atlas Group. Forming a core conceptual link within any discussion of contemporary art and the archive, Raad’s work is largely concerned with an immaterial force: historical trauma and its discursive production and transmutation within given social, aesthetic and political archives. Influenced by the work of Jalal Toufic (specifically the latter’s writings on the idea of the “withdrawal of tradition” during times of conflict), Raad’s oeuvre calls on the past, present and future of archival and cultural knowledge to form a timeline that accommodates representational ambiguities and, to a certain extent, speculative anachronisms.13 As we will see in a number of the essays included here, specifically those concerned with Raad’s Scratching on Things I Could Disavow: A History of Art in the Arab World, (2007–ongoing), the strategic withdrawal of the archive and its tentative reappearance alludes to the precarity that undermines archives of modern and contemporary art in the region, some of which have been destroyed without trace. These gaps in art historical knowledge not only complicate aspects of art history but, crucially, also produce spaces for alternative ones to materialize. The deferral of archival knowledge and access to it suggests a temporal disjunction, a caesura or aporia in a body of knowledge that suggests both historical forms of dissonance — in the form of a civil war, for example — and

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Joana Hadjthomas and Khalil Joreige. Latent Images  –  01, from the project Wonder Beirut, the Story of a Pyromaniac Photographer, 1997–2006. Drawer of films (extracts). Films from 11/04/98–4/11/98 (# 654-808). Photos indexed but not developed. Courtesy of the artists, Galerie In Situ Fabienne Leclerc (Paris), The Third Line (Dubai) and CRG (New York) © Joana Hadjthomas and Khalil Joreige.

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Joana Hadjithomas and Khalil Joreige. Postcards of War, from the project Wonder Beirut, the Story of a Pyromaniac Photographer, 1997–2006. 18 original postcards, each 4.13 x 5.75 in. Courtesy of the artists, Galerie In Situ Fabienne Leclerc (Paris), The Third Line (Dubai) and CRG (New York) © Joana Hadjthomas and Khalil Joreige.

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cognitive dissonance: a sense that the archive (and the artists who work with it) enter into a pact of sorts that presents the archive as both a limitless and ordered field of research and, contiguously, an epistemically unstable source that is liable to imminent collapse if not total disappearance. In 2012, as part of Documenta 13, Akram Zaatari, with the help of a team of workers, dug a square hole in the grounds of a public park in Kassel and placed 16 wooden boxes — each containing painted photographic objects that were inspired by photographic film formats — in a steel mainframe structure. This was then covered with liquid concrete, leaving only an inconspicuous huddle of steel rods visible above ground as a marker for what lay beneath. The work in question, Time Capsule (2012), is an example of an artist archiving works that may never conceivably see the light of day again. In this instance of entombment, Zaatari’s act recalls another by the then Director of National Museum of Beirut, Emir Maurice Chehab and his wife Olga who, at the height of the Lebanese Civil War (1975–90), removed artefacts from the museum and encased others too heavy to move in wooden shuttering and concrete. To dissuade looters, antiquities were also buried in the museum’s basement behind a series of steel reinforced concrete walls.14 Almost the entire catalogue of the museum, including its card indexes and photographic archives, were destroyed during the civil war but the damage would have been far greater had it not been for Chebab’s prescience in protecting it.15 The conundrum, of course, was that the protection of the collection also ensured its withdrawal from public viewing and Zaatari’s burying of his own work in Time Capsule not only references Chebab’s fortuitous act of foresight, but also emphasizes the extent to which the photographic archive can become, as a result of trauma or the exigencies placed upon it in the present, withdrawn and thereafter deferred. In many ways, Time Capsule reverses the archival impulse that has long been a feature of Zaatari’s work, including In This House (2005), Hashem el-Madani: Studio Practices (2006–ongoing), On Photography, People and Modern Times (2010) and the artist’s long association with the Arab Image Foundation (AIF). As a one-time member and co-founder of the AIF, Zaatari is concerned with how the archival impulse — the will to collate, order and produce value — decontextualizes images by removing them from their original social and political economy. Speaking of On Photography, People and Modern Times (2010), Zaatari has observed that the work was supposed to ‘juxtapose two lives and two worlds that photographs in the collection of the Arab Image Foundation experienced: once in the hands of their original owners and once in the custody of the AIF […] In this work I raise for the first time some kind of critique on the narrow understanding of photograph preservation, which considers photographs as objects isolated from social and emotional ties’.16 There is a profound insight here into what an archive does in both a material and immaterial sense: in the moment of decontextualizing an image, a photograph for example, the archive not only takes it out of its social and Contingency, Dissonance and Performativity

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Walid Raad, Appendix XVIII: Plates, 2012 from the project Scratching on Things I Could Disavow. Archival inkjet prints on archival paper, 54 plates, framed. 54.3 x 42 cm, each. Exhibition view, Sfeir-Semler Gallery, Beirut. Courtesy of the artist and Sfeir-Semler Gallery, Beirut/Hamburg.

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Walid Raad, Index XXVI, Artists, Saadi Wall 004, 2011 from the project Scratching on Things I Could Disavow. Detail. Courtesy of the artist and Sfeir-Semler Gallery, Beirut/Hamburg.

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emotional environment, it simultaneously effects a system of radical deracination whereby a social, historical and political element is displaced from its immediate conditions of production and circulation. The photograph thereafter becomes an object of speculation, be it financial, aesthetic or otherwise, and this foundational displacement becomes a corroborative gesture that substantiates the exclusive authority of the archive. In disallowing the presence of experience (in considering, say, photographs in isolation from their social and emotional ties), the archive not only demarcates its records but also what is missing from those records: the emotional, day-to-day, social and experience-based interactions that produced the very economy out of which the image first emerged. It is with this in mind that Zaatari has proposed, perhaps fancifully but no less seriously, that the archive of the AIF be returned to the people with whom it first resided and thereafter back into the social orders from whence it came. The command of an archive, its purview and influence, is based upon the ideal of prerogative — the right exercised by an individual or group who hold office — and aggregation; the accrual, that is, of information within an authoritative and formally reproductive edifice.17 The institutional, governmental, social, cultural and administrative function of the archive, its development as a body of information into an unquestioned system of applied narratives and beliefs, should not, however, overshadow the personal, dissonant, contingent and performative aspect of the archive as a contested site of enunciation. Throughout Dissonant Archives: Contemporary Visual Culture and Contested Narratives in the Middle East, these elements not only recur in contemporary art practices, they also reveal the archive as a structure that is far from epistemically stable, historically fixed or hermeneutically coherent. As we will see in the essays outlined below, this is a contingent, fortuitous and co-dependent moment that promotes conjectural possibility, potentiality and uncertainty and, in so doing, perhaps foretells of a radical emergency in the very ideal of the archive as a system of knowledge production in late modernity.

Archival Dissonance and the Future of the Archive The precariousness of the archive as a material form, prevalent throughout Zineb Sedira’s Image Keepers, is the focus of Mariam Ghani’s essay, ‘What We Left Unfinished: The Artist and the Archive’. Archives are more than the sum of their materials, Ghani argues, and the apparatus of the archive — in the context of recent historical events in Afghanistan — needs to be understood in perfomative terms, one that includes administrators, historians, redactors, janitors-cum-archivists and readers, all of whom, in different ways, ‘perform’ the archive for its public. Lamenting how it can be also destroyed (or become withdrawn) through a performative act such as burning, Ghani details the Contingency, Dissonance and Performativity

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Akram Zaatari, Time Capsule, Karlsaue Park, Kassel, 2012. dOCUMENTA 13. Courtesy of the artist and Thomas Dane Gallery.

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destruction of the Afghan Films archive in 1996. In a comment that chimes with regional concerns, she explains that it is neither easy nor is it straightforward to work with archives in a country like Afghanistan, ‘where books, films and monuments have all been subject to burning; stupas are looted and statues shattered; and sites sacred for one reason or another are eroded by both natural and human disasters’. If the material reality of the archive is subject to change, then its immaterial narratives are subject to the same forces. To this observation, we may want to enquire further into the role that state and institutional archives can play in not only maintaining a shared or collective history through archiving, but in disrupting the narrative of archived histories. In Nick Denes’ ‘Measures of Stillness and Movement: The Poster in Cinema of the Palestinian Revolution’, film posters are examined in relation to their state-building, revolutionary function. The film poster, as an archived artefact, Denes suggests, signalled ideological and institutional allegiances across a broad spectrum of competing and contesting factions within Palestine and beyond. When subjected to a mode of ‘archival stilling’, the ‘moving’ poster image was subsequently reproduced as a static resource from which ‘new political-aesthetic movements might be derived’. Referring to the work of Raoul-Jean Moulin, Denes further remarks on the forward-looking aspect of the archive, namely, that ‘[t]he unmoving poster-as-record […] “becomes a kind of oracle to be consulted”, not least by artists concerned with “forging weapons for the future”’.18 The issue of the archive as a historical, future-oriented reality needs, of course, to be considered in relation to other more immediate forms of archived information. In Tom Holert’s essay, ‘Coming to Terms: Contemporary Art, Civil Society and Knowledge Politics in the Middle East’, a useful distinction is offered between art practices that address concerns around the archival accessibility, suppression, exploitation, racialization, gendering and monetization of knowledge, and thereafter engage in ‘epistemic’ or ‘knowledge politics’, and those who engage with a more general notion of ‘cultural knowledge’ and its circulation. Detailing, in particular, Adelita Husni-Bey’s multi-part installation, (On) Difficult Terms (2013), where the artist — working with journalists at Mada Masr in Cairo — created a ‘mind-map’, Holert outlines how this project highlighted the ideological vagueness and impracticability of key terms such as ‘revolution’, ‘coup’, and ‘Arab spring’ as they were being deployed by western media to report on the ‘Egypt situation’. Arguing that journalism, as pursued by Mada Masr and certain contemporary artists, participates in a radically political economy of knowledge, Holert proposes that epistemological ambiguity can also play a part in archival knowledge production and, conversely, its fallibility as a model of applied knowledge. The idea that an archival method could speak to the historical condition of culture in a specific milieu is an attendant if not pivotal concern for a

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significant number, if not all, of the artists’ projects included in this volume. In thinking about the artist as a de facto archivist, Lucien Samaha presents his own particular approach to archiving and indexing through the ordering of his vast photography collection that has become, over time, a systematic biographical register. Recalling the stirrings of his career as a photographer in an interview with Walid Raad, also included here in an abridged version, Samaha recounts how he indexes his personal archive by inviting friends to go over past images and provide keywords and the names of those they once knew.19 The archive is presented here as a performative, idiosyncratic and socially interactive entity; it is open-ended and subject to uncertainty and alternative modes of recall and application. There is, in Ruanne Abou-Rahme and Basel Abbas’ Incidental Insurgents (2012–13), a similarly unique contemporary archive mapped out across apparently diverse figures. This multilayered, narrative-based work references the writings of Roberto Bolaño — author of The Savage Detectives, 1998, and a quixotic, itinerant author in his own right — and traces an unlikely allegiance between the Russian revolutionary and author Victor Serge, his contemporary anarchist-bandits in 1910s Paris and a bandit gang involved in a rebellion against the British in 1930s Palestine. Into this already combustive mix, the artists emerge as protagonists in a narrative that is fraught with wrong-turns and dangerous possibility. This singular archive produces a form of insurgent knowledge that articulates the incompleteness of a shared language across oppositional movements. Fragmentation and an unreconciled, perhaps ultimately irreconcilable, impulse for political allegiances competes with a technique that flirts with disaffection and more radical forms of action. For Héla Ammar, this sense of insurgency is revealed in Tarz (2014), where the current Tunisian political situation is explored through archival objects and photographs. Using embroidery — tarz is the Arabic word for the practice — in conjunction with official archives, Ammar explores historical memory and forms of popular resistance with direct and personalized reference to their political ramifications in post-revolutionary Tunisia. Elsewhere, Naeem Mohaiemen’s Asfan’s Long Day (The Young Man Was, Part 2) (2014) presents the archive as an integral element in an exposition on national borders, revolutionary wars and insurgent belonging in post-partition South Asia. Exploring a strain of radical politics from the 1970s, this essay film, which follows on from Mohaiemen’s United Red Army (The Young Man Was, Part 1) (2011), details the dissolution of the so-called Left and draws connections between German radicalism and Bangladeshi activist politics through extensive archival footage. Independence and insurgency are also recurring elements in Maryam Jafri’s research into the archives of erstwhile colonies where, in Independence Day 1936–1967 (2009–ongoing), she gathered over 67 archival photographs of the independence day celebrations in countries including, but not Contingency, Dissonance and Performativity

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Akram Zaatari, Damaged Negatives: Scratched Portrait of Mrs. Baqari, 2012. Inkjet print, framed. Made from 35 mm scratched negative from the Hashem el Madani archive. Courtesy of the artist.

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Akram Zaatari, In This House, 2005. Courtesy of the artist.

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limited to, Indonesia, India, Ghana, Senegal, Syria, Malaysia, Kenya, Tanzania, Mozambique, Algeria, Jordan, Kuwait, Benin, Burkina Faso, Tunisia and the Philippines. The immediacy of revolution and its aftermath are further revealed in Adelita Husni-Bey’s Residents on Tripoli Street Archive War (2014), where she archived the landscape of Misrata, the third largest city in Libya and the site of one of the longest and bloodiest sieges during the 2011 civil war. This archiving of a specific topographical place is likewise subjected to a more personalized form of remembrance in Amina Menia’s The Golden Age (2011– ongoing), where she tellingly reveals an archival nostalgia for Orientalistinspired images of Algeria in the urban frescoes that dot the city of Algiers. This prevalent tradition of artists interrogatively engaging with the archive as an institution, and the ideological contexts they give rise to, is key to Guy Mannes-Abbott’s reflections on the work of Emily Jacir. Drawing on Hal Foster’s 2004 essay, ‘An Archival Impulse’, Mannes-Abbott’s explores the way in which Jacir’s work positions the archive as a way of working from fiction (the production of an ideological reading of events) to fact (the actuality of an event and its immanent incontrovertibility as a historical reality).20 In the case of Jacir’s Material for a Film (2006–ongoing), a project that examines the archived facts and fictions around the contested life of the Palestinian intellectual Wael Zuaiter, there is a concerted effort to recover fragments of his life story that obviates a version of his life that portrays him as a ‘terrorist’ involved in the deaths of Israeli athletes at the 1972 Munich Olympics. We return here to the conceptualization of the archive as an extra-juridical space, a realm of contested and contestable knowledge production and historical consciousness. In Rona Sela’s ‘Rethinking National Archives in Colonial Countries and Zones of Conflict’, she considers the archive as an ideological tool for constructing national, historical and political narratives that shape a country’s modern-day perception and presentation of itself. Observing Israel’s National Photography Archives, Sela explores how the archive constructs, conserves and contextualizes photographs to serve Zionist ideals and how, as a result, information on Palestinians can be extracted from the archive to write an alternative history of a subjugated people for political purposes. Continuing this sense of the archive as a dissonant, if not incommensurate space for the production of knowledge, Ariella Azoulay’s contribution, ‘Archive’, reconsiders Derrida’s propositional notion of ‘archive fever’ and contrasts it with what she calls the ‘abstract’ and the ‘material’ archive. Analysing Emily Jacir’s ex libris (2010–12) and her own archive, Constituent Violence 1947–1950, Azoulay reconsiders the potential inherent in ‘archive fever’ and how it offers an opportunity to articulate the archive as a formal mode of political engagement for our time. A number of the essays collected in Dissonant Archives remind us of a key point, albeit one consigned to a footnote, in Derrida’s Archive Fever where he proposed that there is no political power without control of the archive. ‘Effective democratization,’ he argued, ‘can always be measured by Contingency, Dissonance and Performativity

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this essential criterion: the participation in and access to the archive, its constitution, and its interpretation.’21 In this context, Derrida focuses on a singular desire inherent within the archive: the provision of a foundational authority for state power and sovereign command. This sovereign, state-controlled sense of the archive has become an emblematic factor in delegitimizing forms of subjectivity and the sense that the figure of the ‘occupied’, or the migrant, has become the exemplary rather than the exceptional subject of our times.22 Archival power, in the context of collating information, producing knowledge and effecting hermeneutic authority over the knowledge produced, validates an authoritarian power that is at once visible — it gives rise to laws that affect individuals and communities — and invisible insofar as it often remains hidden from public view and only accessible through forms of mediation and intermediaries. This discretionary and discriminatory logic of archiving, as applied to the voice of the migrant, is explored in Lawrence Abu Hamdan’s Aural Contract Audio Archive (2010–ongoing). In this work, individual components of the artist’s extensive archive are pooled, extracted and produced as audio essays, texts and investigations into the political function of archival knowledge in producing exclusionary modes of existence within sovereign-defined notions of statehood and citizenship.23 The archive as an architectonics of knowledge, an edifice within which enunciative possibilities are produced, contested and rendered provisional, is further examined in Chad Elias’ analysis of Walid Raad’s multi-volume History of Contemporary and Modern Art in the Arab World (2007–ongoing). Setting this work within the conditions of a broader discussion about the future of arts pedagogy and cultural infrastructure in the region, Elias argues that Raad’s approach to historical Islamic art could demonstrate a way for cultural and artistic institutions in the region to collect, archive and preserve work for future generations. In Lucie Ryzova’s essay, ‘I Have The Picture: The Making of Photographic Heritage in Contemporary Egypt’, this sense of nascence and preservation is considered in relation to Egypt’s photographic archival history. Detailing the manner in which Egypt has constructed its own image of its photographic heritage through vintage photographs, and the value assigned to them by individual collectors, Ryzova suggests that this formal production of an archived heritage is nevertheless complicated by the perception that the post-1952 Egyptian state failed to preserve the country’s cultural artefacts — a failure that is all too evident in the decay of public archives and museums. In Sussan Babaie’s essay, ‘The Global in the Local: Implicating Iran in Art and History’, the impact of developments within the western conception of the archive and how it impacted on histories of art is focused on Iranian cultural production. Locating her argument in an understanding of the global that is co-dependent on positioning the local, alongside a concept of the present as a space that has an awareness of both past and the future, Babaie pursues this logic through

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a close examination of work by, amongst others, Jananne Al-Ani, Walid Raad and Slavs and Tatars. Institutions as archives, and museums as repositories of knowledge, are subjected to forms of institutional critique that have subsequently become archives in their own right. Burak Arıkan’s On Networks of Dispossession (2013) is a collective data-compiling and mapping project about urban transformation in Turkey that closely examines the relationships that exist among corporations, capital and power in the country. Similarly, in On Higher Education Industrial Complex (2013), the networks in higher education (specifically private universities) in Turkey are mapped so that links between boards of trustees, corporations and other private institutions are made clearer. This effort to hold corporations and institutions to account is likewise a significant feature of Gulf Labor’s 52 Weeks (2013–14), which reproduces a digital archive of artists’ responses to the subject of coercive recruitment and the deplorable living and working conditions of migrant labourers in Abu Dhabi’s Saadiyat Island (Island of Happiness). The future of the archive as a material and digital entity is of course crucial to any overall discussion about its sustainability and long-term function.24 Laura Cugusi’s essay on the recent projects of the Arab Digital Expression Foundation (ADEF) explores the digital archive in the aftermath of the Egyptian revolution and how that context affected the type of work that the ADEF was able to undertake. Similarly, in Laila Shereen Sakr’s (VJ Um Amel) extended contribution, the issue of digital archiving is related to how Arabic social media has become a source for a new, transformative archive that can collate information on cultures in conflict and those undergoing radical forms of change. Focusing specifically on R-Shief, Inc., a laboratory for harvesting Arabic-language tweets, Shereen Sakr presents it as a case study into how an archived digital format allows independent and real-time stories to form part of a counter-archive to those of state institutions. Throughout Pad.ma’s provocative take on the future of the archive, detailed here in 10 Thesis on the Archive, there is a similar proposal that we stop ‘waiting’ for the state or institutionalized archive and produce our own. ‘To not wait for the archive,’ the authors suggest, ‘is often a practical response to the absence of archives or organized collections in many parts of the world. It also suggests that to wait for the state archive, or to otherwise wait to be archived, may not be a healthy option.’ For Pad.ma, the archive, in its personalized, performative and digitized state, has a greater efficiency to it, an economy of usage that suggests a viral, or indeed parasitic, context for the future of the archive and its operations. Future archives, in the framework of both digital and material evidence, would appear to be undergoing dismaying levels of redaction.25 Working with Other Document #131, a heavily redacted CIA report on the capture and waterboarding of Abu Zubaydah (a Saudi man detained in Faisalabad, Pakistan, on 28 March 2002), Joshua Craze explores the physicality of redaction in Contingency, Dissonance and Performativity

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Vahap Avşar, İpdal (C64) / Cancel (C64), 2014. C-print 154 x 120 cm. Courtesy of the Estate of the Artist and Rampa Istanbul.

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Dissonant Archives: Contemporary Visual Culture and Contested Narratives in the Middle East

archived texts in his essay, ‘Excerpts from a Grammar of Redaction’. Examining the way in which the redaction, because of the way it is carried out, renders a certain visibility to redacted information, Craze’s contribution points to an imminent concern: what will the archived history of the present look like in censored form? Again, issues around legality and its suspension come to the fore here and re-emerge forcibly in Timothy P.A Cooper’s ‘The Black Market Archive’ where he explores film piracy in Pakistan, arguing that whilst the black market in films is largely proscribed by the authorities it also, somewhat counter-intuitively, could form the basis of an official, national film archive. The archive as a haunted, disturbed space that re-emerges in the present and regenerates historical lineages is a feature of Ania Dabrowska’s project, Drift / Resolution (from A Lebanese Archive) (2013–14). A series of photographic grids, triptychs, diptychs and collages, all sourced from the archival collection of Diab Alkarssifi, Drift / Resolution presents personal work alongside found family albums and studio prints collected from across the Middle East. Stretching back to the late 1890s, and covering the Lebanese Civil War and the post-conflict years (and continuing up to 1993 when Alkarssifi emigrated to the UK), the photographs presented here are stripped of dates and captions and repositioned in seemingly random contexts by Dabrowska. This chance discovery of an archive, and its implications, is mirrored in Mariam Motamedi Fraser’s discussion of ‘Nurafkan’, named after an unpublished manuscript of an epic story attributed to Ali Mirdrakvandi, and purportedly written in 1940s Iran. Motamedi Fraser’s role as a link to the physical archive for Gholamreza Nematpour, a documentary filmmaker interested in ‘Nurafkan’, leads her to a discussion of the ways in which archives can be transformed and understood based on their accessibility and the narratives and superstitions surrounding their preservation. Recalling Hadjithomas and Joreige’s Wonder Beirut, Vahap Avşar’s series of images, Ipdal (2010), relates the events surrounding his return to Istanbul in 2010, after 15 years abroad, and his search for the postcards of the city that he had used as source material for his paintings when he lived there. Disappointed to discover that the company who produced these postcards had long gone out of business, Avşar embarked on a search that finally led him to the source archive, which he procured, and a series of images marked ipdal, which is Turkish for ‘cancelled’. These photographs depicted various pastoral landscapes and Turkish soldiers in decorous poses with women. The Turkish military, however, had declared that such representations lacked the seriousness with which they wanted to portray their soldiers and the photographs never made it to postcard stage. Also included here are another series of images from the original archive, Chief Commander (2011), which depict seven large-scale photographs of popular postcards showing famous monumental statues of Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, the first President of Turkey. As Avşar notes, these sculptures were produced by two European sculptors in the Contingency, Dissonance and Performativity

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1920s — Heinrich Krippel and Pietro Canonica — and, in their Modernist style, could be seen to represent a repressed European history of art and humanities that had long fascinated Atatürk. The archive, as Derrida commented in Archive Fever, is not only a radically unstable form of inscription, it is also haunted by the moment of writing and the traces of its own ontological coming into being. In its manner of writing and recording, to put it perhaps more bluntly, it presents us with the very means of its own indelible vulnerability to reinterpretation, if not its fallibility as a document. In Shaheen Merali’s ‘The Spectre (of Knowledge): The Recordings of the Cosmopolitan’, he compares the archive to a ‘roaming spirit — a visible but disembodied entity’. In this unstable, haunted state the archive’s susceptibility to reinscription becomes all the more evident. It is this phantasmal instant that presents the artist with the opportunity to renegotiate and rewrite, visually or otherwise, the archive as a reality in waiting. But, in this schema, the artist also becomes an unreliable archivist — a nodal point for distilling the essence and ambivalence of the archive into, on one hand, a form of radical uncertainty and, on the other, a call to action. Writing on his acclaimed film, The Stuart Hall Project (2013; UK: Smoking Dogs Films), which traces the seminal influence of a figure to whom many, this writer included, are indebted for their work on the area of cultural studies, John Akomfrah has observed the importance of the archive in recounting forms of social memory associated with (and often produced by) thinkers such as Stuart Hall. For Akomfrah, the ‘question of “honouring” begins there; with memory, with uncovering the stems of memory, the ghosts of history, sifting through the debris and detritus of past events for traces of the phantoms’.Again, fittingly given Hall’s seminal influence, it is an artist’s intervention into the archive that retrieves and makes sense of the past for future generations. The video installation, Chronoscope, 1951, 11pm (2009–11), by Alessandro Balteo Yazbeck, made in collaboration with Media Farzin, also draws on a not-too-distant archival source, namely, the American television interview series called Longines Chronoscope. Aired on the CBS network from 1951–55, the format for this programme, in which two journalists interviewed a guest, presents a document of US television aesthetics in the making. As the artists recall, politicians, diplomats and corporate executives were invited throughout this series to discuss a wide range of issues that spanned world trade issues, Communist insurgency threats, mutual defence treaties and, frequently during the year 1951, US access to petroleum resources in the Middle East. The archive is changing, in terms of its function and form, and its ghosts return to trouble any sense of ease or resolution in this most dissonant, if not dissident, of times. This anxiety is captured all the more eloquently in Meriç Algün Ringborg’s project, The Library of Unborrowed Books (2012– ongoing), which bases itself on the concept of the library-cum-archive as a

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Dissonant Archives: Contemporary Visual Culture and Contested Narratives in the Middle East

singular institution that produces language and knowledge. Within this space, there are seminal works that have been decided upon and they circulate with an authority and inherent degree of authenticity. This is the image of the library as a canonical archive. However, The Library of Unborrowed Books, as the name suggests, is made up of the books that are left behind, unborrowed, unread and neglected. The framework in this instance, as the artist notes, hints at what has been disregarded, knowledge essentially unconsumed, and puts on display what has eluded us in the construction of future archives. I began this essay with discussions of work by a number of artists who have been the subject of essays and interviews in Ibraaz, the online research publication that is behind the production of this current volume and the ongoing series Visual Culture in the Middle East. It may seem solipsistic to do so, but the intention was relatively straightforward. For one, Ibraaz has become a major resource for researchers and students with an interest in visual culture across the disparate regions of the Middle East, and our essays are usually lengthy and our interviews invariably in-depth. We have become, in short, an archive for anyone with an interest in, first, visual culture and, second, the politics of cultural production within, beyond and about the region. The fact that we have become an archive brings with it a significant number of responsibilities, not least the demand to make information as accessible as possible. It also brings with it a responsibility to enquire into what role art criticism can play in producing a productive (rather than merely reproductive) system for analysing, critiquing and archiving cultural production across the region. It is with these points in mind that we need to understand how a ‘knowledge economy’ has emerged as an essential component in any critical and historical consideration of contemporary art and the subsequent production of archived information about culture. The virtual archive has, moreover, enabled forms of manipulation that have offered a salutary reminder of the power systems that knowledge can harness. Under these conditions, the archive has offered artists and cultural practitioners a considerable resource for exploring and interrogating precisely how knowledge is both utilized and instrumentalized, which gives rise to a further question: Can contemporary art practices and art criticism produce forms of archived knowledge to counter the instrumentalized, often monetized and politicized forms of knowledge that drive the neo-liberal will towards global hegemony? And, if so, to what use can that suppositional knowledge be put? These, and other questions, recur throughout Dissonant Archives and reveal a singular concern: if we are to fully understand the function of an archive, we must consider the means and conditions of production that enable knowledge to come into being and be archived in the first place. As a discursive system of knowledge production, archives enable statements and, crucially, disallow the authority of other statements. This is a concern for artists and is evident in the logic of the archive as a system of enunciability — an Contingency, Dissonance and Performativity

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apparatus of knowledge and power — that remains crucial to understanding, if not building upon, the seminal work that Michel Foucault produced on archives. Understood as structures for not only enabling the emergence and stratification of knowledge systems, but also the contiguous categorization of subjects, the archive, for Foucault, is above all else productive, not reproductive — a singular insight that brings together many of the artists and contributors included here.26 The underlying point in Foucault’s The Archaeology of Knowledge, 1969, is not, strictly speaking, concerned with the reproduction of knowledge and subjects; it is about the production of future knowledge and nascent forms of propositional subjectivity. As a system of discursive production, we should therefore consider the enunciative, productive possibilities that the archive lays down and how it ‘is first the law of what can be said, the system that governs the appearance of statements as unique events’.27 In this reading, as we will see throughout Dissonant Archives, the archive is not only contingent, existing within the vagaries of time and events (and reacting to them), it is formative and performative, enunciative and secretive, future-oriented and chronic and, ultimately, an anxious, dissonant structure. Archives, finally, speak to and attempt to prescribe how future generations will understand the constraints of the present and the far from remote petitions of the past. This inherent performativity, the demand that the archive repeatedly performs the substantiative truth of its being, is precisely what attracts artists to the formal, material structure of archives and their often informal, immaterial processes. The over-arching sense of the archive that emerges throughout what follows, therefore, and albeit in relation to distinct and disparate modes of production, is the extent to which artists produce their own deliberative and highly speculative vision of the future. Again, the question of art’s relationship to the archive might seem expansive, however such enquiries do reveal a horizon of future possibility upon which art as a practice, perhaps uniquely, seems to not only increasingly orient itself but also seems, as we will now see, amply equipped to engage with.

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1. Jacques Derrida, Archive fever: A Freudian Impression, trans. Eric Prenowitz (University of Chicago Press: Chicago, 1996), 36. (Emphasis in original). 2. There have been a number of shows to date that have focused on the relationship of art practices to archiving, one of the more significant being Okwui Enwezor’s ‘Archive Fever: Uses of the Document in Contemporary Art’ (International Center of Photography, New York, 2008). A list of other events, which is by no means exhaustive, would include recent conferences such as ‘Speak, Memory: On archives and other strategies of (re) activation of cultural memory’ (Townhouse Gallery, Cairo, 2010); ‘Out of the Archive: Artists, Images and History’ (Tate Modern, London, 2011); ‘Archive State’ (Museum of Contemporary Photography, Columbia, 2014); and ‘Radical Archives’ (NYU, New York, 2014). The second edition of the ‘Qalandiya International Biennial’ (Qi) (Jerusalem, 2014) was organized around the theme of ‘Archives, Lived and Shared”; and, in 2015, ‘Past Disquiet: Narratives and Ghosts from the International Art Exhibition for Palestine, 1978’ (Museum of Contemporary Art, Barcelona, 2015) presented an archival and documentary exhibition that explored the history of The International Art Exhibition for Palestine (Beirut, 1978). Recent publications on this subject include: Elisabetta Galasso and Marco Scotini, eds, Politiche della Memoria: Documentario e Archivo, (Roma: DeriveApprodi, 2014); Sonja Mejcher-Atassi and John Pedro Schwartz, eds, Archives, Museums and Collecting Practices in the Modern Arab World (Farnham: Ashgate Publishing, 2012); Ann Laura Stoler, Along the Archival Grain: Epistemic Anxieties and Colonial Common Sense (New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 2009); Simone Osthoff, Performing the Archive: The Transformation of the Archive in Contemporary Art from Repository of Documents to Art Medium (New York: Atropos Press, 2009); Sven Spieker, The Big Archive, (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2008); Charles Merewether, ed., The Archive (London and Cambridge, MA: Whitechapel Gallery and MIT Press, 2006); and, Jane Connarty, Josephine Lanyon, eds, Ghosting: The Role of the Archive within Contemporary Artists’ Film and Video (Bristol: Picture This Moving Image, 2006). More recently, the Journal of Visual Culture dedicated an issue to the archive, see ‘The Archives Issue’, eds Juliette Kristensen and Marquard Smith, Journal of Visual Culture (Vol. 12, no. 3, December 2013). 3. The subject of the nomenclature surrounding definitions of the so-called ‘Middle East’ continues to productively disrupt any cursory use of the term in relation to cultural production. I have examined these issues in-depth elsewhere, see ‘The Production of Cultural Knowledge in the Middle East Today’ in Art & Patronage in the Middle East, eds Hossein Amirsadeghi and Maryam Homayoun Eisler (London: Thames & Hudson, 2010), 10–15; and ‘The Burden of Representation: Contemporary Visual Arts in the Middle East’ in Representing Islam: Comparative Perspectives (Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars, 2011), 168–97. 4. I would direct readers here to Benji Boyadgian’s project The Temporary Archive (2014–ongoing), in which the artist has archived, through the use of watercolours executed in situ, a large swathe of land along the Wadi el-Shami valley in Jerusalem. In a premonition of the valley’s destruction by encroaching Israeli settlements,

Contingency, Dissonance and Performativity

Boyadgian has meticulously noted each ruin of the field houses, dating from the Ottoman period, that dot the area and the olive groves that grow there. For the artist, this archive of paintings presents a form of ‘preemptive archeology’ that recreates a historical ecumene, the latter a term used by geographers to mean inhabited land. 5. Born in Blida, a city 45 kilometres south-west of Algiers, in 1922, Mohamed Kouaci was a member of the National Liberation Front (FLN) during Algeria’s war of independence (1954–62) and a photographer for El Moudjahid, the official newspaper of the FLN. Following the war of independence, he continued to serve the newly independent Algerian government and his archive includes seminal images of figures from that period who visited Algeria (including Fidel Castro, Patrice Lumumba, King Hassan II, Gamal Abdel Nasser, Che Guevara and Frantz Fanon), alongside portraits of the Tunisian president at the time, Habib Bourguiba, and Ahmed Ben Bella and Houari Boumediene (the first and second presidents of post-independence Algeria, respectively). 6. Since the making and showing of the film, Sedira has noted that several academics and journalists (who discovered Kouaci’s photographic archive via her film) have contacted Safia Kouaci to write about or research the archive, but there has been no movement to preserve it. Email message to author (6 January 2015). 7. The AIF was set up in Beirut in 1997 to preserve, study and archive photography from the Arab world. Apart from the AIF, Al-Ani specifically worked with the photographic archives of the Air and Space Museum in Washington, DC, where she discovered unpublished aerial reconnaissance photographs of the Western Front taken by a unit established by the renowned photographer and curator Edward Steichen during World War II; and the archives of the Freer and Sackler Galleries, where she found the remarkable landscape photographs of the German archaeologist Ernst Herzfeld. For a fuller account of the background to this work, see Nat Muller, ‘Technologies of History: Jananne Al-Ani in conversation with Nat Muller’, Ibraaz (26 June, 2014) http://www.ibraaz.org/interviews/137/ (accessed 24 December 2014). 8. Ibid. 9. Ibid. 10. The question of forensics, in the context of aesthetics, is a vital element in the recently published volume Forensis: The Architecture of Public Truth, ed. by Forensic Architecture (Berlin: Sternberg Press, 2014). Observing that the term forensis is Latin for ‘pertaining to the forum’, and was therefore a multidimensional space for law, politics and economy, the ambition of this volume is to resituate and expand the idea of contemporary forensics so as to reassert its role in articulating public truths and claims for justice. 11. For a further discussion of latency in the archive, see Uriel Orlow, ‘Latent Archives, Roving Lens’ in Ghosting: The Role of the Archive within Contemporary Artists’ Film and Video, eds Jane Connarty and Josephine Lanyon (Bristol: Picture This Moving Image, 2006), 34–47. 12. For a fuller discussion of the work in relation to archives in Lebanon, see Joana Hadjithomas and Khalil

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Joreige, ‘Wonder Beirut’ in Out of Beirut, ed. Suzanne Cotter (Oxford: Modern Art Oxford, 2006), 76–80. 13. Jalal Toufic’s thesis in The Withdrawal of Tradition Past a Surpassing Disaster (2009) provides a pertinent point of departure for discussing this notion of radical withdrawal in a non-material sense. In aspects of Walid Raad’s work, for example, there is the suggestion, garnered from Toufic, that certain wars and conflicts not only affect a culture on a material level (the destruction of museums, artworks, books and so on) but also on an immaterial level whereby an artwork and the ideas behind it become unavailable to vision and thereafter ‘withdrawn’ — that is, remote and not readily understood or legible in the present or indeed future. The role of the artist thereafter is to either recuperate or point to the modes and mechanisms of withdrawal at work within these archives and artefacts. 14. During Lebanon’s civil war, the National Museum of Beirut had the unfortunate luck to be situated along the so-called ‘green line’ that separated east from west Beirut, and therefore the various warring factions from one another. Its edifice and interior were severely damaged by the fighting along what came to be known alternatively as ‘museum alley’ and ‘the route of death’. The museum is the focus of Lamia Joreige’s UnderWriting Beirut — Mathaf (2013–ongoing). For a fuller account of this work and its relationship to archives, see Anthony Downey, ‘Re-Enacting Rupture: Lamia Joreige in conversation with Anthony Downey’, Ibraaz (30 April 2014) http://www.ibraaz.org/interviews/124/ (accessed 12 December 2014). 15. The first plans to restore the museum were mooted in 1992, but the walls protecting the basement were not formally opened until the museum’s doors and windows were installed. Restoration on the museum started in 1995 and it was officially inaugurated on 25 November 1997. 16. Anthony Downey, ‘Photography as Apparatus: Akram Zaatari in conversation with Anthony Downey’, Ibraaz (28 January 2014) http://www.ibraaz.org/interviews/113/ (accessed 14 December 2014). 17. This is effectively Derrida’s reading of the archive as an edifice and edict, as outlined in the opening pages of Archive Fever where he begins with archiving the term ‘archive’ before observing its origins in arkhē: the origin or beginning, or first principle. Remarking on how the Greek term arkheion refers to a house or domicile where superior magistrates, archons, resided and issued forth commands, the principal term that emerges in these pages is the prefix arche which alludes to both the archive and architecture. In archiving the emergence of the archive, Derrida highlights its commencement (how it is representative of a beginning or starting point in an ontological sense) and how, in a nomological, law-giving sense, the contours of the archive contiguously produce the command of law. Domicile and dominion, if not domination, become one in the edifice of the archive. 18. See Raoul-Jean Moulin, ‘Posters for the Struggling Nations’ in The Baghdad International Poster Exhibition ’79, eds Raoul-Jean Moulin and Dia Al-Azzawi (London: Malvern Press Ltd, 1979), catalogue preface.

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19. For the full extended interview with Walid Raad published in two parts see: Walid Raad, ‘Chapters, Records, Keywords: Lucien Samaha in conversation with Walid Raad, Part I’, Ibraaz (6 November 2013) http://www. ibraaz.org/interviews/102/ (accessed 7 February 2015) and ‘Influence, Passion, Process: Lucien Samaha in conversation with Walid Raad, Part II’, Ibraaz (6 November 2013) http://www.ibraaz.org/interviews/103/ (accessed 7 February 2015), respectively. 20. Hal Foster, ‘An Archival Impulse’, October, no. 110, (Fall 2004): 3–22. 21. Jacques Derrida, op cit., 4, note 1. 22. I have written at length on this subject elsewhere. See Anthony Downey, ‘Exemplary Subjects: Camps and the Politics of Representation’ in Giorgio Agamben: Legal, Political and Philosophical Perspectives, Tom Frost, ed. (Oxon: Routledge, 2013), 119–42. 23. This work is discussed at length in Anthony Downey ‘Word Stress: Lawrence Abu Hamdan in conversation with Anthony Downey,’ Ibraaz (2 May 2012) http://www. ibraaz.org/interviews/21/ (accessed 12 Janaury 2015). 24. The issue of archiving the internet has become all the more significant following, in no particular order, the revelations from Edward Snowden, the hyper-surveillance that defines large swathes of public and private life and the passing of recent laws allowing individuals the right to remove material from the World Wide Web. For a fuller account of the inherent problems involved in archiving the internet, see Jill Lepore’s informative essay, ‘The Cobweb: Can the Internet be Archived?’, New Yorker (26 January 2015): 34–41. 25. This point was made all the more pertinently in Mohamedou Ould Slahi’s recently published Guantánamo Diary (Edinburgh: Canongate, 2015). Imprisoned without charge at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, since 2002, Slahi’s book, whilst heavily redacted, is the first and only diary written by a still-imprisoned Guantánamo detainee. Although a federal judge ordered his release in 2010, he still remains incarcerated. 26. I am mindful here of not digressing into a discussion of modern-day subjectivities, but it is crucial to any broad sense of the archive as a historical construct to understand that the subject — defined as a locus of multiple affinities that reside in the various confluences of reason and unreason, experience and desire, delusion and aspiration — is a syntactical, discursive construct that is produced by normative and normalizing discourses that are, in turn, dependent on historical shifts in meaning and substance over time. To note as much is to observe Foucault’s over-arching insight: the subject is the product of the operation of political technologies — often located in the archive and archival impulse of modernity — on, through and within the social body. In short, disciplinary technologies, particularly the archive, produce subjects as both the effect and affect of productive forms of power and concomitant rituals of truth. 27. Michel Foucault (1969), The Archaeology of Knowledge, trans. A. M. Sheridan Smith (Pantheon Books: New York, 1972) 129. (Emphasis in original).

Dissonant Archives: Contemporary Visual Culture and Contested Narratives in the Middle East

‘What We Left Unfinished’ The Artist and the Archive Mariam Ghani

Perhaps, like the Library of Alexandria, any archive is founded on disaster (or its threat), pledged against a ruin that it cannot forestall. Hal Foster1

Dispatch one: The artist and the archive, June–September 2013 I It is not simple to work with an archive in a country like Afghanistan, where books, films and monuments are all subject to burning; stupas are looted and statues shattered; and sites sacred for one reason or another are eroded by both natural and human disasters. Understandably, Afghans are wary of anyone who proposes to ‘mine’ any cultural resource they still possess. If you want to work with an Afghan archive, therefore, you cannot address your desires to it directly. You must sidle up to it sideways, as if approaching a horse with an uncertain temper. You must turn up your palms and turn out your pockets to demonstrate the purity of your motives. You must persuade it to yield its secrets, slowly and obliquely. Above all, you must try to understand what the archive desires of you. You cannot hope to extract anything from the archive without giving something back. II Archives are not static. Their material reality changes over time — decayed, displaced, reorganized — and their meanings shift as well, depending on the moment and context in which we encounter them.

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The façade of Afghan Films, the state film institute and archive in Kabul, Afghanistan.

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Mariam Ghani, still from What we left unfinished, 2013–2015. Showing discarded frames from the feature film Gunah and a newsreel on the 1978 coup d’état. Courtesy of the artist, Afghan Films and Ryan Lee Gallery.

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One of the peculiarities of the archive, however, is that it often contains either full copies, partial records or fragmentary traces of its previous iterations — the past selves it shed on the way to becoming the present archive. In the case of the Afghan Films archive, these records and traces take on several forms: the scraps of burned film prints still visible in the courtyard, remnants of the Taliban-era bonfire; the stray frames of film, both negative and positive, found in bins and on floors where damaged splices and leader are being repaired; the handwritten records and labels on the old metal film canisters, gradually being replaced by new plastic canisters with new handwritten labels as films are systematically cleaned, numbered, watched, described and catalogued. This indexing of the archive is critical, because your first approach to any archive is always through its metadata: not the content, but its descriptors. When you are engaged in a slantwise, shuffling sort of appeal to the archive — three steps forward, two steps back — your approach may be even more removed. First you must address the people who possess or are creating the descriptions, and then you must sort through their often conflicting and overlapping accounts. In short, you must perform some of the functions of the archive, or archivist, yourself. This performance, you hope, can be your contribution to the archive: a history of sorts, which you write as you find it and leave behind when you go. III Archives are more than the sum of their materials. Each archive has its archivists and administrators, janitors and historians, redactors and readers and others who at various times perform the archive for its public. Each performance refracts the archive through the performer’s interpretation, and each is then reflected in the archive, as the interpretation becomes another record, or another path through the records that can be retraced. Some performances alter the archive irrevocably, slashing and burning as they go, like the literal burning of film prints in the Afghan Films courtyard in 1996.2 Others are delicate insinuations, or daily rituals, whose effects are not visible until viewed from a distance — the leaving out of certain commonly known details while labelling a film canister, for example, goes unnoticed until all those who know the details are gone and the data transmutes from omitted to lost. Or the use of a cheap brand of tape to splice film in lean years, which decades later means that each time those reels run through a projector or telecine apparatus, they may break at the splice point. Or a particular method of cleaning prints with rags, which over the years accumulates as a fretwork of scratches on celluloid. Your performance, of course, is an interpretation as well as an appeal: a synthesis of these other performances, perhaps even more destructive, perhaps less. ‘What We Left Unfinished

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Image photographed by the author in the Afghan Films archive in June 2013. Courtesy of the author.

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Azim Karimi, assistant to the director of Afghan Films and manager of the mobile cinema.

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Silhouette of mobile phone and face in front of projector screen, Tahrir Cinema. Photograph by Cressida Trew.

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Images photographed by the author in the Afghan Films archive in June 2013. Courtesy of the author.

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IV Some parts of the archive are always more visible than others. The archive has two faces: its public narrative and its private holdings. The public narrative, which is designed to be visible, is usually constructed from only a small portion of the private holdings, which remain largely invisible. The public narrative can be adapted by the archive’s performers to meet the moment, by sampling from different parts of the private holdings to construct the order most likely to match present interests. In every archive, there exists a literal or metaphorical dusty drawer where past archivists have filed the private holdings deemed least likely to ever be of interest to anyone anywhere: unfinished projects, failed experiments, institutional embarrassments. If you are an artist, you probably want to find that drawer and rifle through it. The Afghan Films archive is, however, a special case, where the entire negative archive and large portions of the print archive were hidden from 1996–2002, with the door to the negative archive completely bricked up and disguised behind a poster of Mullah Omar. In some ways, the whole archive was temporarily filed in the invisible dusty drawer, and only very gradually did it emerge from this position of retreat over the subsequent decade (2002–12). The systematic recataloguing of the Afghan Films archive, then, has both ritual and practical functions. Ritually, it brings every reel of film in the archive out of the drawer and into the light, examining and re-evaluating each film or fragment relative to the present moment. Practically, many of the prints are literally covered in dust, and need cleaning and checking to see whether they are still viable. The negatives, in their closed chamber, remained more pristine, but are plagued by the aforementioned splices, which need to be marked before any kind of large-scale telecine project can be undertaken. Multiple handwritten catalogues of prints and negatives exist but they are often contradictory or overlapping, and the handwritten labels on the film canisters also sometimes contradict the catalogues, or are inaccurate. This surplus of unreliable indices has produced some uncertainty about which films now (post-bonfire) may exist only as negatives, which may exist only as prints and which may exist as both negatives and prints. Recataloguing will resolve this uncertainty. It also serves to discover which prints may still be useful for soundtrack digitization or circulation of films on film. The recataloguing process inevitably begins to reveal some of the archive’s private holdings, which have never been part of its public narrative. At Afghan Films, these can be broken down into several groups: 1. Foreign films co-produced by Afghan Films, copies of which were deposited in the archive.

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2. Student films supported by Afghan Films, including some by directors who later became well known. 3. Prints of commercials, animations and industrial films that were distributed by Afghan Films to theatres, but not produced by Afghan Films. 4. Unedited rushes shot, but not used, for Afghan Films’ weekly newsreels. 5. Rushes and scenes from unfinished feature films produced by Afghan Films. The latter two categories, the unedited newsreel and unfinished feature footage, correspond closely to periods of political turbulence in Afghanistan, notably 1977–9 and 1989–96. The 1977–9 period includes the end of Daoud’s republic, the Afghan Communist coup, the Communist party split, the assassination of Taraki by Amin and the Soviet invasion. The 1989–96 period includes the withdrawal of Soviet support from the Afghan government; Najibullah’s attempt to reconcile with the mujahidin; the handover of power to the mujahidin coalition government; the split within that government and subsequent civil war; and the Taliban’s entry into Kabul. While some short and feature films and a number of newsreels were finished and circulated during both of these periods, a parallel body of material remained unfinished, as the rapid changes of government resulted in projects being cancelled and new projects commissioned in their place; images that read as innocuous one day could become seditious the next. As the national film institute, Afghan Films was responsible for projecting the image of the state to its citizens — sometimes subtly, sometimes more overtly. In moments of dramatic and often violent reimaginings of the state by its politicians, Afghan Films was often caught in a conundrum, whereby its images had to communicate not the reality of the state as it was, but the imaginary of the state as it desired itself to be — the future-possible state, rather than the present state. In its attempt to catch up to this future-possible state, Afghan Films may have had to discard, or put aside, a lot of film that depicted the state as it was and had been, which did not quite match up to the state as desired or imagined. In the research project What we left unfinished, I will be looking for some of these unfinished films and the people who made them. In the gaps between what was finished and unfinished, I will try to decipher how the Afghan Left imagined its reinvention of the state and how that project went so terribly wrong — the gaps between revolution, reconciliation and dissolution.

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Images photographed by the author in the Afghan Films archive in June 2013. Courtesy of the author.

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Silhouette of mobile phone and face in front of projector screen, Tahrir Cinema. Photograph by Cressida Trew.

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Images photographed by the author in the Afghan Films archive in June 2013. Courtesy of the author.

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V Archives often presume or present themselves to be keepers of facts, and, moreover, keepers of facts that serve as anchor points for the larger historical record. Artists prospecting in archives are sometimes suspected by archivists of taking these facts only to weave fictions around them. While this suspicion is not entirely unjustified, it also overlooks the multiple layers of constructed narrative that already surround most archival records — from provenance records, to finding aids, to placement and classification within the archive, to metadata tags, descriptions and annotations. Each of these layers has an individual author and thus allows subjective interpretations, human errors, fictions and inventions to accumulate around, and influence perceptions of, the original records. At Afghan Films, the question of truth is complicated further still by the ‘house style’ of mixing fiction and fact within the films produced by the state through Afghan Films in 1967–96. This tendency encompasses both fictional feature films, which incorporate documentary footage, and documentary films, which incorporate fictional elements. The first variant appears as early as Manand Waqob (Like the Eagle),3 the 1967 feature that wraps a fictional story of a young girl’s journey around actual footage of the 1966 Independence Day celebrations, and as late as Ouruj (Ascension),4 the 1993 feature about mujahidin that features actual fighters from Masoud’s group as extras, complete with their real weapons. The second variant pops up sporadically in earlier years — as in the tourism-promotion film Afghanistan: Land of Hospitality and Beauty5 (produced by the Ministry of Culture in the early 1960s, before the official launch of Afghan Films, but included in the archive), where anthropologists Louis and Nancy Hatch Dupree play the ‘tourists’ travelling around Afghanistan, snapping pictures. The tendency becomes pronounced, however, during the Parcham years (1979–89), when Soviet-style propaganda films were produced in place of, or supplemented, the weekly newsreels distributed to cinemas. In order to disentangle fact from fiction within the original records, and particularly to decode whether the original audience would have perceived a given film as fact, fiction or both, you must first understand the historical context of that film and the overlapping — but not necessarily identical — cultures of the producing institution, the commissioning government and the viewing audience. VI What are the ethics of the archive? An archive cannot be separated from its interpreters and past interpretations. They impose their orders upon the archive, and those orders bend the archive

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toward construction or destruction, preservation or projection, the vault or the network or sometimes, paradoxically, all these things at once. We cannot evaluate the materials in the archive along some sort of moral axis unless we take into account the structures through which we receive them, structures which have been produced by the archive’s performers and performances. Is it possible, however, to imagine some kind of ethics of archival research? The media archive collective Pad.ma suggested in ‘10 Theses on the Archive’6 that we approach the archive with intellectual propriety, rather than rigid notions of intellectual property.7 I interpret this to mean that, as researchers, we should be sensitive to the origins and contexts of archival material, especially when considering how to deploy it within a new artwork. ‘Fair use’ is a legal doctrine but also an apt phrase: Is your use of an existing work fair to the original creator? In the case of the unfinished films in the Afghan Films archive, the copyright resides with the archive, which therefore controls the intellectual property. Permission to use the footage can be granted by the archive, and licensing fees are paid to the archive. Intellectual propriety, however, would require that the original creators be sought out and consulted about their original intentions for the films, not only as a matter of intellectual curiosity, but also as an ethical prerequisite for taking their unfinished work and recontextualizing it within a new artwork — especially when the work being appropriated was never made public in its original form. Ultimately, intellectual propriety might even require that the new artwork become a work of facilitation rather than a work of appropriation — that is, after consulting the original creators, it may appear more appropriate or desirable to create a system whereby they can finish their own unfinished work (with the interest coming from the gap between the moment of making and the moment of finishing), rather than subsuming their unfinished work into a new artwork. VII A film archive is a cabinet of memento mori, full of flickering images of things and people long lost. When the film is projected, that which was lost lives again, for a frame or a second, a minute or an hour. The film is projected, not only onto the screen, but also from the deep storage of the archive into the more accessible (if more frangible) memory of a present-day viewing audience. But every time the film is run, the filmstrip risks destruction: the reel may burn or break, the celluloid acquires scratches and spots. When a film is digitized, it is translated from frames to fields, light to bytes, intermittent to continuous. It loses its specific materiality, but gains the ability to be transmitted to larger audiences. Effectively, it can migrate from the archive-as-vault to the archive-as-network. It can be recontextualized, reused, remixed. The physical archive may be dispersed, or even destroyed, ‘What We Left Unfinished

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while the digital archive lives on, copies of copies proliferating across time and space. In a country like Afghanistan, where iconoclasm is a very real and seemingly perpetual threat, preservation of cultural resources like the Afghan Films archive may best be achieved not by panicked moves to protect assets, but rather by a move to project those assets. That is, locking the films away for another decade in another dusty drawer would be less effective than digitizing the archive as quickly as possible and disseminating films as widely as possible, including placing copies of master files on servers both inside and outside of the country. Broad dissemination would also allow a critical discourse to grow around the films, ultimately making an even stronger argument for their preservation. Perhaps every archive is, like Afghan Films, scrambling to avert its own destruction, whether that arrives through catastrophe, obsolescence, the inevitable decay of materials or the inexorable sway of entropy over order. When a collection becomes an archive, the linguistic shift registers a transformation from a group of objects that are, to a group of objects that were (the same, connected, part of a set, parts of a whole). In this sense, the archive is founded on a moment of passing into the past, a kind of death, and the impulse to archive is connected (as Derrida said, following Freud) to the death drive.8 The need to archive is connected to the fear of loss; but to archive something, it must be fixed in time, like a butterfly pinned in a glass case, and thus to archive is also to kill the very thing you feared to lose. At the same time, the archive constantly engages in attempts to resuscitate its holdings, bringing them back to life in the present: translations to new formats; circulation to new audiences; new interpretations, orders, edits, narratives. If the archive is both founded on and pledged against disaster, we can interpret that founding moment as the archive’s original attempt to preserve something that might otherwise be lost, and that pledge as the archive’s continuing efforts to countermand the static nature of preservation by projecting its past memories into the present and the future. Walter Benjamin described the task of the historian as seizing hold of the past as it flashes up into the present at ‘a moment of danger’,9 and the task of the translator as producing a new text in harmony with the original10 — that is, more faithful to the original’s spirit than its letters, and generated to some extent by the productive tensions between the language of the original and the language of the translation. What, then, is the task of an artist in an archive, as she or he balances between the roles of archivist, historian, translator and narrator? Perhaps it is to understand which of the archive’s preserved pasts relate to the present moment of danger, and find a way to translate and narrate that past into the present; not casually, not haphazardly and not nostalgically, but just when and where it is most needed.

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Louis Dupree playing a tourist in the documentary Afghanistan: Land of Hospitality and Beauty. Courtesy of the artist.

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Images photographed by the author in the Afghan Films archive in June 2013. Courtesy of the author.

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Dispatch two: The radical archive, October 2013 — May 2014 I I have been having a lot of conversations lately about radical archives, or archiving as a radical practice. To be sure, I started a lot of those conversations myself. But many people presented with the term ‘radical archive’ seem to have a lot to say. On the other hand, there certainly exists a subset of people who resist or reject the term ‘radical’ when conjoined to the term ‘archive’. In an attempt to appease them, I tried using ‘experimental’ or ‘revisionist’ or ‘expanded’ or ‘reimagined’ or even, improbably, ‘overturned’ and ‘exploded’, but none of them seemed to capture quite the same idea as ‘radical’. I want to begin my experiment or revision, my expansion or explosion, of archives from the radice, the root. First, though, we must examine in more detail these two terms which seem to both attract and repel each other: radical and archive. Radical, as an adjective, has three usual meanings (apart from its usage in slang). The first and oldest is ‘of, relating to, or proceeding from a root’ and derives from its etymological origins in the late Latin radicalis (‘of or having roots’) and the Latin radix (‘root’). Radical has been used in this sense since the late fourteenth century, where its first recorded use is in medieval philosophy. In the 1630s, this use acquired a second shading, where the root under discussion could be either literal or metaphorical — the radical object might be the root of a plant, of a language, a mathematical process or eventually even a disease. In the 1650s, quite possibly as a direct result of the extension of radical into these metaphorical realms, radical also came to mean ‘of or relating to the origins’, ‘essential’ or ‘fundamental’. Radical notions in fields from science to politics, therefore, were ideas that returned to the roots of the discourse, ripped them out, re-examined and reimagined them. Radicals were the people who performed this overturning of the roots, the radical reformers first named in British politics around 1786. By 1817 or so, reform had been elided and radical acquired its third and most contested meaning, which has to do with opposition to the norm and advocacy for extreme change, most notoriously in political contexts. Chemistry’s free radicals, bonded atoms that play a collective part in multiple reactions, were also named around the same time.11 It may seem contradictory that a radical can be both a root part and founding principle, and an extreme agent of change and reactions, simultaneously basic and new; but all this contradiction resolves at the root, which is both the foundation of the status quo and the natural starting point for its reform. Archive arrives in English around 1600, by way of the sixteenth-century French word archif, from the late Latin archivum. All three terms carry the same meaning, which is ‘a place in which public records or historical documents ‘What We Left Unfinished

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are preserved’ as well as the collection of materials preserved therein and, when used as a verb (to archive), the act of collecting, storing and arranging materials for later use.12 The confusion between place and material probably derives from the Greek sources of the Latin term, which are usually listed as ta arkheia, meaning ‘public records’, plural of arkheion, meaning ‘town hall’, both from the root arkhe, meaning ‘government’ or literally ‘beginning, origin, first place’.13 The archive as ark: the place that preserves the records of our origins. Perhaps after all it makes perfect sense to juxtapose radical and archive: if we want to proceed from the root, to begin again from the beginning, where else should we go but the archive, the arkhe? II In my collaboration with Chitra Ganesh, Index of the Disappeared, we have been both practicing and thinking about radical archiving for almost a decade. As a sort of anniversary marker, we decided to organize a symposium around the notion of the radical archive, planned for April 2014 at New York University. We include under this rubric: (1) archives of radical politics and practices; (2) archives that are somehow radical in form or function; (3) moments or contexts in which archiving in itself becomes a radical act; and (4) attempts to make archives active in the present, rather than documents of the past or scripts for the future. Over the past ten years, Index of the Disappeared has worked with all four of these strands of radical archiving: we archive post-9/11 policies, their effects, the stories of people who resist them and the work of lawyers, activists and artists engaged in the struggle; we constructed our archive around absences in the records, and organized it through poetic and polemical categories; we started the archive as a response to a larger absence, a gap in history; and we are constantly experimenting with new ways to activate the archive as a whole, or fragments extracted from it, through translation into new forms and contexts.14 In our individual practices, Chitra and I both work with archives in other ways: not as archivists building a new archive, but as artists mining existing archives. In the project What we left unfinished, I am engaged in an ongoing dance with the Afghan Films archive, an archive which does not view itself as radical, but which has become radical almost despite itself — ironically enough, by conserving both its holdings and its values, very much against the larger current of its place and time. Afghanistan has bent for many years now towards destruction, reconstruction and reinvention rather than preservation. Afghan Films, with its Soviet-inflected institutional culture, has held tightly to its past, and in so doing, become an iconoclast.

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Silhouette of mobile phone and face in front of projector screen, Tahrir Cinema. Photograph by Cressida Trew.

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Image photographed by the author in the Afghan Films archive in June 2013. Courtesy of the author.

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Tapes from a partial digitization project initiated by INA in the 1990s. Courtesy of the author.

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III In October 2013, we issued an open call for proposals for the ‘Radical Archives’ conference, outlining four major themes. Under ‘Archives and Affect’, we asked for proposals related to embodied and performed archives; the archive and the repertory; buildings as archives; oral and informal histories; private versus public archives, and transitions between those states; and warm versus cold data.15 Under ‘Archiving Around Absence’, we asked for proposals related to disappearing archives; deliberately destroyed archives; inadvertently preserved archives, or unofficial histories within official histories; reading for the shadows; and strategies of resistant or counter-archiving. Under ‘Archives and Ethics’, we asked for proposals related to stealing from archives; stealing as the foundation of archives; FOIA and its discontents; refusal of or resistance to archiving; ownership of archived testimonies; intellectual property versus intellectual propriety; the ethics of open access; and the afterlives of archives designed for specific purposes, for example, archives of protests, activist movements and human rights initiatives. Under ‘Archive as Constellation’, we asked for proposals related to archive as method; the artist’s archive; the expanded archival field or notion of the archive; the linking of archives across networks; film as archive; subversive or experimental uses of metadata, cataloguing and classification; archive and database, database and interface; and how standards and interfaces shape our understanding of collections and the information they contain. We encouraged proposals for a number of different presentation formats, including full panels, individual papers, performances, screenings and hybrid forms. Remarkably, we received about 160 responses to the open call, including many full panels, and a surprising number of performance proposals. The responses to the open call were notably diverse, representing an unexpectedly wide range of possible framings or imaginaries of radical archives. In turn, we felt we had to represent as much of that range as possible within the conference, because making it too narrow would leave out too many important ideas of what a radical archive could be or do. So, we doubled the size we had initially planned and ended up with a major international conference, with two ten-hour days of simultaneous programming in two theatres and a gallery. The conference included keynotes by Lara Baladi of Cinema Tahrir, on archiving a revolution in the digital age, Shaina Anand of Pad.ma, on archives and ethics, and Ann Cvetkovich (The Archive of Feelings) on the queer art of the counter-archive. There were panels on disruptive standards, collaborative preservation, remixed archives, decolonized archives, erased archives, protest archives, queering archives, counter-archives, prison archives, spectral archives, embodied archives, artist’s archives, archives from below and archiving Palestine. There were four performances, two durational performances,

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Silhouette of mobile phone and face in front of projector screen, Tahrir Cinema. Photograph by Cressida Trew.

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Image photographed by the author in the Afghan Films archive in June 2013. Courtesy of the author.

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A projectionist tests replacement bulbs. Courtesy the author.

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two media archive viewing stations, an interview project and a screening program. About half the sessions are available as podcasts on Creative Time Reports,16 and the video documentation will be uploaded to Pad.ma — which will allow linking to specific time codes within clips, and annotation of clips by participants, as well as embedding of videos on other sites. Some papers from the conference are also included in this volume. Finally, we built a website (radicalarchives.net), through which conference presentations can be accessed, to serve as a resource for the field. IV What did we learn from the ‘Radical Archives’ conference? That the archive may not be a ‘site of redemption’ (as per Pad.ma’s ‘10 Theses’),17 but it can be a site of resistance and possibility. That archives themselves may, like bodies, resist. Archives may be messy and fallible. That archives can be crime scenes in the present, or forensically examined for the tragedies of the past. That archive fever is most likely to break out when your history is being erased. That activists quite often become archivists, and archivists just as often become activists. That the most radical archive might be distributed: all records remain with their creators; the archivist as adviser, not custodian. That the radical approach to preservation is projection: use it or lose it. That if the archive is a garden, the speculative archive is not the flowers picked from it, but the scents caught from a passing breeze — partial and imperfect accounts.18 That the seductive spectre of the imagined archive should not prevent us from accounting for the specific materiality, labour dynamics and power structures of real archives.19 That the attraction of archives will always be as much about what they lack as what they contain. Those gaps and holes, all the things left unfinished, are often the possibilities: the cracks where your own imaginings of the archive can creep in, and the sites where earlier resistance to the dominant narrative of the archive already has taken root. That there are as many ways to practice radical archiving as there are people who call themselves radical archivists (or radical librarians). And they are both marvellous and strange; revisionist and conservative; seeking the roots of archival practice, and gleefully deconstructing those essentials. Their archives might go unrecognized by the record-keeper of a Greek arkheion. But they are radicals in every sense of the word.

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1. Hal Foster, ‘An Archival Impulse’, October, Vol. 110 (Autumn 2004): 5. 2. 1996 is my best guess for the date of this event, as several conflicting accounts of the bonfire exist, each giving a different date, and also describing different players, motivations and quantities of film involved. 3. See: Pad.ma (Public Access Digital Media Archive), https://www.pad.ma/BRH/player/ to view this video (accessed 23 July 2014). 4. Not yet digitized, this video was viewed at the Afghan Films archive. 5. See: Pad.ma, https://www.pad.ma/BQI/player/ to view this video (accessed 23 July 2014). 6. Pad.Ma, ‘10 Theses on the Archive’ (April 2010), https://www.pad.ma/texts/padma:10_Theses_on_the_ Archive/100/ (accessed 18 February 2014). 7. ‘Archives are governed by the Laws of Intellectual Propriety as opposed to Property’. Ibid. 8. Jacques Derrida, ‘Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression’ in Diacritics, trans. Eric Prenowitz, Vol. 25, no. 2 (Summer 1995): 14. 9. Walter Benjamin, ‘Theses on the Philosophy of History’ (1937) in Illuminations, trans. Harry Zohn (New York: Schocken, 1968), 255.

11. ‘radical’, Merriam-Webster Dictionary, http://www. merriam-webster.com/dictionary/radical/ (accessed 10 July 2014); ‘radical’, Online Etymology Dictionary, http://www.dictionary.reference.com/browse/radical/ (accessed 10 July 2014). 12. ‘archive’, Merriam-Webster Dictionary, http://www. merriam-webster.com/dictionary/archive/ (accessed 10 July 2014). 13. ‘archives’, Online Etymology Dictionary, http://www. dictionary.reference.com/browse/archives/ (accessed 10 July 2014). 14. See: http://www.kabul-reconstructions.net/disappeared/ (accessed 23 July 2014). 15. See: http://www.integr8dmedia.net/viralnet/2006/2006_ghani.html/ for more on ‘warm data’ (accessed 23 July 2014). 16. See: Mariam Ghani, ‘Radical Archives’, Creative Time Reports (May 2014), http://www.creativetimereports.org/2014/05/27/radical-archives-mariam-ghani-chitra-ganesh-nyu/ (accessed 4 August 2014). 17. Pad.ma, ‘10 Theses on the Archive’, op cit. 18. Paraphrased from G.D. Cohen and Brian Harnetty’s presentations on the ‘Radical Resampling: Archives Remixed and Remade’ panel (‘Radical Archives’ conference, NYU Cantor Film Theatre, 11–12 April 2014).

10. Walter Benjamin, ‘The Task of the Translator’ (1923) in Illuminations, trans. Harry Zohn (New York: Schocken, 19. Paraphrased from Kate Eichhorn’s presentation on 1968), 76. the ‘Queering Archives’ panel. Ibid.

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Measures of Stillness and Movement The Poster in Cinema of the Palestinian Revolution1 Nick Denes

These pages ask how posters and films produced in the context of the Palestinian Revolution have intersected over time. The Palestinian Revolution serves as an elastic designation for a complex series of social, political and cultural transformations propelled by the Palestinian liberation movement between 1965 and 1982. With its ideals of self-reliance, popular armed struggle and creative iconoclasm, the revolution served as fertile ground for political art. Posters and films were two of the media forms through which the revolution’s creative energies flowed, and into which its aesthetic content was nominally inscribed for posterity. Relationships between the two are examined here while contrasting their relative stillness and movement as sites of revolutionary expression. The aim is to identify some functional and aesthetic departures and to relate these to the preservation as well as the creation of the two political art forms.

The relative measure of stillness For a still image, the revolutionary poster was pervaded by movement. It served as a tool for communicating fast-moving ideas and imageries across borders and scattered constituencies. Its mobilizing role meant it was frequently imbued with signs of transformation, rupture or return. Stylistically, it formed a site of rapid aesthetic exploration. As a material object, the poster was ostensibly ephemeral — a vernacular form in perpetual flux. In such ways, the still poster coursed with movement. This momentum could be slowed though. Resiting the street poster as an exhibition artefact arrested much of its movement. Poster exhibitions occurred from early in the revolutionary period, as with the Fatah movement’s 1969 ‘Al-Karameh Exhibition’ in Amman (fig. 1).

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(fig. 1) ‘Al-Karameh Exhibition’, Fatah, 1969. Featuring artwork by Mustafa Al-Hallaj. Image courtesy of the Palestine Poster Project Archives.

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Periodically, throughout the era, the poster was slowed by curatorial transpositions of this order. Through sorting, selection and re-presentation, a fluid and sequential episode in revolutionary expression could be held static as a discrete artefact, indicative of a given moment or concern. The transformation this involved was radical; and it was understood as such by some of those who presided over it. In 1979, the Iraqi National Museum of Modern Art hosted a Baghdad International Poster Exhibition and Competition.2 The project was statefunded, formally adjudicated (with cash prizes) and carefully catalogued. Its stilling effect was acknowledged in a catalogue preface by Raoul-Jean Moulin, secretary general of the International Association of Art Critics. This posited the political poster as an ‘ephemeral, disposable’ form that ‘arises directly out of current events’.3 By making the street ‘a permanent gallery for new images’, the poster was capable of ‘transforming our habitual ways of seeing and thinking’.4 But the Baghdad event’s museological, archival act unplugged the poster from this circuitry. As a stilled exhibit, the poster was translated into ‘visual evidence of the condition of the art of their times, of a certain stage in the plastic and graphic quest for form’.5 However new in style, however current their themes, the catalogued posters were now ‘posters of the past’, to be ‘collected and preserved for their value as contemporary records, and because they form a part of history’.6 This sort of archival stilling of the ‘moving’ poster image was neither a simple nor a deliberate attempt to depoliticize the form. By bringing the poster to a standstill, the curatorial act proposed to reinvent it as a static resource, from which new political-aesthetic movements might be derived. The unmoving poster-as-record, Moulin concluded, ‘becomes a kind of oracle to be consulted’, not least by artists concerned with ‘forging weapons for the future’.7 The selective archiving of the street poster thus amounted to a slowing and reconstituting of the fast-moving revolutionary image. The same deceleration would not apply to revolutionary cinema. The moving image was already characterized by a lack of movement. To produce or exhibit, film was cumbersome and costly. In this it was ill-suited to the rapid pace with which ideas and imageries were being evolved or exchanged. Modes of spectatorship and circulation differed greatly: if posters could move and be interpreted freely in the hubbub of the street, cinema demanded spatial and temporal seclusion; the nature of time-based media and the demands of cine projection meant for stiller (and fewer) encounters with the moving image. Seen in the ‘gallery’ of the street, the poster was not truly self-contained but rather part of a serial whole that continually unfolded. Its stilling as ‘visual evidence’ or gallery ‘record’ interrupted this flow. Films, technically elaborate and years in the making, were necessarily more closed. Apprehended as an episode unto itself, a finished film resembled a ready-made artefact. Its curatorial stilling for archival catalogue or festival exhibition did not entail the

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(fig. 2) ‘All Hail the Aircraft Snipers’, Mustafa Al-Hallaj. General Command, Al-Assifa Brigades, Fatah, 1971. Image courtesy of the Palestine Poster Project Archives.

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jarring deceleration that occurred with the poster, but corresponded instead with the visibilities its creators envisioned. These contrasting degrees of stillness and movement can be related to the ways posters influenced or operated within early revolutionary cinema.

Posters in Palestinian revolutionary films The proximity of the two forms’ development meant early Palestinian filmmakers were always likely to draw on posters as they looked for a cinematic language echoing the nimble immediacy of the other medium. The Fatah movement’s Palestine Film Unit (PFU), formed in 1968 by Mustafa Abu Ali, Hany Jawhariyyeh and Sulafa Jadallah, grew initially out of the photographic and poster-printing activities of Jawhariyyeh and Jadallah. The PFU’s first films invoked the power of the street poster in a number of ways as the group experimented in search of ‘a popular cinema in which the people find themselves in the process of making history’.8 An indication of the way posters could subtly shape the choices of early filmmakers is found in the 1972 PFU work A Zionist Aggression. By 1971, Israeli air attacks on Palestinian populations were an increasingly pronounced feature of the struggle. That year, Mustafa al-Hallaj produced a poster illustration that was disseminated by the General Command of Fatah’s Al-Assifa Brigades: ‘Hail the Aircraft Snipers’. Instating the anti-aircraft gunner as a prime emblem of resistance vividly reflected a new era of heightened aerial bombardment. The next year, the 22-minute A Zionist Aggression gave a harrowing depiction of the carnage such raids inflicted. It closed with a cinematic statement of defiance composed as a close enactment of Al-Hallaj’s poster drawing (figs 2 and 3). Another early work saw the PFU draw on posters as more direct cinematic resources. With Soul, With Blood (1971) was an ambitious, multilayered account of Black September. It mixed satirical sketches, newsreel footage, popular theatre and even quasi-animation sequences; these accompanied a frenetic soundscape of revolutionary song, poetry, radio broadcasts, military communiqués and political speeches. Posters, newspapers and other still images featured heavily in this kaleidoscope of signs (fig. 4). Many bore Fatah’s insignia and so reinforced the movement’s status (signs of other groups were absent). But the poster also furnished something more precious: the film effectively borrowed the movement it contained. With the film’s time-based elements cluttered, the poster, more than any other form, remained capable of evoking further cognitive or aesthetic tributaries beyond the film’s textual surface. However fleetingly seen, the poster’s power to rapidly convey condensed political-aesthetic codes made it a potent

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(fig. 3) A Zionist Aggression, Palestine Film Unit, 1972.

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(fig. 4) Poster by Ismail Shammout, in With Soul, With Blood, Palestine Film Unit, 1971.

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(fig. 5) Newsreel No. 4, promotional poster. Palestinian Cinema Institution, 1978. Image courtesy of the Palestine Poster Project Archives.

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(fig. 6) ‘The Militant Cinema Martyr’, Mona Saudi for the Palestinian Cinema Institution, 1976. Image courtesy of the Palestine Poster Project Archives.

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accelerant, multiplying the scope and speed with which this film mobilized its cacophony of revolutionary signs. Of all the PFU’s works, With Soul, With Blood best imparted the momentum that characterized the era and manifested in the street poster’s restless motion. Hassan Abu Ghanimeh saw this film as their most concerted bid ‘to find our way to a people’s cinema in order to express the people’s war’.9 But the same attributes giving the film its noise and urgency made it slow to make. However well it expressed the instability of its moment, by the time it was seen, that moment had elapsed. After its making, Mustafa Abu Ali told an interviewer that people ‘often criticized us […] for showing films such a long time after the events. This is one reason why we want to make newsreels’.10 The appeal of the newsreel was its responsive immediacy, its closing in on the poster’s power to express the revolution in near ‘real-time’. Annual newsreels were issued from 1974, but they offered more of a yearly digest than the rapid mediation cinema still lacked (fig. 5). Reflecting on the PFU’s work, founding member Hany Jawhariyyeh once noted that his poster-making activities in 1967 had begun with ‘documenting the pictures of martyrs’.11 When he was killed in 1976 while filming in Lebanon, Jawhariyyeh was immortalized in this way himself. A poster came first: this cast Jawhariyyeh, camera to eye, as ‘The Militant Cinema Martyr’. In 1977, further posters honouring Jawhariyyeh appeared prominently in Palestine in the Eye, a film eulogy drawing heavily on the late filmmaker’s own iconic still and moving images. Stylistically, this work gave the martyr poster a cinematic form: its reverent portrait of a fallen comrade was carefully arranged alongside party-political symbols, flags and staple images of homeland and struggle (figs 6 and 7).

Posters in films of revolutionary solidarity For filmmakers propagating the revolution outside the region, the poster offered a particularly versatile cinematic shorthand. It could quickly convey rhetorical or thematic motifs that were challenging to deliver in standard expository: militant operations, the circumstances of Palestinian prisoners or activities in the occupied areas were hard to document in film yet could be shown to be key to the revolutionary field via the signifying power of the poster. Meanwhile, as artwork, the poster allowed the cultural corollaries to the revolution’s political or military dimensions to be established; little could match the poster as instant evidence of the revolution’s creative and aesthetic scope. More crudely, the poster was a means of alloying a film to the particular ideological movement it was made in conjunction and solidarity with. Amongst the first films to bring the revolution to a foreign audience was Luigi Perelli’s Al-Fatah: Palestine (1970). This was commissioned by the Italian

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(fig. 7) Poster honouring Hany Jawhariyyeh, in Palestine in the Eye, Palestinian Cinema Institution, 1977.

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(figs 8 and 9) Fatah posters seen in Arafat’s office in Al-Fatah: Palestine Luigi Perelli, 1970. 

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(fig. 10) PFLP poster, 1970 (artist unknown), in The Red Army / PFLP Declaration of World War, Masao Adachi & Koji Wakamatsu, 1971.

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(fig. 11) Palestine — Denmark, Same Struggle. Nils Vest, 1972.

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(fig. 12) Posters by Nazir Nabaa (1968) as seen in With Soul, With Blood, Palestine Film Unit, 1971.

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Communist Party as an expression of its alignment with the Fatah movement. At the start of the film, Yasser Arafat outlined the nature of the liberation struggle while seated in an office that doubled as a poster gallery; as he spoke, the camera ranged over Fatah posters identifying signal events and features of the liberation struggle. Arafat’s précis of the cause was thus refracted through the posters’ gestures to key events or concerns as well as toward the revolution’s creative bearing; Fatah’s centrality to these processes was all the while secured without assertions of primacy being spoken (figs 8 and 9). Unsurprisingly, no Fatah posters appeared in The Red Army / PFLP Declaration of World War (1971) by Masao Adachi and Koji Wakamatsu. Artwork of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine featured frequently instead (fig. 10). As visiting filmmakers tended to work with one or other political group, this sort of aesthetic-ideological discipline was common. But it was not universal. Palestine Another Vietnam (1971) by the Argentinean-Italian Colectivo de Cine del Tercer Mundo was contrastingly promiscuous in quoting from posters or insignia belonging to competing movements. Despite the film’s Marxist-Leninist hue, the aesthetic universe it conveyed was ideologically porous, even ambiguous. This was unusual for a film of revolutionary solidarity in this period and can be traced to the film’s status as a rare instance of wholly unaffiliated filmmaking. Another independent work of the early period was Nils Vest’s Palestine — Denmark, Same Struggle (1972). This adapted a slogan from the Danish protest movement against the Vietnam War and was made up largely of still images — an essay on Zionism and imperialism delivered over archive photographs, documents, newspapers, cartoons and posters. Made amidst and for a Danish audience, the film admonished the European left for failing to translate revolutionary rhetoric into active support for liberation in Palestine. This critique acquired striking formal expression at the film’s end: its procession of still frames was abruptly torn from behind by an upraised clenched fist, ushering in moving images of resistance cadre and street protests. After 36 minutes of still images and expository, the moving image announced itself as an urgent rupture, tearing away at hollow rhetoric with its action, its movement (fig. 11). In this instance, it was the still image that was associated with stasis while the moving image signalled a contrasting dynamism. The sequence can be read as an isolated formal gesture, or perhaps as hinting at a deeper-lying departure over the relative degree of movement accrued to still and moving political images when seen from within or without the immediate revolutionary milieu.

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Conclusion: Revisiting the measure of stillness Filmmakers of the early revolutionary period invoked posters in a multitude of ways, both subtle and explicit. Some of these can be traced to the paradoxical advantage of speed and movement that the still image enjoyed over the moving image. The poster’s rapid pace of production and the breadth of its stylistic and thematic movement meant it sometimes literally ‘sketched out’ imageries that were only later translated onto film. As a condensed site of rapidly absorbed visual cues, the poster’s communicative force could be injected into films, extending and accelerating their signifying power. And as visual shorthand, the poster filled in where filmic representation fell short; it testified to the revolution’s cultural and creative dimensions; and it signalled ideological or institutional allegiances. Although it was often deliberately used in such ways, the poster acquired this value to the moving image as much in its ubiquity as a feature of the revolutionary mise en scène, as it did by instrumental design. As the final example above suggests, the relative economy of movement and stillness distinguishing posters from film was not absolute in the revolutionary period. And revisited today as historical artefacts, quite different distinctions might be made between the moving and still image. The transposition of the poster from the street to the museum archive or exhibition catalogue was, as noted, already underway in the revolutionary era. This decelerated and reinvented the form by altering the terms on which it was encountered — by freezing a high-speed process in order to hold still what Moulin called an ‘oracle’ that could speak as ‘evidence of the condition of art’ of its age. This has been a dramatic intervention, but it has not required (and implicitly rejects) changing the material surface — the poster’s visual appearance. With the archival process begun early, and the poster reproduced by the hundreds or thousands, securing this surface intact has proven relatively successful.12 Original prints, catalogue editions and — more lately — digital reproductions have captured the poster with a high degree of fidelity, preserving and reproducing it with a ‘cleanliness’ and permanence that belies, and so further estranges, its prior existence as dynamic political ephemera. By contrast, film prints began few in number and were of a material fabric that militated against preservation with anything like the fidelity of the poster. The same qualities that slowed film as a revolutionary medium meant even its limited movement, exhibition or reproduction entailed rapid processes of degradation. When films were stored in archives (such as that which the Palestinian Cinema Institution operated in Beirut from 1976 to 1982), the inherent quality of celluloid nonetheless consigned them to steady decay. With few exceptions, film’s transformation-by-erosion has only very recently (and marginally) been slowed through digitization.

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Experienced today as a historic artefact, the poster not only cloaks its earlier volatility, but even the movement of history itself. As time leaves little evidence of its passing on the well-preserved surface, the ‘oracle’ speaks unerringly from and of a fixed point in history. Films can offer different encounters. The haptic effect of their erosion conveys the motion of history unfolding. Seen today, the revolutionary film cannot be suspended discretely, unmarked by historical processes in the way the poster often can. Instead, the film is ineluctably marked by the passage of time. And this means the fate of a film’s revolutionary imageries and ideals is often evocatively mirrored in the cracked and fading surfaces of a medium that testifies, materially, to its turbulent movement through history. In a reversal of their earlier distinctions, it is now the poorly preserved moving image that seems permeated with historical movement and aesthetic flux while the archived poster lies still and unchanging. Physical damage and decay separate the film from an earlier state while deceleration and stasis set the poster apart from its former self. And film now repays the debt it owed to the poster as a resource, an accelerant or an inspiration. It is today only within the haptic haze of the revolutionary film that we can glimpse again the revolutionary poster in its lost state — incomplete, interrupted and moving (fig. 12).

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1. I thank Dan Walsh of the Palestine Poster Project Archives for providing the photographs of posters reproduced in this article. See: The Palestine Poster Project Archives, http://www.palestineposterproject. org/ (accessed 28 August 2014). 2. The exhibition’s twin themes were ‘The Struggle of the Third World for Cultural and Political Liberation’ and ‘Palestine — A Homeland Denied’. Iraqi artist Dia Al-Azzawi was the creative and curatorial force behind the project, which was co-produced (and exhibited) by the Iraqi Cultural Centre in London. 3. Raoul-Jean Moulin, ‘Posters for the Struggling Nations’ in The Baghdad International Poster Exhibition ’79, eds Raoul-Jean Moulin and Dia Al-Azzawi (London: Malvern Press Ltd: 1979), catalogue preface. 4. Ibid. 5. Ibid. 6. Ibid. 7. Ibid.

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8. Guy Hennebelle, ‘Arab Cinema’, MERIP Reports, no. 52 (November 1976): 7. Elsewhere I have related these experiments in search of a militant cinema language to the revolution’s changing ideological and rhetorical features. See: Nick Denes, ‘Between Form and Function: Experimentation in the Early Works of the Palestine Film Unit, 1968–1974’, Middle East Journal of Culture and Communication, Vol. 7, no. 2 (2014): 219–41. 9. Hassan Abu Ghanimeh, ‘L’Expérience du Cinéma Palestinien’ in La Palestine et le Cinéma, eds Guy Hennebelle and Khemais Khayati (Paris: Editions du Centenaire, 1978), 35. 10. Guy Hennebelle, Tahar Cheriaa and Serge Le Peron, ‘Toward a Revolutionary Arab Cinema: An Interview with the Palestinian Cinema Association’, Cinéaste, Vol. 2, no. 6 (1974): 34. 11. Khadija Habashneh, ‘Palestinian Revolution Cinema’, This Week in Palestine (August 2010), http://www. thisweekinpalestine.com/details.php?id=2355&edid=149/ (accessed 28 August 2014). 12. Archive holdings of revolutionary posters are scattered and vary greatly in size and scope; numerous private collections exist in the Middle East, US and Europe; both the British Museum and US Library of Congress maintain special collections of revolutionary posters. The Palestine Poster Project Archives meanwhile holds by far the largest known collection, maintaining open-access online galleries presenting many hundreds of archived works. See: The Palestine Poster Project Archives, http://www.palestineposterproject.org/ (accessed 28 August 2014).

Dissonant Archives: Contemporary Visual Culture and Contested Narratives in the Middle East

Rethinking National Archives in Colonial Countries and Zones of Conflict The Israeli-Palestinian Conflict and Israel’s National Photography Archives as a Case Study1 Rona Sela

Zionist photography archives of the State of Israel — civil and military — reflect pre-state and state activity and policy in the field of photography, and form part of a larger and more powerful institutional system. These archives are not neutral and are connected to a national ideological system that loads them with meaning and a Zionist worldview. The way they structure, collect, catalogue and preserve materials, and their policies of exposure or censorship, are driven by a national ideology, serve its fundamental norms, values and goals and help in constructing its symbols and language. As in other cultural and civil systems in Israel, and similar to the mechanisms of pre-state or state Zionist propaganda, official photography archives are also recruited for establishment benefits and assist in shaping public opinion, attitudes, content and worldviews. These archives are under absolute sovereign control, and represent one brick in a large systematic structure of a control mechanism that oversees the construction of meaning.2 The ideological activities of these photographic archives are inbuilt, and affect the representation of the conflict and its evolution in the public consciousness. In addition, photography itself serves as a vehicle for establishment power mechanisms based on systems of oppression, and is used as a tool to convey ideology as well as to manufacture narratives, myths and national terminology. National state bodies — including propaganda departments, prestate military groups, photography archives and others — have subjected photography and its use to their interpretation and worldview since the inception of Zionist photography in the early twentieth century, when it was used to market the Zionist idea of establishing a Jewish state, and continue to do so to this day.3 In contrast to photography archives, which operate as entities that collect information from outside sources, most of the national photography archives in Israel were established, along with photography departments that actively ordered photographs from photographers in the service of the

institutions they represented, to fulfil state agendas. Therefore, these archives also engaged in an initiated, informed and conscious dissemination of photographs for these purposes. In other words, the long-term conservation of photographs in Israel’s national archives is the final stage of institutional involvement in the field of photography. In various studies, I have discussed the ideological strategies that accompany the activities of these mechanisms and systems, from the control of the production process of a single photograph (what to and what not to photograph, when, how and what to include in the photograph, and what to avoid, which photographer, who owns the negative and its copyright etc.), to the structure of the archives and how they operate in preserving and distributing the photograph in the public sphere, while loading it with meaning and content (how the material is classified and edited, the terminology that accompanies the photographs, the selection of what is marketed and distributed and where, what is concealed and more).4 In general, these mechanisms regulate photography, organizing and managing it according to strict rules and codes in order to construct a one-sided Zionist national worldview that is slanted and enlisted. The national character of state Zionist photography archives is overt and visible. For example, the book and the exhibition Six Days and Forty Years deal with the way Israeli institutional bodies shaped the occupation of the West Bank, Gaza and the Golan Heights as moral and beneficial to Israeli society and the state after the Six Day War in 1967.5 In this essay, I would like to extract additional layers of information, meanings and characteristics that are not apparent from the archives. Jacques Derrida, who studied archives as geological or archaeological excavations, addressed the archive’s logic and semantics. He describes the way the ‘quasi-infinity of layers, of archival strata […] are at once superimposed, overprinted, and enveloped in each other’, and are stored, accumulated and capitalized. ‘To read […] requires working on substrates or under surfaces, old or new skins.’6 This reading, especially in areas of conflict, allows for a wide range of interpretation and analysis that often contradicts the primary aim of state archives and their national character. Since the official role of national photography archives is representative and apparent, I will show that it is possible — even obligatory — to extract additional layers of knowledge, content and meaning that undermine the original structure of the archive and challenge its contents and national objectives. This information, largely buried in photography archives, makes it possible to crack their underlying nature and create an alternative to establishment perceptions. However, these additional layers can be deciphered and liberated only after neutralizing the biased aspects of the archives. Isolating their ideological characteristics, and ‘cleaning’ and freezing their national bias, allows additional contextual layers — often contrary to the nature of the archive — to be freed. In ‘Reading an Archive’, Allan Sekula argues that the archive has the ‘semantic availability’ to change over time, and to be ‘appropriated by different

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Fred Chasnick, The Exile from Haifa. Palestinians carrying their belongings to the port after the city was conquered by Jewish Soldiers, April 1948. Courtesy of the Keren Kayemeth LeIsrael Jewish National Fund Archive.

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Fred Chasnick, Haifa, Looting, April 1948. Courtesy of the Keren Kayemeth LeIsrael Jewish National Fund Archive.

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disciplines, discourses, “specialists”’.7 They are open to other interpretations by new agents and thus ‘new meanings come to supplant old ones, with the archive serving as a kind of “clearing house” of meaning’.8 Or, as stated by Derrida, ‘Radical destruction can again be reinvested in another logic, in the inexhaustible economic resource of an archive which capitalizes everything, even that which ruins it or radically contests its power: radical evil can be of service, infinite destruction can be reinvested in a theodicy.’9 Ann Laura Stoler, who addresses the writing of colonial history, discusses the critical and conceptual potential to enable a fluidity of knowledge according to a new vocabulary of words and concepts. In an essay that focuses on the writing of colonial history in France, drawing on Foucault, she discusses how ‘categories are formed and dispersed, how aphasics disassociate resemblances and reject categories that are viable […]. [This] produces endless replacements of categories with incomprehensible associations that collapses into incommensurability.’10 Stoler describes historical writing as ‘an active voice’ dealing only partially with the past. It allows ‘differential futures’ that reassess the resilient forms of colonial relations. In an essay dealing with the building of post-colonial archives in South Africa, Cheryl McEvan demonstrates how, after the ending of apartheid, civilian and government entities established archives devoted to portraying their policies and the devastating consequences, and to give voice to the population particularly affected by them, such as black women. McEvan discusses the importance of building alternative post-colonial archives based on seemingly marginal materials, and the need to include them in national projects for the purpose of ‘remembering and notions of belonging’.11 But, unlike the situation in South Africa, where, as McEvan points out, its initiated national projects have latent radical potential and can challenge the national representation of the past through subversive projects funded by institutional bodies, in Israel these processes are still in their initial stages,12 and also provoke institutional and public objections.13

Palestinians in Zionist Establishment Archives Writing an alternative history of subjugated populations represented in photography archives is made possible by discussing the power relations and violence that characterizes them. Deciphering these archives’ repressed characteristics will broaden the understanding of their role in conflict areas, and offer new models for reading and interpretation. Over the years, Israel and its pre-state and state institutional, public, military, national and private archives became an important reservoir of information about the Palestinians in the first half of the twentieth century.14 By reviewing the representation of Palestinians in Israeli photography archives, I deal with the paradox of a state

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that is in a long and continuous national conflict with another people, a state that occupies and controls the other and has developed into a significant source for historical and cultural material on the other (the Palestinians), not to mention other materials as well. Furthermore, the fact that the occupying Israeli society also preserves parts of Palestinian historiography — visual and written — shows that the control is not only geographical, but extends also to awareness, identity and memory, as well as to cultural and historical spheres. The dependence of the ruled on those who hold power to write (or erase) their history, and the sophisticated methods used by the occupiers to push materials of the occupied to the margins (or to closed basements), are some of the mechanisms that need to be ‘cracked’ in order to build this understanding. Thus, I will map sources of information about Palestinians in national, institutional, Zionist photography archives in Israel, and propose a new role for them in the public sphere.15 I have discussed some of these sources in the past, but this essay gathers the various information sources together, characterizes and maps them and indicates the phenomenon. The national photography archives under discussion are composed of two kinds: 1. Civil establishment photography archives that serve national goals: Government Press Office — National Photo Collection, The Central Zionist Archives, Israel State Archives, Jewish National Fund Archive and The National Library of Israel. 2. Military photography archives: pre-state and state archives that serve military and national security interests such as the Israel Defense Forces and Defense Establishment Archives (IDFA), the Hagganah Archive and the Palmach Archive. When discussing the representation of Palestinian history as reflected in these archives, several factors must be considered: 1. In Palestinian visual historiography there are many missing chapters. Countless photographs and visual archives were looted, plundered, destroyed or lost during the 1948 war and subsequent wars, or as a consequence of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.16 Palestinian culture and history fell victim to the national conflict, and for the last two decades, Palestinian and Arab researchers have worked to complement parts of this physical loss, and to structure the Palestinian historiography.17 However, many of the missing chapters are stored and hidden in Israeli archives that allow limited access to Palestinian and Arab researchers, and, to a degree, to Israeli-critical researchers.

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2. The activities of the National Archives with regard to others, including Palestinians, incorporates, in many cases, two kinds of violence:18 2a. Documented physical violence. This is the visible aspect of the violence directed towards the Palestinian population, and is present in national institutional photography archives and others.19 It includes, for example, the theft and appropriation of land, exile, martial law and a military regime.20 The discussion about the visible aspects of violence in various projects draws largely on Walter Benjamin’s ‘Critique of Violence’, which analyses violence and power exercised by a ruling authority by virtue of the law.21 Joseph Pugliese claims that the documenting of scenes of violence becomes an instrument of violence itself. 22 In an essay dealing with archives of photographs of tortured detainees and of soldiers who tortured detainees in Iraq’s Abu Ghraib prison, he points to the photographic act and its physical outcome — the photograph — as part of the fascist mechanism that testifies to the abuse of human rights. For example, the humiliation suffered by the abused detainee does not end with the act of degradation itself, but with its documentation, which perpetuates it forever. Thus the camera too becomes an instrument of torture. Pugliese demonstrates how archives — ‘shadow archives’ as defined by Allan Sekula23 — also become part of the American colonial mechanism of violence made visible through the representation of the oppressed body. He describes how these archives are dominated and controlled by a visual regime, and the way meaning is reframed in the context dictated by different mechanisms of power.24 2b. Functional violence inherent in archival structures. This violence is embedded and entrenched in the structure and operations of national, institutional archives and in their physical and fundamental actions. The power applied and its structure, normally concealed, is an integral part of institutional mechanisms based on ideological, repressive aspects. It is expressed in the formation of archives and their mode of operation, as well as in their ethical functioning — their underlying objectives and norms — and in the laws and rules that regulate the activities of gathering, preserving, archiving and distributing. This type of violence is usually intrinsic and not apparent, and dictates what to document and collect, and what to preserve, although it is sometimes wrapped in visible aspects of physical violence, such as the looting mentioned above. These moral and functional aspects are quite evasive and their aggressive aspects are generally camouflaged, so the need to bring them to public awareness requires exposure and knowledge. Military and security materials in Israeli archives concerning Palestinians largely reflect the direct and indirect violation of human rights. The direct violation of human rights originated mainly with a variety of activities whose objective was intelligence gathering for military and operational purposes, most of

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them based on the dual operation of power relations. On one hand, the method used by units and military archives to gather information (booty, looting, secret and prohibited copying of material from other archives, intelligence gathering by various means and so on), and, on the other, the management practices of archives and their limits on exposure of certain materials to the public (censorship and restrictions on viewing). The indirect aspect of human rights violations includes, for example, the denial of Palestinian existence. This too can be classified as functional violence. It is reflected in the way pre-state civil bodies, such as the Jewish National Fund and The National Foundation Fund, acted to promote Zionist propaganda in the country and abroad, excluding the Palestinian entity from the regional lexicon, and omitting their presence in the public sphere. These bodies were engaged in constructing a moral justification for Jewish settlement, describing the land as empty, ruined and deserted, and Zionist settlement as an act of redeeming the land. Ignoring the Palestinian population, and its rich economic, educational and cultural life, was intended to serve national marketing objectives, and involved the use of force.25 The article focuses mainly on this type of violence, inherent in the archives, and less on the overt and documented violence. In the process of analysing materials taken by force from Palestinians and information gathered about Palestinians in photography archives, I encountered two different types of data: direct information and information that needed to be extracted from the archive on which this essay will focus. The category of information correlates, to a certain extent, with the type of violence involved in collecting these materials.

Information That Needs to be Extracted from the Archives Much of the information about Palestinians stored in photography archives is catalogued, accompanied by texts and published in frameworks that blur the Palestinian context. More than once over the years, I have had to liberate these connections, pointing out their innate information, which allows them to be read and interpreted in a manner at variance with that enforced by the archives. The first time I offered to ‘strip’ photographs connected to Palestinian existence from their imposed Zionist national context was in the essay ‘The Absent-Present Palestinian Villages’, where I suggested the need to decipher the contradictory meanings that can be found in the archives that are occasionally opposite in their nature and visible intention, and to crack their facade.26 The essay discusses the representation of displaced Palestinian communities in Israeli collective consciousness, as reflected in the Government Press Office — National Photo Collection attached to the Prime Minister’s Office, and the Photography Archive of the National Jewish Fund. It deals with villages whose residents fled or were expelled in the 1948 war, and were prevented Rethinking National Archives in Colonial Countries and Zones of Conflic

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from returning to their homes by the Jewish state. Jewish immigrants who arrived in the massive waves of immigration between the years 1948 to 1950 repopulated most of these villages. Some of them were destroyed by the Israeli army, with the aim of preventing Palestinians from returning, and in order to erase them from the map and from public consciousness and eliminate them from memory.27 In a book that discusses the birth of the Palestinian refugee problem, Benny Morris demonstrates that at first, in 1948, the state established settlements outside the built-up area of displaced Arab villages, while many of the settlements that were founded in 1949 and later were established in the villages themselves, since it was quicker and less expensive to rehabilitate them than to build a new settlement.28 The photographs documenting Jewish settlement in Palestinian villages are the only remaining evidence of these communities, moments after their physical and legal possession and just before losing their Palestinian identity and becoming Israeli. Although the original inhabitants were exiled — they were considered Absent-Present by the Israeli state29 — and there is no record of the physical violence used against them, many of the photographs show entire villages, homes and fields, making it possible to reveal what Israeli collective memory has repressed: the tragedy experienced by the Palestinian population. Over the years these villages have altered their structure, character and identity. In areas where Palestinian lands were transferred to Jewish hands, methods of farming, types of crops and the rural structures of the villages began to change; the distinctive landscape of Palestinian agricultural settlement developing characteristics of Jewish agricultural settlement. The photographs show the absorption of Jewish immigrants in the new state on the ruins of the Palestinian entity, and thus have two different ethnic and geographical features that, combined, create a new reality: on one hand, the Palestinian village with its distinctiveness, style and methods of cultivating the land, symbolizing the missing Palestinian entity, and, on the other hand, new settlers, engaging in daily activities that symbolize the normality of Jewish settlement — sewing, embroidery, study, garden work and so on. These photographs were created as part of Zionist propaganda that sought to document the proliferation of Jews in the young country as a continuation of the pre-state Zionist ethos of kibush hashmama (redeeming the land), and to bypass the UN resolution allowing the refugees to return home. Supposedly, these are pure Zionist photographs: they were used to document the activities of the Jewish National Fund and the State of Israel in settling the land, and as part of its public relations and fundraising efforts. According to this standpoint, Israel’s very existence was conditional on Jewish possession of most of the land that could be controlled and settled. Thus, the official appearance of the photographs is entirely Zionist. However, this stance did not confront the ethical and legal questions that should have arisen, questions that are in fact expressed in photographs that appear seemingly innocent. The

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absent becomes present via the land, the houses and the vegetation, and those present appear largely foreign in the landscape. In many instances the Jewish immigrants are dressed in clothes from their country of origin, and their alienation from the local land hints at the identity of the people who worked it, who lived in the photographed houses and were an integral part of the environment. Above all, the combination of different ethnic and architectural characteristics seen in each image indicates the people who were part of the landscape and are now absent. Indeed, whoever ordered the photographs, like the majority of the Israeli population, was blind to the Palestinian entity, wishing to present only the Israeli human landscape and the kibbutz-galuyoth (gathering of the exiles) of new Jewish immigrants from all over the world. In spite of their original objective, after liberating the photographs from their propaganda aspect, the absent become visible, the missing become present and the forgotten become speakers of memory that bring to life the map of the country in its previous configuration. Thus, regardless of their original intention, the Zionist photographs become the mouthpiece of the Palestinian catastrophe. Another example is from the field of military photography. Jewish intelligence bodies began collecting information about the Palestinian entity before the establishment of the State of Israel, marking the beginning of military Jewish photography in Palestine. Soldiers, scouts and Jewish pilots collected data for operational intelligence that in due time would provide assistance for the future occupation of the Palestinian population, and for controlling and monitoring the population after occupation. In this way information was collected about Palestinian communities and those Palestinians who took part in resisting the Zionist enterprise. This intelligence activity, which began in the late 1920s, became institutionalized and organized in the 1940s in its various fields, among them the field of photography. Direct photography of Palestinian targets — aerial photographs, photographs from the ground, ‘village files’30 and a photographer disguised as a Palestinian — were among the methods used by Jewish military bodies to collect information about the Palestinian community and Palestinian existence in Palestine.31 However, these bodies also used other methods, such as the looting of photographs and archives from Palestinian bodies and individuals, the looting of images during battle or after by Jewish/ Israeli citizens who assimilated the language of power and the duplication of material from British sources. The information gathered about Palestinian villages, towns and populations became a large reservoir of knowledge, with a historical and cultural value that expropriates the visual data from its limited function as a military document. For example, the visual information taken on the ground and from the air, as well as the textual information collected by Jewish scouts and Palestinian informers, was detailed, extensive and comprehensive, and dealt with many aspects — from geographic and demographic data to economic and social.32 The aerial photographs taken by the Palmach Squadron from late 1946 was, for instance, part of a network of initiated and Rethinking National Archives in Colonial Countries and Zones of Conflic

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organized intelligence gathering, documenting the many Palestinian villages in preparation for a future national conflagration or war, or in order to occupy and control them. Aerial photography assisted in studying the area and in constructing topographical maps for future military aims: it included details of the landscape, and gave the most up-to-date depiction of the terrain, including all the latest changes, allowing control over territory that was not reachable in any other way.33 These photographs served a military operational purpose before and after 1948 (as part of the control over the Palestinian population during military rule), but today they can help reconstruct the geographical distribution of Palestinians before 1948, supplying a detailed description of every locality. From a historical perspective, these photographs, most of them from 1947 to 1948, are the last comprehensive and systematic documentation of Palestinian settlements before they were destroyed or resettled by Jewish immigrants, making it possible to build a map of the country from a Palestinian perspective. Paradoxically, even though photographed by Israeli military bodies in the service of operational national Zionist aims, and in spite of their tendentious nature,34 they now, in fact, offer much information on the destruction of the Palestinian entity.35

Afterword My research over the years has dealt with the question of tyranny that characterizes the activities of Israel’s national institutional photography archives. I discussed the power relations that shaped them and the significant role they played in determining the perception and writing of history. Derrida points to violence as one of the main features inherent in the archive, embodying governmental information/power relations.36 These aggressive relationships are intensified in a country where two peoples — occupiers and occupied — live in a national conflict and are present, for example, in the way institutional archives control both the national treasures of the vanquished and the knowledge of their history and culture. Pointing out the overt and covert mechanisms in these national institutional archives by stripping away and exposing their inherent national bias, lays the foundation for building an alternative, layered database, different from the one-sided worldview that characterizes them. This enables the original purpose of the archives to be undermined and, in the words of McEvan, put through a process of democratization.37 However, while in South Africa civil organizations and government are aware of the importance of establishing post-colonial (post-apartheid) archives, in Israel the situation is different. Although in recent years additional studies have started to breach this national cover, exposing excluded areas of knowledge and research, in Israel they still exist on the margins and there is ample room to read archives in a way that penetrates their facade of physical violence.

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It is also necessary to deconstruct the archive’s structure, and to propose alternative mechanisms of reading, interpretation and criticism in addition to those discussed in this essay. The voice of the subjugated is not entirely absent from national, institutional archives in Israel, but exists in an emasculated and misleading form. In this essay, I wanted to raise the possibility of hearing these voices that are seemingly missing from the archives. Freeing the national archives from their chains, and the construction of an independent memory and history — by challenging the national database and providing a platform for Palestinian voices and the return of their looted and seized materials — are the first steps in establishing alternative national archives in Israel. However, stripping away their outer-wrapping does not replace the importance of hearing the voices of the oppressed, learning their history and restoring their ownership and rights.

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1. An extensive version of this paper was presented in the conference ‘Lifta — Last Call’, Bezalel, Academy for Art and Design, Jerusalem (July 2013) and published in Reality Trauma and the Inner Grammar of Photography [in Hebrew] (Israel: The Shpileman Institute of Photography, 2012). 2. Rona Sela, Photography in Palestine in the 1930s and 1940s [in Hebrew] (Tel Aviv, Hakibbutz Hameuchad Publishing House, 2000); Rona Sela, Six Days Plus Forty Years [in Hebrew] (Petach Tikva: Petach Tikva Museum of Art, 2007); and Rona Sela, Made Public — Palestinian Photographs in Military Archives in Israel [in Hebrew] (Israel: Helena Publishing House, 2009). 3. Sela, Photography in Palestine, op cit.; Sela, Six Days Plus Forty Years, op cit.; and Sela, Made Public, op cit. 4. Sela, Photography in Palestine, op cit.; Sela, Six Days Plus Forty Years, op cit.; and Sela, Made Public, op cit. 5. Sela, Six Days Plus Forty Years, op cit. 6. Jacques Derrida, Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression, trans. Eric Prenowitz (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1998), 22. 7. Allan Sekula, ‘Reading an Archive: Photography between Labour and Capital’ in The Photography Reader, ed. Liz Wells (London and New York: Routledge, 2004), 444–5. In ‘The Body and the Archive’, Sekula, drawing on Foucault, points to the double system of photographic portraiture ‘a system of representation capable of functioning both honorifically and repressively’. This double operation ‘extends, accelerates, popularizes and degrades’ the traditional functioning of the bourgeois self, at the same time indicating the repressive social relationship with regards to the other, which enables the ‘social body’ to be defined. See: Allan Sekula, ‘The Body and the Archive’, October, Vol. 39 (1986): 6–11. 8. Sekula, ‘Reading an Archive’, op cit., 444–5. 9. Derrida, op cit., 13. 10. Ann Laura Stoler, ‘Colonial Aphasia: Race and Disabled Histories in France’, Public Culture, Vol. 23, no. 1 (2011): 153–6. 11. Cheryl McEwan, ‘Building a Post-colonial Archive? Gender, Collective Memory and Citizenship in PostApartheid South Africa’, Journal of Southern African Studies, Vol. 29, no. 3 (2003): 739–57. 12. In recent years some researchers, as an extension of their political views, began to make critical use of national archives, for example: Chava Brownfield–Stein, ‘On Ghosts Reappearing From behind One Famous War Photograph’ [in Hebrew], Sedek Magazine, no. 1 (2007): 50–8; Ariella Azoulay, Act of State (Tel Aviv: Etgar Publisher, 2008); and Ariella Azoulay, Constituent Violence 1947–1950 [in Hebrew] (Tel Aviv: Resling Publishing, 2009). However, these researchers did not point to the subversive potential in national archives, and the possibility of formalizing alternative archives based on them.

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13. Thus, for example, when I was the chief curator of the Haifa City Museum, I planned to show an exhibition that aimed to deal with the dramatic changes that occurred in the country in 1948 — both the Palestinian catastrophe and the building of the Jewish state on the ruins of the Palestinian entity. The idea that I would expose the Palestinian tragedy and narrative was perceived as controversial and I was fired from the museum. Dani Ben-Simhon, ‘1948 Haunts the Haifa Art Museum’, Challenge, A Magazine Covering the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict, Vol. 108 (2008), http:// www.challenge-mag.com/en/article__207/ (accessed 18 November 2012). 14. Not only in terms of quality but in terms of content. Because of censorship laws and restrictions on viewing in Israeli law, which enables archives to avoid disclosing material for 50 years from its date of issue, most of the materials relating to the Palestinians currently opened for inspection and use are from no later than the 1950s. See: Sela, Made Public, op cit. 15. With one exception, which relates to textual archives, this essay deals with national, institutional Zionist photography archives, and not private collections holding Palestinian collections and photographs. The latter reflect the manner in which individuals in a society internalize codes of institutional power systems, and how practices of power permeate the private and civil sphere. See: Sela, Made Public, op cit. 16. For example, the archive of the photographer Chalil Rissas, whose shop was seized after the 1948 war, photographs from World War I, pillaged from the Nashashibi family in Jerusalem by an Israeli soldier, looted photograph taken from the office of Rashid Haj Ibrahim in Haifa in the 1940s, the Palestine research Center (known in Israel as the ‘PLO Archive’) taken by force in Beirut by Israeli soldiers in 1982, The Orient House Archive in Jerusalem looted in 2001 by the Israeli Police and more. All these archives are described extensively in: Sela, Made Public, op cit. Photographs seized from a dead Arab soldier during the 1948 war are depicted in: Rona Sela, ‘The Archive of Horror’, Ibraaz Platform for discussion 006 (2013), http://www. ibraaz.org/platforms/6/responses/141/ (accessed 10 August 2014). It is important to emphasize that these researches point to the phenomena and hint at the vast amount of looted Palestinian archives and photographs that are still censored in Israeli archives. Another type of loss comes from the plunder of Palestinian books. See: Gish Amit, ‘Salvage or Plunder? Israel’s “Collection” of Private Palestinian Libraries in West Jerusalem’, Mita’am: A Review of Literature and Radical Thought, Vol. 8 (2006): 12–22. 17. Rona Sela, ‘Pictorial History of Palestine’, Theory and Criticism [in Hebrew], Vol. 31, no. 2 (2007): 302–10. 18. Violence is part of the colonial situation as many scholars demonstrate. For example: Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, trans. Constance Farrington (New York: Grove Press, 1968); and Albert Memmi, Decolonization and the Decolonized (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2006).

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19. The topic is also at the heart of other research studies. Ariella Azoulay, for example, exposes the physical violence reflected in various archives, not only Israeli but also Palestinian and foreign: Azoulay, Constituent Violence, 1947–1950, op cit. 20. Aspects of this nature are expressed in other colonial countries, such as in post-colonial archives in South Africa, mentioned earlier. McEwan, ‘Building a Post-colonial Archive?’, op cit. 21. Walter Benjamin, ‘Critique of Violence’ in On Violence: A Reader, eds Bruce B. Lawrence and Aisha Karim (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2007), 268–85. 22. Joseph Pugliese, ‘Abu Ghraib and Its Shadow Archives’, Law and Literature, Vol. 19, no. 2 (2007): 249–61. 23. Allan Sekula, ‘The Body and the Archive’, op cit.: 10–11. 24. Pugliese, ‘Abu Ghraib and Its Shadow Archives’, op cit. 25. Sela, Photography in Palestine, op cit. 26. Sela, ‘The Absent-Present Palestinian Villages’, op cit., and Sela, Made Public, op cit. 27. Arnon Golan, ‘The Transfer of Abandoned Rural Arab Lands to Jews During Israel’s War of Independence’ [in Hebrew], Cathedra, Vol. 63 (1992): 122–54. 28. Benny Morris, The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem, 1947–1949 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988). 29. In 1948, the new Israeli state closed its borders to the Palestinians who wished to return to their homes and expropriated their houses in towns and villages, declaring them ‘abandoned property’. In March 1950, the state regulated the subject in the framework of the Absentee Property Law designed to prevent Palestinian refugees from claiming their property. Instead of Abandoned Property the property became Absentee Property. See: ‘Absentees Property Law 5710 — 1950’, Israel Law Resource Center, http://www.geocities.com/ savepalestinenow/israellaws/fulltext/absenteepropertylaw.htm/ (accessed 10 August 2014). 30. ‘Village files’ was an organized pre-state Jewish military intelligence gathering about targets — mainly Palestinian villages, but also police stations and military camps. It was carried out mainly by Jewish scouts, volunteers and information officers of the Haganah from 1943 to 1948 due to lack of information for operation planning purposes and for the future occupation of villages. The system was based largely on visual gathering — photography from the ground and from the air, drawing, sketching and mapping. Its main purpose was to learn how the villages were planned and structured, the main roads, landscape and topographical data. In the same period (1940–48) very detailed textual surveys were prepared about the villages by a separate body of the Haganah, SHAI (The Intelligence Service). They included extensive information about the

villages and their populations: historical, agricultural, demographical, architectural, social, economic, military, education, families and leaders and so on, as well as main roads that lead to the villages, water sources, the villages’ topography and the like. Early studies on the subject do not differentiate between the two methods: Ian Black and Benny Morris, Israel’s Secret Wars: A History of Israel’s Intelligence Services (London: Hamish Hamilton, 1991), 24–5, 129; Meron Benvenisti, Sacred Landscape, The Buried History of the Holy Land since 1948 (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2000), 70–1; and Ilan Pappe, The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine (Oxford: Oneworld, 2006), 17–22. Yoav Gelber was apparently the first to distinguish between the surveys and the ‘village files’, but at the same time wrote that they were both taken by SHAI which was not the case: Yoav Gelber, The History of Israeli Intelligence, Part I: Growing a Fleur-de-Lis: The Intelligence Services of the Jewish Yishuv in Palestine, 1918–1947 (Tel Aviv: Israel Ministry of Defense Publications, 1992), 329–30, 526–7. The confusion between the two methods was indicated in: Shimri Salomon, ‘The Haganah’s Arab Intelligence Service and Project for Surveying Arab Settlement in Palestine, 1940–1948’ [in Hebrew], A Sheet from the Cache, Quarterly Bulletin of the Haganah Archives, Vol. 3 (2001): 9–10. See also: Yitzchak Eran, The Scouts [in Hebrew] (Tel Aviv: Israel Ministry of Defense Publications, 1994); Sela, Made Public, op cit.; and Shimri Salomon, ‘The Village Files Project: A Chapter in the Development of the Haganah’s Military Intelligence, Part 1: 1943–1945’ [in Hebrew], The Haganah Research Pamphlets, no. 1 (2010). 31. Sela, Made Public, op cit. 32. Ibid. 33. Ibid., 53–6. 34. When I searched the Haganah Archive in early 2009, I found hundreds of photographs of this nature. Now, when reviewing the archive once again, there were only a few dozen of them (mainly those I scanned for Made Public). It is not clear whether they disappeared accidentally after publication of the book. 35. It will join other sources of information such as Walid Khalidi’s important book: All That Remains: The Palestinian Villages Occupied and Depopulated by Israel in 1948 (Washington, DC: Institute for Palestine Studies, 1992), other sources mentioned in his book and Salman Abu-Sitta’s extensive: Atlas of Palestine (London: Palestine Land Society, 2004), that used Israeli sources in a limited way. Efraim Karsh claims that Khalidi overlooked the ‘village files’ and the air-photographs as sources for his book: All That Remains (1992). See: Efraim Karsh, Fabricating Israeli History: The New Historians (Oxford: Routledge, 2000), 12. 36. Derrida, Archive Fever, op cit., 15–21. 37. McEwan, ‘Building a Post-colonial Archive?’, op cit.: 742.

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Coming to Terms Contemporary Art, Civil Society and Knowledge Politics in the ‘Middle East’ Tom Holert

I In November 2013, Italian-Libyan artist Adelita Husni-Bey met with journalists of Mada Masr, an independent online Egyptian newspaper, to discuss issues of vocabulary, wording and translation in the aftermath of the ousting of President Mohammed Mursi on 3 July 2013. The resulting multi-part installation, (On) Difficult Terms (2013) (fig. 1), has since been exhibited at, amongst other venues, a 2014 group show dealing with, ‘the space between the extremes of a factual and a non-factual history’,1 curated by Bonaventure Soh Bejeng Ndikung and Elena Agudio at the Neuer Berliner Kunstverein (n.b.k.) and Savvy Contemporary in Berlin. Giving Contours (2014), an attempt at a post-colonial reordering of historiography through the ‘language’ of art and artists ‘whose works stand as a voice for the unspoken or the unuttered’, pointedly located Husni-Bey’s installation in a conversation around the possibilities of anti-hegemonic narratives and the fallibility of written discourse in such times as now; that may or may not be called post-revolutionary.2 Commissioned by the Cairo-based exhibition space and research platform Beirut to develop an on-site work, Husni-Bey came to Egypt for the first time in autumn 2013. Equipped with a background in sociology as well as fine art, she arrived in the Egyptian capital with considerable experience in organizing workshops and other pedagogical formats on topics such as radical schooling or housing politics. All of these elements are typical of a cross-disciplinary artistic practice that, in her case, usually leads towards multimedia installation work. The displayable outcome of the meeting with the people from Mada Masr consists of one wall-sized print and 14 framed black and white photographs of subsequent stages in the making of a wall drawing which Husni-Bey produced as a heuristic device to structure and visualize the discussion. Headphones accompany the visual components of

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(fig. 1) Adelita Husni-Bey, (On) Difficult Terms, 2013. MP3 audio, 33 min; series of black and white photographs, 30 x 40 cm; wallpaper, 400 x 300 cm. Courtesy of the artist, Beirut, Mada Masr and Galleria Laveronica.

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(On) Difficult Terms through which the viewer may listen to 40 minutes of edited audio excerpted from the five-hour meeting. As a ‘cultural producer’3 connecting non-art audiences and social contexts with art spaces and communities and thus engaged in an ongoing process of interpretation and mediation, Husni-Bey assumed the journalists, editors and other contributors of Mada Masr may well share her fundamental concern with issues of translation. The mutual task of translating, as it is pursued in different cultural spheres, deploying different strategies, media and institutions of communication, henceforth became a ‘scenario’ for the workshop that Husni-Bey facilitated in the newspaper’s offices. The starting point of the discussion and the initial text Husni-Bey had herself written on the wall in the centre of the — soon to be evolving — mind map, was the phrase ‘Tahrir is (not) a square’. The invocation of the geographical symbol of the Egypt uprising that started in January 2011 and rapidly became the meme linking the anti-Mubarak movement to subsequent protests in Madrid, New York, Istanbul and elsewhere met with some scepticism. In her opening remarks Husni-Bey hastened to emphasize how keenly she is aware that ‘Tahrir’ has become ‘so overused, so overbearing, that it lost its meaning’.4 Interestingly, the same slogan, ‘Tahrir is not a square’, was deployed around the same time by Sarah Rifky, one of Beirut’s founders. In a contribution to the blog pertaining to global activism, a 2013–14 exhibition at ZKM in Karlsruhe, Germany, Rifky defied, in characteristic poetic style, the globally mediatized and marketed symbolism of Tahrir square, declaring it not to be a square at all but a ‘circle and a roundabout’ that ‘behaves like a square on which the creation of self-generating circles that become spheres takes place. These spheres are like soap: slippery, and forming bubbles that take to the sky and defy gravity.’5 One could understand these lines to be saying that rather than becoming a solid and reliable referent for the protestors that toppled the Mubarak regime, in the course of events, Tahrir square had instead turned into a sign that is being manipulated infinitely and rendered malleable, in slippery and bubbly fashion. Rifky’s basic lesson on the instability of meaning attached to symbols and signs, and on the risks imposed on the desire to fix meaning, resonated in the discussion involving Husni-Bey and Mada Masr. Touching on the ideological ambiguity or utter impracticability of key terms such as ‘revolution’, ‘coup’, ‘martyr’, ‘propaganda’, ‘occupation’, ‘Arab’, ‘Arab spring’, ‘deep state’ or ‘democracy’ deployed regularly by western media in reporting on the ‘Egypt situation’, the artist and journalists together produced a kind of critical glossary of a historical moment in need of constant translation and definition.6 Not one of the terms remained undisputed, most were defied or even refuted as expressions of a certain hegemonic stance. The discussion also documents tensions that traverse the newspapers’ office, displaying different lines of thought as well as the eternal conflict between reporters and copy

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editors. The mind map that Husni-Bey started to draw on one of the office’s walls, and which further evolved after the meeting, is testament to this transitory state. A prototypical brainstorming tool of post-Fordist management, it conveys iconic qualities that could well invite a number of different audiences, the one present during the meeting as well as those encountering the Mada Masr mind map in Husni-Bey’s installation, accessing a complex set of linguistic and discursive tasks. Provisional and improvised, this map speaks of a collective mind very much in the making, exploring and experiencing the power-knowledge of political discourse. The artist has used her experience in pedagogy to the advantage of a project that hovers purposively between the poetic and the epistemological, between the pleasure of the text and an acknowledgment of its own looseness. Quite literally, (On) Difficult Terms documents the difficulties of finding the appropriate, intelligible and critically valid terms for ‘independent, progressive journalism’.7 Demonstrating these difficulties and the linguistic competence and intellectual reflexivity necessary to avoid the traps and pitfalls of ideological jargonizing, the installation also evokes the specific role and responsibility of a local newspaper that is published bilingually, with an articulate interest in reaching a local and international readership. I would not have been able to discuss Husni-Bey or Mada Masr’s work were it not for the fact that this conversation had been held in English. Whether it is possible for anyone who does not speak Arabic to enter into any truly effective discussion on the political semantics of contemporary Egypt is questionable at the least. However, a sense of the very ‘linguistic unrest’, identified by linguist Reem Bassiouney in the 2011 Egyptian uprising (which Bassiouney dubbed as ‘revolution’ with far less hesitation than the journalists at Mada Masr), is certainly being transmitted.8 In a revolutionary process that entailed countless acts of reading and translation — from the reappropriation of rituals and festivities of popular mulid (birthday celebrations for religious or spiritual figures) by the demonstrations and performances in Tahrir square, to the ‘thick translation’, in which ‘the revolutionary moment is read as a layered and open text’, as literary critic Samia Mehrez, editor of the 2012 volume Translating Egypt’s Revolution, has it.9 A review of the latter book that was published in Mada Masr’s precursor, the Egypt Independent, singled out Sarah Hawas’ essay on certain concepts developed in Egypt and their distribution and re-enactment in the linguistic and social imaginations of Greece, Israel, Spain or the US, from activist to mainstream media coverage: ‘The meaning of the word “thawra” or “revolution” looks very different in Tahrir versus how it looks after it has been translated, familiarized and recreated into the words of, for instance, New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman.’10 Seen against this background, HusniBey’s (On) Difficult Terms, knowingly or not, revisits a debate around issues

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of translation that appear to have been intimately woven into the Egyptian events from the very start. It is however difficult to specify precisely to what extent the English language has become a ‘linguistic resource’ — in the sense in which Bassiouney uses the term in her research into ‘stance and identity construction’ with regard to a ‘distinct Egyptian identity’ — comparable with Modern Standard Arabic (considered as the legitimate code) or Egyptian colloquial Arabic. Bassiouney is interested in finding out what language the protestors in 2011 really used. While pro-Mubarak media claimed that English and Egyptian Arabic, one foreign, the other vernacular, were the languages of the uprising, Bassiouney notes that other commentators took a different turn and considered the institutional Standard Arabic discourse to be the actual revolutionary language that helped unify the various local uprisings in the so-called Arab world.11 (On) Difficult Terms addresses the issue of access to linguistic resources directly and indirectly. Through the artist’s use of English as a visitor’s language as well as a linguistic and cultural resource accessed and used by Mada Masr to reach non-Arabic-speaking audiences and to interact with (and inform) public discourses within and beyond Egypt, the work renders the debate accessible for those on the outside of it, but simultaneously excludes those who do not speak English. Though the issue of the use of the foreign, if routinely accepted, lingua franca is not directly addressed in the exhibition version of the work,12 questions of class, education, knowledge and power become tangible through its use. English arguably operates as a resource for constructing professional, political and cultural identities in the fluent exchange between the artist and the journalists. It also works as a filtering or compressing device, organizing the trans-local availability of a specific discourse and designing its linguistic surface. In its regulating ways, English attains an archival function in the Foucauldian meaning of the term archive, as it determines the translatory throughput from Standard or Egypt Arabic or, in the hands of those using the foreign language to speak and write, it becomes immediately productive of discourse. Moreover, if the archive, in the definition of Michel Foucault’s famous 1969 text Archaeology of Knowledge, is a system of relations between the unsaid and the said, the struggle over the use of key terms in the political discourse of a country participates in a quintessential archival endeavour. HusniBey and Mada Masr’s mind map could be described as an oblique portrait of the laborious ‘taking place of enunciation’ that Giorgio Agamben invokes in his 1998 Remnants of Auschwitz: The Witness and the Archive. Paraphrasing Foucault, Agamben locates the archive between the langue (‘the system of construction of possible sentences’) and the corpus (uniting ‘the set of what has been said, the things actually uttered or written’).13 The archive appears to be ‘the mass of the non-semantic inscribed in every meaningful discourse as a function of its enunciation; it is the dark margin encircling and limiting

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every concrete act of speech’.14 The difficult and critical search for the right terms in a constantly changing situation of semantic struggle and translation, as is partly documented, visually and acoustically, in Husni-Bey’s installation, seems to be more about the said than the unsaid and is decidedly explicit when it comes to fighting or defending certain uses of concepts and terminology. Nonetheless the mind map itself could be read as a diagrammatic mask that covers the very ‘mass of the non-semantic’ that constitutes the archive and that is inscribed in every statement made, as the trace of the relation between the actually said and the potency of the sayable. II So, where does the particular ‘taking place of the enunciation’, as encapsulated in (On) Difficult Terms, take place? Deeply engaged in the Egyptian uprisings and firmly rooted in a leftist, cosmopolitan faction of the intellectual scene in Cairo, those associated with and actually running Mada Masr were a quite natural choice to invite to the kind of collaboration Adelita Husni-Bey instigated. Mada Masr had been founded only a few months earlier, on 30 June 2013, following the shutdown of the English language weekly newspaper Egypt Independent by its owner, the Al-Masry Media Corporation. In the first article published on the newly created web platform the editors recalled, self-critically, how they envisioned a different kind of journalism during the conversations held after being laid off. Looking back, they acknowledged a lack of economy coverage at Egypt Independent in favour of institutional and street politics; and fostering the individual reporter’s voice, they may have sometimes verged on elitism. ‘We decided we want to publish in Arabic as well as English, that we want to see more data-based reports, more investigative journalism. We want to experiment with different ways of storytelling. And very importantly, develop a business model and deploy a visionary commercial team that helps make our work sustainable.’15 This multiple emphasis on a rejuvenation of fact-based journalistic commitment, innovative narrative strategies and a sense of creative business not only speaks of a desire to report and comment differently on contemporary Egyptian politics, economy and culture (and in so doing, deploy uncommon, forgotten or to-be-invented aesthetic methodologies), but also of the necessity to cope successfully with a local and global commercial environment crying out for creativity — and not only in editorial terms. The knowledge production of the ‘independent, progressive journalism’ at Mada Masr is unavoidably entangled in a neo-liberal framework of market imperatives. This is less a trivial or deterministic observation than one may think. Similar to discussions in contemporary art, questions of ‘different ways of storytelling’ tend to be treated separately to reflections on the political economy of journalistic endeavours such as Mada Masr. Apparently this seems to be the Coming to Terms

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case even more where it pertains to cultural production in typical geopolitical abstractions such as the ominous ‘Middle East’ that a distanced, orientalizing western gaze constructs as predominantly characterized by turmoil, war, crisis, poverty and instability. Here, ‘culture’ or ‘the arts’, like ‘journalism’, are seen to belong to the somewhat pre- or non-economic realm of civil society where the organization of resistance and the rehearsal of resilience is taking place, while culture and critical thinking flourish under difficult conditions. The question now is, how or why civil society, commonly understood as the site of NGOs, community-based organizations and social movements, is expected to be productive of art and knowledge at all? From grassroots knowledge to citizen science, from participatory research to militant epistemologies, the — often transnational — platforms and networks are increasingly portrayed as hothouses of innovation and creativity.16 An NGO-type civil society actor, Beirut, the curatorial platform that invited Adelita Husni-Bey to Cairo, deliberately chose a knowledge-centred approach when it opened in 2012: As an (art) institution in process, you soon learn that self-organization and grassroots knowledge production, both individually and collectively, are your backbone. Young organizations in the region have collectively admitted the need to work closely on mutual support and visibility, knowledge exchange, and joining efforts on diversifying publics at this particular moment in time.17 In a gesture of self-evidence, Beirut draws from knowledge as the key resource of institution building. The orientation towards knowledge production comes naturally, as does self-definition as part of a certain civil society context. But how, as the invocation of ‘civil society’ time and again encourages us to associate this term with an epistemic environment nourishing social and political change, does this very context qualify as a site of the political at all? Contesting a conventional understanding of the notion of civil society, Marxist Middle East scholar Adam Hanieh emphasizes the importance of class formation and political economy to comprehend the problem of capitalism in the region.18 Hanieh further stresses internationalization as a major feature of neo-liberal restructurings in the Middle East, the transnational, border-crossing processes of money, commodities and people that he considers typical for ‘a region that is so integral to the way that the world system has developed’.19 Indeed, a critical assessment of potentially depoliticizing notions of ‘civil society’ seems due, particularly since they have become a key referent for external and internal readings of the ‘Arab uprisings’, including enthusiastic invocations of ‘strategies and practices of the civic’ by Okwui Enwezor20 or the ‘collective actions of non-collective actors’ — as political practices that are ‘part and parcel of the ordinary practices of everyday life’ as from Asef Bayat.21 Increasingly nuanced views of the ‘associational life in Middle East societies,

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where many different kinds of Islamic organization coexist, cooperate and compete with secular NGOs, think-tanks, women’s groups, protest movements, labour unions, media outlets and bloggers’, as per Michael Edwards,22 conversely require ever-more nuanced political ontologies. For instance, is the observation that the emergence of civil society patterns in the region appears, in many cases, to be a response to processes of neo-liberalization (privatization and deregulation of labour markets, for example) since the 1980s23 to be seen as antagonistic or rather affirmative with regard to such processes? Answering the question of where politics reside — whether one looks for them in the practice of ‘non-movements’, theorized by Bayat, or in the struggles around class, state and internationalization, as highlighted by Hanieh — is of immediate relevance for any discussion of cultural practices labelled contemporary art, as these are increasingly evaluated along the lines of their affiliations with or disentanglements from politics. Enthralled by demands to leave the alleged comfort zone of self-indulgent art worlds, contemporary artists and other art practitioners, especially in those parts of the world that are perceived as crisis-ridden and torn by conflict, are expected to act ‘responsibly’.24 Activism, or at least a readiness to intervene artistically in political and social processes, such as the struggle for social change, the fight against authoritarian regimes or the building and protecting of structures of civil society, has become somewhat obligatory. Posing (and attempting to answer) the above question on the location of politics is crucial both for an outsider of the cultural and political situation (such as myself) and for those who dwell inside and on-site, rooted in the local situation or being diasporically dis-entwined from it, whatever such topo-ontological demarcations may actually mean. A new arena of theoretical activism and political engagement that has been put on the map in recent years by theorists of decolonial critique such as Ann Laura Stoler, Walter D. Mignolo or Achille Mbembe and post-Operaist thinkers of ‘cognitive capitalism’ and Marx’s ‘general intellect’ (Yann Moulier Boutang, Paolo Virno, Maurizio Lazzarato, Andrea Fumagalli, Stefano Lucarelli and others) is knowledge itself, or, more precisely, the contestation of the very powers that control its distribution and reach. Among the main issues of such activism are questions of access and exclusion. Knowledge is considered as a common resource of social and political organization, but also as a speculative asset and commodity; it is critically framed as the medium of colonial dominance exerted through epistemic control, to be contested through acts of ‘de-linking’ the ‘Global South’ from western philosophical traditions while creating different, independent, self-determined ways of knowing. On the background of such ongoing, multidimensional struggles around epistemic violence and possibility, it becomes particularly important to assess the relationship between cultural practices and the transnational schemes of neo-liberal governance driven by normative ideas on the inevitability of a full integration of a knowledge economy (or knowledge society) into existing Coming to Terms

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economies and societies. In other words, the very ‘epistemic horizon of the neo-liberal ontological project’ is increasingly coming under the scrutiny of contemporary cultural practitioners.25 In the case of the Middle East and/or the ‘Arab World’, a clarion call was issued in 2006, when Ahmed Zewail, known as ‘the only Arab to receive the Nobel Prize in Science’ in 1999 for his work on femtochemistry, published an article titled ‘We Arabs Must Wage a New Form of Jihad’.26 Taking into account the wars in Lebanon, Palestine and Iraq, low GDPs, high levels of illiteracy and ‘deteriorating performance in education and science’, Zewail demanded a confident realignment with a glorious past of ‘world-class universities, and renowned scholars and scientists’, as ‘the Arab world has people with talent and creativity, with nearly half of the population in its youth’.27 Five years later, Zewail penned the foreword for a Global Research Report Middle East published by Thomson Reuters, referring back to his earlier article and the jihad metaphor, while proposing the creation of ‘centers of excellence in science and technology in each Muslim country […] to show that Muslims can indeed compete in today’s globalized economy and to instil in the youth the desire for learning’.28 Zewail, who teaches and researches in the US, at the California Institute of Technology, recommends ‘partnership-guided aid’, with ‘programs of excellence’ to implement ‘criteria set by the developed nations’.29 Such a vision of a globalized neo-liberal model of education, research and knowledge production, relying on the import and investment of western institutions and development agencies and probably most abundantly embodied in the knowledge urbanism of Doha’s ‘Education City’, ‘Dubai International Academic City’, ‘NYU Abu Dhabi’ or Sharjah’s ‘University City’, is very much in sync with the 2009 UNESCO-driven Cairo Declaration on Higher Education in the Arab States, the Arab Knowledge Reports, published every two to three years by the Dubai-based Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum Foundation and the United Nations Development Programme, or the World Bank’s 2013 policy paper Transforming Arab Economies: Traveling the Knowledge and Innovation Road. The latter in particular makes sufficiently clear how job creation in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region is bound to entail ‘more investment in knowledge-related sectors and new emphasis on how to develop competitive, productive, and sustainable economies’.30 The ‘Arab world’ is urged to follow ‘a global move toward the “knowledge economy”’, and the ‘road’ is paved with notions of ‘more open and entrepreneurial economies’, ‘a better-educated and more skilled population’, the improvement of ‘innovation and research capabilities’ and the expansion of ‘information and communication technologies’.31 However, the colourful rhetoric deployed here cannot mask the fact that ‘[p]rogress toward transitioning into knowledge-intensive business services and other higher-value-added areas has remained limited’ in the region, as a 2014 IMF report sums up the situation in its own (disputable) terms.32 Conversely,

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claims have been made as to the immediate causal relation between the discourse of knowledge economy and the ‘Arab Springs’. Economist Abdelkader Djeflat argues that the promise of the knowledge-based economy paradigm actually contributed to the uprisings and their ‘appropriation by young people’; in vintage neo-liberal prose, Djeflat lists what would be required to further advance the mission of the knowledge economy, namely ‘reforms capable of inspiring and mobilizing large numbers of people to utilize new technologies, accept risk taking, innovate and engage in start-ups and entrepreneurial ventures’.33 This is not the place to go into the details of the failures and successes of such attempts at economic reforms and a redressing of societies and economies in the MENA region along the lines of the neo-liberal agenda. It needs to be emphasized though, with reference to Foucault and others, that this agenda is not limited to changes in national economic policies, the promotion of Information and Communications Technologies (ICT) business, the development of financial industries or the expansion of the higher education sector, but has a significant subjective and biopolitical dimension to it. The possessive and competitive individualism founded on a universalized economic reason links the governing by the state (or state-like ideological apparatuses) and the governing of the self. In the process, ‘knowledge’ is relentlessly operationalized and commodified. At the same time it appears highly individualized and subjectivized. An asset of every commodified individual’s ‘human capital’, ‘knowledge’ in a neo-liberal framework is a far cry from being a common, a shared and shareable good, and is thus in urgent, constant need of being reclaimed by the people. III To return to Cairo and the 2013 context of (On) Difficult Terms, journalism as pursued by a newspaper such as Mada Masr is distinctly and inevitably participating in the political economy of knowledge. It provides information and interpretation on issues that are usually controlled by mainstream media operating in close vicinity to state institutions and the ruling class. At the same time Mada Masr embodies the entrepreneurial spirit necessary to succeed in an environment of enhanced communication technologies, internationalization and the imperative towards a transformation of Egyptian society along the lines of globally implemented schemes of a knowledge-based economy. Rather less obvious is the fact that such involvement in a political economy of knowledge can also be detected in certain practices of contemporary artists. I would suggest a distinction between those art practices addressing issues of the accessibility, suppression, exploitation, racialization, gendering or financialization of knowledge, and therefore engage in what could be called ‘epistemic’ or ‘knowledge politics’, from a more general notion of ‘cultural Coming to Terms

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knowledge’ and its production and dissemination.34 Anthony Downey introduced the latter term in the context of Middle East art studies, and convincingly maps the cross-regional institutional infrastructure that allows such knowledge to flourish, often against the grain of authoritarian and fundamentalist cultural policies. Though ‘cultural knowledge’ is certainly a useful term to characterize the general type of ‘new’ knowledge that is — potentially at least — generated by artists, cultural institutions and other practitioners on social and cultural issues, it remains, arguably, slightly vague and somewhat broad a category to instigate any real controversy on the problems that may occur once the aesthetic becomes ‘firmly imbricate[d] […] within a civic dimension’.35 But Downey himself makes a poignant definition of ‘culture’ available as a place or medium of epistemic politics, when he states that it ‘encourages the production and exchange of knowledge, some of which will inevitably challenge the partitioning and distribution of meaning (and social relations) in societies through the region’.36 Constituted by expanding networks of practitioners, institutions, funders and audiences, ‘culture’ or ‘contemporary art’ thus appears to be invested in the transformation of societies and epistemic regimes in a region that is transformative almost by definition. Through the way in which ‘cultural knowledge’ is taken here as an epistemic production by the cultural actors in and of the region, the political position vis-à-vis these actors differs from a more common approach that seeks ‘knowledge’ about the region through contemporary art. A decade or so earlier, the mission of European art institutions was explorative in a very different sense. Catherine David’s curatorial project ‘Contemporary Arab Representations’, to cite only one example, claimed ‘to tackle heterogeneous situations and contexts which may sometimes be antagonistic or conflictive, to acquire more specific knowledge of what is going on in certain parts of the Arab world at present’.37 Albeit collaborating with regional and local actors, the multidisciplinary discursive exhibition project, in itself typical of the post-conceptualist educational, documentary and other epistemological turns in the art world since the 1990s, was conceived as a device of a ‘will to knowledge’, however self-critical the intention. This knowledge is arguably being made accessible via ‘representations’, images and texts of a situation that have to be decoded and translated to attain intelligibility for the outsider’s gaze. In a fairly critical assessment of David’s project, writer and curator Pablo Lafuente stresses the difference between the concepts of ‘art’ and ‘representation’ and argues that ‘[t]here is a gap between what an artist from Cairo is expected to produce and what an artist from Cairo actually produces’; contrary to any contextualist determinism provided by sociological, biographical, historical or cultural accounts, Lafuente continues, art is ‘not really a knowledge, in the strong sense of the word, but

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something closer to fiction that is in conflict with the dominant representation’.38 Hence, for one, art is to be protected from neo-liberal demands, from becoming reduced to a mode of ‘knowledge transfer’.39 Considered this way, ‘knowledge’ appears to be less a horizon of possibility than a highly problematic category, ready to suffocate contemporary art. Moreover, the ‘will to knowledge’ in the context of an art field becoming increasingly more research-oriented, discursive and academic is to be put into relation to the westernized ‘will to knowledge’ directed at regions such as the Middle East. IV The dominant representation, mentioned by Pablo Lafuente, can be one that constantly demands to pursue more knowledge on the situation in the Middle East, one that constantly asks for increasingly accurate contemporary Arab representations. Tony Chakar, an architect, theorist and activist from Beirut, responded eloquently to the imperative of knowledge production by and about the people in the region with his 2012 video Speak Mouthless (fig. 2), stating a case against ‘the incessant accumulation of knowledge’.40 The video was presented for the first time in January 2012 in a workshop-seminar on ‘Translating Revolutions’ at Haus der Kulturen der Welt (HWK), Berlin.41 Outlining the work on the website of the New York public art’s NGO Creative Time in June 2013, Chakar describes the peculiar circumstances of his contribution to the HKW workshop: ‘I showed a short video and a Powerpoint presentation, remaining silent throughout. I had asked that I be paid in cash at the end of my presentation, on stage. When I finished, the director came to me with an envelope. I opened it, counted the money and put it in my wallet.’42 In an attempt to ‘exonerate myself’, as Chakar further explains, the mode of payment on stage ‘was a gesture that says that I too am in the “system” that I point to in the work’.43 Without saying a word, thus leaving the stage to the video and his own mute presence, Chakar commented on the demands of discursive performance in a penultimate institutional context of cultural knowledge production, the Haus der Kulturen der Welt. However, he not only exhibited his reluctance to submit to the imperative of discursivity, he also showed a work that explicitly addresses knowledge politics on a global scale and proposes strategies to counter the epistemic violence implicit in the relationship between the western world and the Middle East. Speak Mouthless makes a case for the importance of the complex relation between silence and language, voice and text. The four-minute video, a sequence of still images, shows a group of men and children with their mouths duct taped, holding a banner bearing a date (December 4), written in Arabic on the bottom, and changing text (in English) in its main field. The scene has been photographed in Kafranbel, a town occupied (or liberated) by rebels in north-western Syria that gained an international reputation for being ‘a Coming to Terms

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▲

(fig. 2) Tony Chakar, screenshot from Speak Mouthless, 2012. Video, 4.14 min. Courtesy of the artist.

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scruffy Hollywood-in-a-bomb-shelter’.44 The town’s residents regularly produce anti-Assad videos, banners and signs, most of which can be found on the Web. Using the camera as an opportunity and the Web as a showcase for hand-made messages, texts and visuals are being displayed to the world in an ostentatious folk manner, while deliberately using English rather than Arabic to bring the content across. ‘It’s very important to send our message to all the world,’ an activist is quoted as saying on the website Occupied Liberated Kafranbel, ‘And English is the public language.’45 Chakar appropriated images posted by the people from Kafranbel and used them to transmit a message about epistemic asymmetries and the defiance of the will to knowledge. The empty banner shown in the photograph being carried and exposed by the people as they pose for the camera while being deprived of the possibility of a voice becomes the screen or canvas onto which Chakar projects his decolonial polemic. The text, which is divided into passages of three to eight lines, is carried further by the beat of a Powerpoint presentation that is converted into a video: At all times: the demands are coming in with such frenzy, such insistence, that any sane person cannot but stop, take a step back, and ask, before answering, ‘why do you want to know?’ Why do you want to know? What is the purpose of all these seminars, round tables, symposiums, publications? What will they lead to? What is most upsetting is this false sense of urgency, and this sense of amazement that ‘these things’ are still possible in the twentyfirst [sic] century. This state of emergency in which we live is not the exception but the rule. And I’m not speaking about the Arab world. I am speaking of the world. All of it. So — why do you want to know? Why do you want to know now? Why about this subject and not some other one? Why not, say, about the homeless people in Europe? Or any other subject closer to home? Is it not ‘hot’ enough? Is that it? While reading these sentences and in being confronted with their relentless questioning of the addressee’s (our, my) eagerness to increase general knowledge of the situation in the ‘region’, a sense of embarrassment or impatience vis-à-vis a Brechtian approach to interrogation manifests and grows. At the same time I wonder how the picture of the duct-taped faces, the constant, unchanging gaze towards the camera and thus of course me (i.e., the

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eye and the self as protagonist/receiver who reflects and is designed to be included by the piece itself), relates to the progressing text that is written from a slightly different perspective, blended onto the banner carried by the men from Kafranbel. Chakar didn’t ask for permission to use the image that was produced across the border from Lebanon; he didn’t know anyone from the town at the time that the work based on the photograph was produced (though he later befriended some Kafranbel residents via Facebook, receiving positive feedback from the community). Authorship becomes reconfigured in the process, a well-known characteristic of Chakar’s work that constantly raises issues of copyright, deploys strategies of appropriation and centres on ‘the notion of quoting and citation’.46 Through putting his own text in a place where it fits, but doesn’t necessarily belong, he literally displaces the discourse of epistemological critique while amplifying it through the strong visual appearance of the Kafranbel people. The location of knowledge and critique becomes negotiable. Knowledge production in the increasingly placeless, digitized space of contemporary art and a transnationally networked civil society is rebuked by Chakar. In the formats and vectors of knowledge production (privileged by the art world and by a professionalized civil society) the artist, who has no desire to be considered either an ‘artist’ or of ‘the region’,47 detects an inequality and asymmetry in need of being addressed artistically. A complicated task that has to be properly performed, by being mute and being paid in cash, hence, ‘knowledge economy’. Why do you want to know? I came here to ask you this question, and to ask of you to stop believing in your fundamental difference, because there’s not much difference between this obscure village in Syria and some obscure village anywhere in Europe. Because the Enemy is one, and it is everywhere.

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1. Bonaventure Soh Bejeng Ndikung and Elena Agudio, ‘Introduction’ in Giving Contours to Shadows, eds Marius Babias, Bonaventure Soh Bejeng Ndikung and Elena Agudio (Berlin: Neuer Berliner Kunstverein and Savvy Contemporary Berlin, 2014). Exhibition brochure.

2. Ibid. 3. Adelita Husni-Bey in conversation with Mada Masr, quoted from the audio of her work (On) Difficult Terms (2013). 4. Ibid. 5. Sarah Rifky, ‘Tahrir is not a square’ (2013), http:// www.blog.zkm.de/en/dialogue/tahrir-not-square/#sthash.ZNcAURsc.dpuf/ (accessed 26 July 2014). 6. In this regard, Husni-Bey’s work could be productively compared to Amira Hanafi’s ongoing A Dictionary of the Revolution project, in which the Cairo-based artist conducts live interviews all over Egypt using vocabulary cards with ‘revolutionary’ terms, with the aim to write a book in ‘aamiyya, the Egyptian colloquial Arabic. See the project’s websites http://www.amiraha.com/qamos-al-thawra/ and http://www.qamosalthawra.com/ as well as Patrick Kingsley, ‘Egypt: After the Revolution Comes the Battle for Language’, The Guardian, 18 July 2014, http://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/ jul/18/egypt-battle-for-language-dictionary-revolution-amira-hanafi/ (thanks to Anthony Downey who notified me of this article) (all accessed 31 July 2014). 7. See: Mada Masr’s website, http://www.madamasr. com/ (accessed 28 July 2014) for this motto. 8. See: Reem Bassiouney, ‘Politicizing Identity: Code Choice and Stance Taking During the Egyptian Revolution’, Discourse and Society, Vol. 23, no. 2 (2012): 107–26; ‘Language and Revolution in Egypt’, Telos, Vol. 163 (Summer 2013): 85–110; and Language and Identity in Modern Egypt (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2014). 9. Nazry Bahrawi, ‘An interview with Samia Mehrez’, Asymptote (October 2011), http://www.asymptotejournal.com/article.php?cat=Interview&id=8/ (accessed 26 July 2014); see also: Translating Egypt’s Revolution: The Language of Tahrir, ed. Samia Mehrez (Cairo: The American University in Cairo Press, 2012). 10. M. Lynx Qualey, ‘In Other Words: Translating Egypt’s Revolution’, Egypt Independent (11 June 2012), http:// www.egyptindependent.com/news/other-words-translating-egypt%E2%80%99s-revolution/ (accessed 26 July 2014). 11. See: Bassiouney, ‘Language and Revolution in Egypt’, op cit.: 14–19. 12. At the time of writing, Husni-Bey still plans to organize a second meeting, in which the English of the first mind map would be translated into Arabic, ‘recording the difficulties of that translation, adding layers to the original English, hopefully rebuking some of it’s structural claims’ (Adelita Husni-Bey in an email message to the author, 22 July 2014).

Coming to Terms

13. Giorgio Agamben, Remnants of Auschwitz: The Witness and the Archive, trans. Daniel Heller-Roazen (New York: Zone, 1999), 143–4. 14. Ibid., 144. 15. Mada Masr, ‘And we’re back’ (June 2013), http:// www.madamasr.com/content/and-were-back-0/ (accessed 26 July 2014). 16. See, for instance: ‘The Call Behind the Conference: An Innovative Civil Society: Impact through Cocreation and Participation’ in Abstract Book (6th Living Knowledge Conference, Copenhagen, April 2014), http://www.livingknowledge.org/lk6/wp-content/uploads/2014/04/LK6_abstract-book_update_28–04–2014.pdf (accessed 26 July 2014): 11–15; Mariëtte Heres, ‘Aid is a Knowledge Industry: NGOs: Learning from Experience?’, The Broker Online (28 November 2007), http://www.thebrokeronline.eu/ Articles/Aid-is-a-knowledge-industry/ (accessed 26 July 2014); Erika Mein, ‘Literacy, Knowledge Production, and Grassroots Civil Society: Constructing Critical Responses to Neo-liberal Dominance’, Anthropology & Education Quarterly, Vol. 40, no. 4 (2009): 350–68; Maria Hayrinen-Alestalo, ‘Is Knowledge-based Society a Relevant Strategy for Civil Society?’, Current Sociology, Vol. 49, no. 4 (2001): 203–18. 17. Shuruq Harb, ‘Interview with Beirut’, ArtTerritories (27 November 2013), http://www.artterritories. net/?page_id=3202/ (accessed 27 July 2014). 18. Adam Hanieh, Lineages of Revolt: Issues of Contemporary Capitalism in the Middle East (Chicago: Haymarket, 2013). 19. Ibid., 11. 20. ‘Okwui Enwezor in conversation with Anthony Downey. Art Dubai 2014: Global Art Forum 8’, Ibraaz (8 May 2014), http://www.ibraaz.org/channel/6/ (accessed 27 July 2014). 21. Asef Bayat, Life as Politics: How Ordinary People Change the Middle East, 2nd ed. (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2013), 21. 22. Michael Edwards, Civil Society, 3rd ed. (London: John Wiley, 2014), 34. 23. See: Ibid., 35. 24. On the notion of ‘responsibilization’ with regard to contemporary art see my ‘Burden of Proof. Tom Holert on Contemporary Art and Responsibility’, Artforum International, Vol. 51, no. 7 (March 2013): 250–59, 289. See also Anthony Downey’s paper ‘What Can Art Do? New Pieties and Critical Practices’, delivered at the conference ‘Regional vis-à-vis Global Discourses: Contemporary Art from the Middle East’, held at the Brunei Gallery at the School for Oriental and African Studies (SOAS), London (6–7 July 2013). 25. Yahya M. Madra and Fikret Adaman, ‘Neo-liberal Reason and Its Forms: De-Politicisation Through Economisation’, Antipode, Vol. 46, no. 3 (2014): 711.

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26. Ahmed Zewail, ‘We Arabs Must Wage a New Form of Jihad’, The Independent (24 August 2006), http:// www.independent.co.uk/voices/commentators/ ahmed-zewail-we-arabs-must-wage-a-new-form-ofjihad-413101.html/ (accessed 28 July 2014). 27. Ibid. 28. Ahmed Zewail, ‘Foreword’ in Jonathan Adams et. al., Global Research Report Middle East. Exploring the Changing Landscape of Arabian, Persian and Turkish Research (Leeds: Evidence, a Thomson Reuters business, 2011). 29. Ibid. 30. Mats Karlsson, ‘Foreword’ in Transforming Arab Economies: Traveling the Knowledge and Innovation Road (Washington, DC: International Bank for Reconstruction and Development and The World Bank, 2013), vii. 31. Ibid. ‘Main Messages’, xi. 32. Toward New Horizons. Arab Economic Trans­ formation Amid Political Transitions, Harald Finger, Daniela Gressani and Khaled Abdelkader et. al (Washington, DC: International Monetary Fund, 2014), 63. 33. Abdelkader Djeflat, ‘The Relevance of Science and Technology for the Arab Spring and the Key Role of the Knowledge Economy’ in The Real Issues of the Middle East and the Arab Spring. Addressing Research, Innovation and Entrepreneurship, eds Thomas Andersson and Abdelkader Djeflat (New York: Springer, 2013), 169–93. For a somewhat less optimistic view, see: Wesley Schwalje, ‘The Knowledge-Based Economy and the Failure of the Arab Dream: What the !#%@ Happened?’, Social Science Research Network (24 May 2012), http://www.ssrn.com/abstract=2065855/, or: http://www.dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.2065855/ (both accessed 27 July 2014). 34. Anthony Downey, ‘The Production of Cultural Knowledge in the Middle East’ in Art and Patronage in the Near and Middle East, eds Hossein Amirsadeghi and Maryam Eisler (London: Thames & Hudson, 2010), 10–15, 316.

39. ‘The latter chugs on primarily with acts of transmission. It is about shifting already-made bodies of thought and data, about handling and filtering existing information. The emphasis is on both reproducing data and passing it on, a DNA Xerox process — the logic of replication.’ Sarat Maharaj, ‘Know-how and No-How: Stopgap Notes on “Method” in Visual Art as Knowledge Production’, Art & Research. A Journal of Ideas, Contexts and Methods, Vol. 2, no. 2 (September 2009), http:// www.artandresearch.org.uk/v2n2/maharaj.html (accessed 29 July 2014). 40. Tony Chakar, Speak Mouthless (sequence of screenshots from the 2012 video) in springerin: Hefte für Gegenwartskunst, Vol. 18, no. 2 (Spring 2012): 42. 41. The workshop-seminar took place at the same weekend as ‘Meeting Point 6’, the multidisciplinary Contemporary Art Festival from the Arab World, for which Okwui Enwezor curated a long-term project around the theme of ‘Locus Agonistes — Sites of Struggle’, in which Tony Chakar presented another work. See the program leaflet Locus Agonistes: Practices and Logics of the Civic (Young Arab Theater Fund and Haus Der Kulturen Der Welt, 2012), http:// www.hkw.de/media/texte/pdf/2012_1/programm_5/ meeting_points_6.pdf (accessed 27 July 2014). 42. Tony Chakar, ‘Speak Mouthless’, Creative Time Reports (3 June 2013), http://www.creativetimereports.org/2013/06/03/speak-mouthless/ (accessed 28 July 2014). 43. Tony Chakar in an email message to the author, 16 July 2014. 44. The Economist, ‘An unlikely band of brothers’ (21 September 2013), http://www.economist.com/news/ middle-east-and-africa/21586600-deal-struck-america-and-its-allies-russia-envisages-removal/ (accessed 27 July 2014). 45. Occupied Liberated Kafranbel, ‘The fortitude & courage of revolutionaries .. From Kafranbel’ (2014), http://www.occupiedkafranbel.com/ (accessed 27 July 2014). 46. Tony Chakar in an email message to the author, 16 July 2014.

35. Ibid., 15.

47. ‘What does it mean that I’m from the “Middle East”? What does it mean to a European and what does it 36. Anthony Downey, ‘Beyond the Former Middle mean for me? In fact, the region itself doesn’t exist. East: Aesthetics, Civil Society, and the Politics of We might talk about is as much as you want but it’s Representation’, Ibraaz (1 June 2011), http://www.ibraaz. still not there.’ Tony Chakar quoted in Stephen Wright, org/essays/8/ (accessed 27 July 2014). ‘Territories of Difference. Excerpts from an email exchange between Tony Chakar, Bilal Khbeiz and Walid 37. Catherine David, ‘Presentation’ in Tamáss 1: Sadek’ in Out of Beirut, ed. Suzanne Cotter (Oxford: Contemporary Arab Representations. Beirut/Lebanon Modern Art Oxford, 2006), 60. (Barcelona and Rotterdam: Fundació Antoni Tàpies and Witte de With, 2002), 10. 38. Pablo Lafuente, ‘Art and the Foreigner’s Gaze: A Report on Contemporary Arab Representations’, Afterall, Vol. 15 (Spring–Summer 2007): 23.

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This is Tomorrow On Emily Jacir’s Art of Assembling Radically Generative Archives Guy Mannes-Abbott

There must be an archive of jokes where researchers can go and laugh themselves to death. In an age of reflex archivism every kind of joke will be there: Freudian, poignant and bittersweet jokes, violently racist or sexist ones and ‘harmless’ versions of the same, even a ‘re-archived’ joke sub-section. The most interesting of all such locations of cultural memory is the archive of jokes about archives. Unfortunately, I have forgotten where it is. ––– An archive can be a beautiful thing, though never a neutral one. It is probably at its most ideologically saturated or epistemologically delimited when it professes to be the opposite: ‘open,’ ‘complete,’ ‘universal’. However, what is archived can and often does end up speaking for or re-archiving itself, so long as the archive is secured and accessible in some meaningful degree. While archivism has inherently conservative instincts and allies, the creating of archives is actually about generating futures. I am picturing a manuscript in Farsi interleaved with an excellent hand translation in nineteenth-century English of an authoritative, multi-volume eighteenth-century history of western India by the last diwan of Gujarat. Written partly under siege, it has been ‘mislaid’ in a national archive that I spent many months scouring for anything remotely like it while researching a book about a place that I spent years getting to know. My hope and intention remains to bring the definitive version of it into print in the twenty-first century. This is not a radicalizing of history but a rewriting of it from now.1 It is a re-archiving of the archive, which remains continuous with the act of archiving. I am thinking too of a project of Emily Jacir’s about whose work this essay will concentrate. Here, an archive of books stolen from an indigenous Palestinian population massacred or driven from their homes and land to enable the creation of the state of Israel in their place becomes evidence over

time of that ethnic cleansing even while access to it remains restricted by the perpetrators. In ex libris (2010–12) Jacir exhibits snatched ‘cell phone (Nokia N8)’-quality images of parts of the books, their inscriptions and identifications as well as scrappy imperfections and markings.2 The project developed from doctoral research conducted by Gish Amit in 2008, which uncovered the existence and provenance of stolen trophies that remain ‘archived’ at the Jewish National and University Library in Jerusalem, still not returned to their owners several decades after their theft.3 I will come back to this, however this project is not so much a radicalizing of history either, but a rewriting of what was already known or suspected. The re-archiving of this archive is yet to take place but it will also be continuous with the act of archiving. As such it will generate new realities. ––– Globalization, together with the periodizing and disavowal of the modern as an episteme, has levelled cultural playing fields like perhaps nothing before, especially in the MENASA (Middle East, North Africa and South Asia) region. The proliferation of a range of archival recoveries is observable, particularly in the ‘ME’ part of that acronym. However, there are instances, notably in parts of western India, ‘SA’, where such re-archiving expires in one imperial intervention or form — ‘Mughal’ to British, historical narrative per se to regimes of classification — or other circularity. Histories in local dialects, for example, are often footnoted in archives produced at the moment of foreign encounter, appraisal and colonization. What is at stake now is not ‘clean’, new national narratives or extrapolations of once-colonized identities, not least because colonizations are often multiple events, but the consequential recognition of anthropocenic damage to the planetary vessel that sustains human life. That is, the anticipation or ‘praise in advance’ of ‘the civilisation to come’ (as Bruno Latour puts it): a radically renegotiated common world required for continued human existence.4 If re-archiving has significance it is on a scale of this order, which may seem excluding of emergent cultures or nations but only for a moment. It is, of course, precisely the opposite. In sketching the recent history of what I will simply call the ‘archival impulse’ in visual production, after Hal Foster’s important, if dated, essay,5 I will, in this essay, update his thesis by adverting to its manifestation in the ‘generation’ of postwar artists in Beirut. Then my focus will shift to Emily Jacir’s work, especially that of the last decade which has involved an intensified engagement with the archive since the second Palestinian intifada, the impacts of which she witnessed, and so return us to an art engaged with cultural erasure and threats to existence itself. It is her ability to draw this scale

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of things through her work that lifts Jacir’s archival assemblages to a level of exceptional significance. Foster was characteristically succinct in delineating ‘an archival impulse’ in 2004. While his essay seems surprisingly dated ten years on, the basic terms still describe a clearly observable phenomenon. They encapsulate the ‘impulse’ as follows: ‘archival artists seek to make historical information, often lost or displaced, physically present. To this end they elaborate on the found image, object and text, and favour the installation format.’6 Sources are ‘recalcitrantly material, fragmentary rather than fungible’, anticipating, enabling and requiring ‘human interpretation’.7 They are ‘promissory notes for further elaboration or enigmatic prompts for future scenarios’.8 Since the museum’s loss of credible coherence, these artists draw upon and reproduce informal archives, underscoring ‘the nature of all archival materials as found yet constructed, factual yet fictive, public yet private’, and their work ‘often arranges these materials according to a quasi-archival logic, a matrix of citation and juxtaposition, and presents them in a quasi-archival architecture, a complex of texts and objects’.9 Foster wrote of a will ‘to probe a misplaced past’ and, crucially as well as even more contentiously today, to ‘transform the no-place of the archive into the no-place of a utopia’.10 ‘An Archival Impulse’ instances three bodies of work, by Thomas Hirschhorn, Tacita Dean and Sam Durant, in 2004 which would not suffice in 2014, not least because the qualities Foster ascribes to the three are now ubiquitous. Even in 2004, he might have been bolder in his references, not least in relation to the MENASA region and Beirut in particular. It is immediately obvious that the words I have quoted from Foster might have been written directly about the postwar ‘generation’ of artists, even though they would now be art historical in their application. As such, rather than follow the developing trajectories of artists central to that generation, I hope you will allow me to confine myself to a single, arguably over-convenient art historical reference from 2006. The book Out of Beirut draws together many of the familiar figures of a historically contingent ‘generation’.11 One of its touchstones is what Joana Hadjithomas and Khalil Joreige call ‘the anecdotal. Etymologically, the anecdotal appears as something unrevealed, something kept secret, at odds with a certain concept of history.’12 Lamia Joreige describes her methodology as follows: ‘my work attempts to collect, record, erase, invent, forget, capture, miss and divert’.13 Kaelen Wilson-Goldie’s excellent introductory text burdens the latter’s work with being ‘emblematic of contemporary art practices as they have been developing in Beirut’.14 The Beirut context is of some 150,000 deaths, 800,000 displaced people and approximately 18,000 disappeared from the last sustained civil war in Lebanon (1975–91), a war that ended with a broad amnesty and mass demolitions, replanning and redevelopment of the city centre. All these elements This is Tomorrow

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have generated artworks, controversy and grief, underscored by Jalal Toufic’s construction of ‘surpassing disaster’.15 Wilson-Goldie writes of the way that Lamia Joreige’s Here and Perhaps Elsewhere (2003) ‘probes’ this ‘history and legacy of Lebanon’s civil war’, using ‘documentary practices, eyewitness testimonies, and archival images’ with informal promiscuity. This challenges but also carries potential to ‘alter the political and social realities that inform identity construction and daily life’.16 Exploring Wilson-Goldie’s assertion, let me collate the qualities considered ‘emblematic’ here. Joreige’s film traverses the war’s main dividing line in the city to ask passersby what they know or remember about the disappeared, and captures the absences, rumours and potency of such moments. Here and Perhaps Elsewhere combines anecdote, the unofficial, personal, non-factual and unplanned in anti-narratives that are spatially chaotic and yet specific, latent in intent and investigatory as a mode. Wilson-Goldie writes of ‘scraps of visual information that slide around without fixed meaning, constantly renegotiated, readjusted, and assimilated into larger networks of signs and symbols’.17 Referring to the same sources, T.J. Demos has described the way that in place of documentary ‘fact’, fictive strategies at play in the work of these artists, as well as Walid Raad, are concerned with ‘eliciting subjective desire, wonder and engagement when it comes to historical remembrance and transmission’.18 On the one hand, ‘Raad’s projects […] evoke the psychologically infused subjective aspects of traumatic memory, presented as embodying its own legitimate historical truth.’19 On the other, more generally, ‘fiction facilitates memory by linking representation with affect’.20 For Alan Gilbert, Raad’s ‘Atlas Group is an attempt to document history as a topography of symptoms’,21 and his use of fiction is only one of the ways his work ‘produces temporality’.22 I will end this glance at a historical moment of Lebanese visual production with a written exchange on the occasion of Raad’s Miraculous Beginnings (2010–11) at the Whitechapel Gallery, London. Achim Borchardt-Hume writes in one of several long questions to Raad: ‘Schools in Lebanon can teach history only up to the country’s independence in 1943 after which there is no consensus on the sequence of events which makes attempts by writers and artists to come to terms with the country’s recent history all the more prescient.’23 In responding, Raad quotes Toufic to the effect that ‘Lebanese artists have not divested “not remembering from forgetting”’, a ‘failure’ attributed to a ‘post-traumatic amnesia encountered in postwar Lebanon […] exemplified by the unjust and scandalous general amnesty law that was passed by parliament on 28 March 1991.’24 I want to suggest that what may be true for Lebanon here may be true for all of us at this point in time, that this ‘failure’ might even be said to be emblematic of our cultural condition today, characterized by events that haunt the present but of which there is no mutually recognized narrative account. This might be related to the violence of what we have done to our common

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‘dwelling’ — truly a ‘surpassing disaster’ — and the real crisis it represents: how we might begin to propose ways to continue to exist. The visual production that such an era generates will continue to reflect a certain extreme exilic quality of foreshortened reckonings and recollections, an urgent recomposing of whatever is to hand and of whatever that is, to be offered for reinterpretation in the hope of having generative affect. We have to try to imagine, invent or decide ways in which we can actually survive as a species: the modes and locations of a ‘civilization to come’. ––– Large categories of being and a proper appreciation of the precariousness of existence itself are the only ways to frame an approach to the work that Emily Jacir has produced in the last decade. Certainly, as Murtaza Vali has written, ‘the logic of the archive, the trace, the residue, the remnant, the ruin, haunts’ Jacir’s ‘extensive oeuvre’.25 However, there is more to Jacir’s manifestly influential work than the archive, which in any case has a very particular fecundity in her work. There is also a relationship between the precariousness of the artist’s existence at times and the modes with which the work has been encountered at others. As a Palestinian born in Bethlehem in 1970, Jacir’s experience is of ongoing nakba or catastrophic trauma, and a creative and otherwise active resistance to it. The temporality of this experience is unique, and different from the civil-war period in Lebanon even when understood as anything but a single past event, of course. The uniqueness of the Palestinian nakba is even underscored by its episodes in Lebanon, the source of Jacir’s very recent and ongoing work with footage shot at the Tel al Zaatar refugee camp in the aftermath of massacres in 1976. Jacir came close to death in Ramallah when she, her sister Annemarie and Emily’s New York dealer were caught up in an Occupation raid on the city, an incident with echoes of the one that imperilled her own mother.26 The ongoing acute threat of cultural, historical and personal erasure at the hands of a state actor with superpower supports in the early twenty-first century is unique and adds dimensions to her work with and without archives. While archival art jostles between fictiveness and fact to sometimes-notable effect, in the case of Jacir’s variously assembled Material for a Film, there is a direction of travel from fiction towards facts. Here it serves to recover actual fragments of the life story of Wael Zuaiter and counter the fiction that he was a ‘terrorist’ involved in the deaths of Israeli athletes at the Munich Olympics. This fiction takes the form of state propaganda, as well as Hollywood cinema.27 Zuaiter was born in Nablus in 1934 to an affluent family of independent-minded intellectuals. He studied in Baghdad and worked in the Gulf before arriving in Rome where he became a thwarted poet, translator and latterly a This is Tomorrow

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Emily Jacir, detail from ex libris, 2010–12. Installation, public project and book. © Emily Jacir 2012. Commissioned and produced by dOCUMENTA (13) with the support of Alexander and Bonin, New York, and Alberto Peola Arte Contemporanea, Torino. Photo courtesy of Roman März. Courtesy of Alexander and Bonin, New York.

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political representative for Fatah.28 He was murdered in the courtyard of his apartment block in Rome in October 1972, the first of many Palestinian intellectuals and political figures in Europe executed by Golda Meir’s government in a policy known humbly as ‘Wrath of God’. One of Material’s successes is the way its indeterminateness as an object, whereby more than one assemblage has been produced under its name, also defines our encounter with it. I first came across it in 2006 on the artist’s blog where she mentioned a commission for the Biennale of Sydney that year.29 Since Zuaiter’s murder followed closely upon Ghassan Kanafani’s assassination in July 1972, the subject fascinated me, but a subsequent blog post with a clip of Zuaiter’s fleeting appearances in The Pink Panther (1963) stretched that a little. The fact of Zuaiter’s almost edited-out appearance, as an extra who was given lines to speak but could not deliver them, had a limited potency. Watching the clip of it in isolation seemed to diminish that.30 I rehearse this because I missed a direct experience of iterations at the Venice Biennale in 2007, Home Works, Beirut, in 2008 and the Guggenheim, New York, in 2009, before catching up with a scaled-down version in London. Meanwhile, I had pieced together the work myself remotely, using the internet to follow its movements and to supplement the book by Zuaiter’s long-term companion Janet Venn-Brown, which had been Jacir’s original inspiration. For a Palestinian: A Memorial to Wael Zuaiter includes court documents from a trial of his murderers in absentia and testimonials from his friends intended for a documentary that was never made — except in the conceptual form of Jacir’s disassembled, or spatial ‘film’.31 By the time I stood before an installation of Material as part of the Deutsche Börse Prize show at London’s Photographers’ Gallery (2009), I was familiar with more of its parts than were being shown in London (which coincided with the fuller Guggenheim exhibition). The curators had located Jacir’s work on the third level of their exhibition, at the far end of a floor dedicated to another nominee for the prize, and behind a floating wall on which it stated that she was born in Kuwait! Casual visitors missed it altogether, while these kinds of sleight were all-too predictable to me and presumably to the artist also. The installation consisted of three photographs, including one of Wael with Alberto Moravia, a letter from Moravia recommending Wael to Sartre, loose pages of Dante that Wael carried about, images of a coin he kept on a string for use in his apartment’s lift, images of all the books in his personal library, a telegram announcing his murder, Venn-Brown’s handwritten Arabic beside a list of Mossad suspects and, most centrally, an image of the volume of A Thousand and One Nights which absorbed the 13th bullet of Zuaiter’s assassins on that dreadful night. Elsewhere Jacir had exhibited 67 photographs of every page that bore traces of the bullet.32 She’d also installed the 1000 blank volumes she shot through with the same .22 calibre bullets, in a

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Emily Jacir, detail from Material for a Film (Wael Zuaiter’s 1001 Nights), 2004–07. Multimedia installation, three sound pieces, one video, texts, photos, archival material. This work was devised in part with the support of La Biennale di Venezia. Photo courtesy of Bill Orcutt. Courtesy of Alexander and Bonin, New York.

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Emily Jacir, Material for a Film, 2004–07. Multimedia installation, three sound pieces, one video, texts, photos, archival material. Installation view at The Hugo Boss Prize 2008: Emily Jacir, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York. Photograph courtesy of David Heald © The Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation, New York. This work was devised in part with the support of La Biennale di Venezia © Emily Jacir. Courtesy of Alexander and Bonin, New York.

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white-shelved installation reminiscent of the ‘archival architecture’ of Kew Gardens’ herbarium. Other iterations included more photographs of Zuaiter as a young sophisticate with friends or as a corpse lying with his personal effects in a pool of blood. Clips of the artist retracing Wael’s last steps as well as the movingly pathetic Pink Panther clips ran at other times. Altogether, a partial recomposition of a man, humanized in literal even banal ways, designed to complicate, add depth and dimensions to the existence of one of many displaced Palestinians. On one level it was a textbook exercise in making ‘historical information, often lost or displaced, physically present’,33 a concrete bulwark against cultural, historical, personal erasure. On others, the book of life-sustaining Arabian nights, with its captured 13th bullet, transforms this work into something much more than a gathering of parts. If Zuaiter had been involved in the attempt to take Israeli Olympians hostage and exchange them for ‘over 200 non-Arab’ prisoners, and some of the many Palestinians in Israeli prisons,34 Jacir’s archival endeavour would not be noticeably diminished. There would still be the need to understand and narrate in the place of ongoing, unacknowledged erasure. Zuaiter had written a strong-minded piece on the subject days before his murder, asking: ‘who stood to gain from the deaths of the hostages?’35 The work’s success is not reliant on the ‘innocence’ of its subject and does not seek to demonstrate it either. Instead, it gathers real objects and existential proof and lets them act — ‘speak’ — in place of despicable fictions. More than fact or fiction, Material is a poem. A poem centring on the great literary work that Zuaiter devoted years of his life in Rome to attempting to translate properly: directly from Arabic into Italian. The same work that protected him from one assassin’s bullet. The material for the film is this one slim and well-worn volume of Arabic poetics complete with its deadly but neutralized brass-coloured shell and lead heart. It is a highly resonant image of the power of words in dispossessed hands: the real target of Israeli violence. The book was in Zuaiter’s jacket at the time of his murder and brings viewers of the work in any form and every place of encounter correspondingly close to the lived days and horrifying night of his death. Archives do not need to achieve so much, they do not need to rely upon extreme proximity or generate such affects. Archival art only rarely engages such realms, having other objectives to attend to. Indeed, the archival impulse often seems to have spread like a virus of referential ricochets. An activity hard to distinguish from a local history society, presenting things unseen for a while, that someone somewhere will invest with resonance, or which are extrapolated with museological dedication. Suggestively perhaps, but not very. At their best, many of these works represent a formal challenge, or condense a short story. Very few embody or enact the poetic in the ways that Material for a Film does.

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––– Announcing her work on the Tel al Zaatar film archives in Creative Time Reports, Jacir describes how the broad object of her enquiry — what happened to the Left in Italy — led to the films via her project on Zuaiter.36 Part of it began in 2004 when researching Material, seeking out publications and interviewing Wael’s network of friends. She ‘accumulated 92 conversations’ in this way from all across Italy, a ‘common theme’ being ‘the loss of the history of the Italian Left’ which paralleled that of Palestinian archives looted in 1948, confiscated from Beirut in 1982 and Jerusalem in 2001.37 These elements came together in an old friend, German filmmaker Monica Maurer, who had worked with the PLO and various migrant communities. In 2010, Maurer directed Jacir to the Audiovisual Archive of Workers’ and Democratic Movements (AAMOD) with its extensive material on all these themes, including Italian documentaries dedicated to the Palestinian struggle. AAMOD housed the rushes for Tel al-Zaatar,38 a documentary about ‘the August 12, 1976 massacre of Palestinians and Lebanese at Tel al Zaatar, a UN-administered refugee camp in northeast Beirut. The film reconstructs the history of the camp, its destruction and its resistance through the voices of the men, women and children who survived the massacre.’39 In January 2013, Maurer told Jacir that the Italian State Archives had finally agreed to host these archives and that she wanted to digitize the rushes to ensure their continuing accessibility before they left the building. Work began on watching 100 hours of often badly decomposed film from 33 boxes, some of which had ‘hundreds of splices’ that needed restoring, along with reels with unrelated footage of Palestinian marching bands in Beirut, Mahmoud Darwish and other PLO dignitaries attending a funeral, and dancing women fighters.40 A handful of these clips are now online while the painstaking work continues. It is a labour of pure archiving, of course, with poignant glimpses of a peculiarly coherent Palestinian ‘state without land’.41 However, Jacir admits to holding onto the smallest scraps of what has survived: ‘I can find a story in a grain of dust.’42 Somewhere between this so-far pure archivism and the condensations of Material lies ex libris, the exhibition of images of a collective Palestinian library that is archived but also held hostage by the state of Israel. For Jacir there is a strong relationship between these books and the land, both of which have been designated ‘A.P.’ (‘Abandoned’ or ‘Absentee Property’) and stolen away. Her project hones in on issues around custodianship, looting and violence in relation to books, ‘but also raises questions regarding repatriation and restitution’.43 The word violence is mine here, since I am aware of the fact that these 6,000 books have been preserved out of 70,000 to 80,000 that were looted (though Jacir wonders how many entered the library without their ‘A.P.’ insignia), but that at least 26,000 of those were pulped.44 This is Tomorrow

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Emily Jacir, 2006. Installation and performance, 1,000 blank books shot by the artist with a .22-caliber gun, mixed media and photographs. Zones of Contact: 2006 Biennale of Sydney. Photograph courtesy of Greg Weight. © Emily Jacir. Courtesy of Alexander and Bonin, New York.

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Emily Jacir, AP 3852 from ex libris, 2014. Translation and painted mural, 25 x 50 ft. Alexander and Bonin, New York. Photography courtesy of Joerg Lohse. © Emily Jacir. Courtesy of Alexander and Bonin, New York.

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Emily Jacir, detail ex libris (AP 4561), from 2010–12. Installation, public project and book. © Emily Jacir, 2012. Commissioned and produced by dOCUMENTA (13) with the support of Alexander and Bonin, New York and Alberto Peola Arte Contemporanea, Torino. Courtesy of Alexander and Bonin, New York.

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Emily Jacir, detail ex libris (AP 807), from 2010–12. Installation, public project and book. © Emily Jacir, 2012. Commissioned and produced by dOCUMENTA (13) with the support of Alexander and Bonin, New York and Alberto Peola Arte Contemporanea, Torino. Courtesy of Alexander and Bonin, New York.

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ex libris has been shown at dOCUMENTA 13 in Kassel as well as in New York. The main installation consists of often significantly blown-up prints of varying sizes, propped on narrow ledges from floor to ceiling; half cloister of votives, half mausoleum. Some of the books’ inscriptions were translated and exhibited as billboard posters beyond the gallery spaces.45 As a publication ex libris is reminiscent of Walter Benjamin’s Archive, which is fitting given his obsession with cultural scraps and a smallness of scale.46 Of course, ex Libris condenses and archives an exhibition, itself condensing traceable books and land that await return and reparation. However, for me it is the subtle, barely-there proof of human hands in close-up images of page tears, stains, smudges and impressions, floral and folded paper insertions that are the most poignant as well as the most visually gratifying. I recognize these scrappy qualities from the Farsi manuscripts I have been working with, albeit that they are free of the unique scales of ongoing violence linked to still-imprisoned Palestinian libraries. I also came across this particular library quite some time before it took the form it has in ex libris, read the originary article in Jerusalem Quarterly and followed the progress of a documentary called The Great Book Robbery, which was completed in 2012.47 So I came to ex libris in much the same way I came to Material, both are repositories of a range of poor images that lose nothing for that. In fact, Jacir’s need to steal back these images with a low-resolution mobile device (as described in the first part of this essay) is crucial to the meaning of the work as realized. ex libris is a small project, but a little treasure nonetheless. Jacir’s attention to the materials opens up new futures in the classic Fosterian way of wanting to ‘transform the no-place of the archive into the no-place of a utopia’.48 It is also incomplete in the sense that it does not actually transform the materials archived as well as in the sense that the arc of the story of return is incomplete. However, its effects extend to sociopolitical realms and again elevate definitive elements of Foster’s ‘impulse’, his ‘enigmatic prompts for future scenarios’, into a range of radical yet concrete propositions.49 One thing we know for certain is that Palestine’s library will not remain hostage to a criminal notion of ‘Absentee Property’ for much longer. ––– Jacir has spoken of sharing origins in ‘West Bank’ towns under Occupation, and periods of living in the Gulf as well as Rome, with Zuaiter. After repeated visits to his home in Nablus, she concluded: ‘I do not find Wael in Nablus. He is in Rome.’50 Material represents a throb of loving identification, a poignant resurrection of a Palestinian who was executed simply for being Palestinian. This is not a melancholic work: Jacir entrains Wael in a collaborative role, incorporating something of the ‘evanescent presence’ conjured by the Arabic term for spectre; tayf.51 The creating of archives is actually about generating futures.

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Jacir is recomposing the diasporic experience of displacement and dispossession through Material for a Film (and elsewhere) and much of what that means is concentrated in the image of a bullet-stopping copy of A Thousand and One Nights. Poetry is not an end here, but acts as a portal to other realities of time and place, temporalities and topographies. ‘In Wael, you can find the world’, she has said,52 a further reminder of Foster’s links between the archive and the utopic. The difficulty with drawing lessons for regional art production from Jacir’s work — beyond its inspiration — is the indeterminacy generated by ongoing Occupation. Of course this is part of its great value as creative resistance but it is impossible to deduce its ultimate efficacy as archival art. Jacir’s archivism is not only of impulse but also of necessity. Beyond visual affects, it is a mode by which to reimagine common futures — a ‘civilization to come’.

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1. With Gujarat’s notorious Narendra Modai as India’s prime minister. Notorious because of his career as an RSS pracharak and subscriber to hindutva, an ideology that maps an Indian ‘fatherland’ over an Indian ‘holy land’ to the exclusion of aboriginal tribes, Dravidians and Muslims. The latter felt what this meant in Gujarat in 2002 when thousands were killed and tens of thousands displaced by well-organized pracharaks operating with state support. I witnessed the latter directly. 2. Emily Jacir, ex libris (Cologne: Walther Konig, 2012), 6. 3. Gish Amit, ‘Ownerless Objects?’, Jerusalem Quarterly, no. 33 (2008): 7–20, http://www.jerusalemquarterly. org/ViewArticle.aspx?id=36/ (accessed 11 July 2014). 4. Bruno Latour, An Inquiry into Modes of Existence: An Anthropology of the Moderns (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2013), 486. As impressive and vital as this work is, there is a whiff of Eurocentrism in its conception, of course. 5. Hal Foster, ‘An Archival Impulse’, October, no. 110 (Fall 2004): 3–22. 6. Ibid., 4. 7. Ibid., 5.

22. Alan Gilbert, ‘A Cosmology of Fragments’ in Miraculous Beginnings, ed. Achim Borchardt-Hume (London: Whitechapel Gallery and Paris: Festival d’Automne, 2010), 118. 23. Achim Borchardt-Hume, ‘In Search of the Miraculous’ in Miraculous Beginnings, ed. Achim Borchardt-Hume (London: Whitechapel Gallery; Paris: Festival d’Automne, 2010), 16. 24. Ibid., 17–18. 25. Murtaza Vali, ‘Archiving Palestine: Notes on Emily Jacir’s “accumulations”’ in Emily Jacir (St Gallen: Kunstmuseum St Gallen; Esslingen am Neckar: Villa Merkel; Nurnberg: Verlag für moderne Kunst Nürnberg, 2008), 19. 26. Emily Jacir, ‘Photostory: Retracing bus no. 23 on the historic Jerusalem-Hebron Road’, Electronic Intifada (15 December 2006), http://www.electronicintifada.net/ content/photostory-retracing-bus-no-23-historic-jerusalem-hebron-road/6609/ (accessed 11 July 2014). 27. Specifically Steven Spielberg’s Munich (2005), which is based on Operation Wrath of God and ex-Mossad sources.

8. Ibid. 9. Ibid. 10. Ibid., 22. 11. Out of Beirut, ed. Suzanne Cotter (Oxford: Modern Art Oxford, 2006). 12. Joana Hadjithomas and Khalil Joreige, ‘Wonder Beirut’ in Out of Beirut, ed. Suzanne Cotter (Oxford: Modern Art Oxford, 2006), 77. 13. Lamia Joreige, ‘Here and Perhaps Elsewhere’ in Out of Beirut, ibid., 18. 14. Kaelen Wilson-Goldie, ‘Contemporary Art Practices In Postwar Lebanon: An Introduction’ in Out of Beirut, ibid., 84. 15. Jalal Toufic, ‘Credits Included’ in The Withdrawal of Tradition Past a Surpassing Disaster (Forthcoming Books, 2009), http://www.jalaltoufic.com/downloads/ Jalal_Toufic,_The_Withdrawal_of_Tradition_Past_a_ Surpassing_Disaster.pdf (accessed July 2014). 16. Wilson-Goldie, op. cit., 84. 17. Wilson-Goldie, op. cit., 89. 18. T. J. Demos, ‘Out of Beirut. Mobile Histories and the Politics of Fiction’ in The Migrant Image (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2013), 194. 19. T. J. Demos, ‘The Art of Emily Jacir’ in The Migrant Image (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2013), 117. 20. T. J. Demos, ‘Out of Beirut’, op cit., 194.

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21. Alan Gilbert, ‘The Atlas Group/Walid Raad’ in Zones of Contact: 15th Biennale of Sydney (Sydney: The Biennale of Sydney, 2006), 80.

28. According to Janet Venn-Brown’s most recent account in which she states that ‘Wael showed me a letter from Fatah indicating that he was in fact their official representative in Italy.’ Sarah Irving, ‘Murdered for being Palestinian; Wael Zuaitaer remembered 40 years on’, Electronic Intifada (3 October 2011), http://www. electronicintifada.net/content/murdered-being-palestinian-wael-zuaiter-remembered-40-years/10418/ (accessed 14 July 2014). Zuaiter was also involved or at least a founder of the Italian Committee in Support of Palestinian People, see: Jean Fisher, ‘Voices in the Singular Plural “Palestine c/o Venice” and the intellectual Under Siege’, Third Text, Vol. 23, issue 6 (November 2009): 792. 29. Emily Jacir, ‘Material for a Film’ (3 June 2006), Amoula il Majnoona blog, http://www.majnouna. blogspot.co.uk/2006_06_01_archive.html/ (accessed 14 July 2014). 30. Emily Jacir, ‘Material for a Film at the Venice Biennale’ (27 June 2007), Amoula il Majnoona blog, http://www.majnouna.blogspot.co.uk/2007_06_01_archive.html/ (accessed 14 July 2014). 31. For a Palestinian: a Memorial to Wael Zuaiter, ed. Janet Venn-Brown (London and Boston: Kegan Paul International, 1984). 32. 67 as specified in the Huge Boss Prize 2008 catalogue (New York: Guggenheim Museum, 2008). I cannot help noting that the 1967 war and Occupation of the ‘West Bank’, Gaza and Golan Heights proved a pivotal crisis in Zuaiter’s life, indeed it was the trigger of his murder. Numbers in the form of years like this — -36, -48, -67 and so on, — have special poignancy in Palestine, and I cannot believe this one is insignificant.

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33. Hal Foster, op cit., 4. 34. Fisher, op cit., 792.

46. Walter Benjamin, Archive, Images, Texts, Signs, eds Ursula Marx, Gudrun Schwarz, Michael Schwarz and Erdmut Wizisla (London: Verso Books, 2007).

35. Wael Zuaiter, ‘Testimony of a Palestinian Activist, Rome, October 1972’ in For a Palestinian: a Memorial to Wael Zuaiter, ed. Janet Venn-Brown (London and Boston: Kegan Paul International, 1984), 213–17.

47. The Great Book Robbery, dirs Benny Brunner, Alexander Jansse and Arjan El Fassad (2010–12), http:// www.thegreatbookrobbery.org/library/ (accessed 14 July 2014).

36. Emily Jacir, ‘Letter From Roma’, Creative Time Reports (September 2013), http://www.creativetimereports.org/2013/09/03/emily-jacir-letter-from-roma/ (accessed 14 July 2014).

48. Foster, op cit., 22.

37. Ibid. 38. Tel al-Zaatar, dirs. Mustafa Abu Ali, Pino Adriano and Jean Chamoun (1977). 39. Jacir, ‘Letter From Roma’, op cit. 40. Ibid. 41. Monica Maurer and Maureen Clare Murphy, ‘1970s film of Palestinian struggle in Lebanon restored’, The Electronic Intifada, Chicago (17 November 2013), http:// www.electronicintifada.net/content/1970s-film-palestinian-struggle-lebanon-restored/12914/ (accessed 14 July 2014). 42. Jacir quoted in Maurer, ibid. 43. Jacir, ex libris, op cit.

49. Foster, op cit., 5. 50. Emily Jacir, diary entry (9 April 2005), quoted in: Vali, op cit., 84. 51. I am grateful to Rasha Salti for making this link. Salti’s words come from the supportive text for Material for a Film’s first outing at the 15th Biennale of Sydney in: Zones of Contact: 15th Biennale of Sydney (Sydney: The Biennale of Sydney, 2006), 152. These thoughts belong with all of Jacir’s work in these archives, and remind me of Atyaaf, the plural form of tayf, as well as the title of a novel by Radwa Ashour that reconjures massacres at Deir Yassin as well as Sabra and Shatila, see: http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/ books/reviews/spectres-by-radwa-ashour-2180199. html/ (accessed 14 July 2014). 52. Emily Jacir in: Murtaza Vali, ‘All That Remains’, ArtAsiaPacific, no. 54 (July–August 2007), http://www.artasiapacific.com/Magazine/54/ AllThatRemainsEmilyJacir/ (accessed 14 July 2014).

44. Gish, op cit. 45. Jacir translated selections of the handwritten inscriptions from the books into German and English and exhibited them on billboards throughout Kassel. ex libris was part of her solo exhibition intervals in NYC, where one of the inscriptions was transformed into a hand-painted 50-foot-long mural facing the Highline.

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Lucien Samaha

Lucien Samaha Archive, 2013 The year 1991 was the first of relative peace in war-torn Lebanon. For 15 years prior, the country had suffered devastating civil wars and extra-national invasions. It was the first time in the same 15 years that Lucien Samaha had travelled back to his native land where he photographed extensively, as he did many more times in ensuing years. In planning his photo book project, Catalogue of Destruction, about the destruction and devastation, he discovered that he had not labelled his negatives from the years 1991 and 1992, the former critical to the book. As a detective in his own archive, he poured over and meticulously analysed more than 2,700 images for clues and relationships between clues on various rolls of film, to reconstruct chronologies and to confirm dates. In his project for Ibraaz.org, Samaha designed a web-based pictorial presentation to highlight select parts of the investigation, and in which he also reveals the nuances of his archiving process and the inevitable quirks and possible shortcomings of any archive. To see more of Samaha’s work online, visit: www.ibraaz.org/interviews/102/ www.ibraaz.org/interviews/103/ www.ibraaz.org/projects/67/

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The Incidental Insurgents: The Part about the Bandits extract, 2012–13. All images are courtesy of the artists.

Ruanne Abou-Rahme and Basel Abbas

Incidental Insurgents, 2012–13 The Incidental Insurgents is mapped out as a three-part multilayered narrative, with chapters completing and complicating each other and unfolding the ‘story’ of a contemporary search for a new ‘political’ language and imaginary. Multiple texts and fragments, largely the writings of Victor Serge and Roberto Bolaño, alongside manifestos, memoirs, testimonies and text written by the artists, are sampled and repieced together to form an altogether new script. As the project unfolds and the search continues, new threads emerge that take us into expected and unexpected places, deadly serious and deadly playful all at once. Contributing to a growing density of material where the figure of the incidental insurgent, part bandit, rebel, part vagabond, artist, returns and resurges in many forms and characters. Recast into a convoluted script of sampled text, images, objects and sounds. The Part about The Bandits begins with four seemingly disparate coordinates, the early anarchist life of Victor Serge and his contemporary anarchist-bandits in 1910s Paris; Abu Jildeh and Arameet and their bandit gang involved in a rebellion against the British in 1930s Palestine, the artist as the quintessential bandit in Roberto Bolaño’s novel The Savage Detectives set in 1970s Mexico, and the artists themselves in present-day Palestine. The first part of the story is woven together by looking at the resonance between the inspiring, bizarre and sometimes tragic stories of these diverse bandits, the outsider rebels par excellence, often rewritten as mere criminals (or naively romanticized as wayward figures) and excluded from the narrative of revolutionary struggle. Ironically these figures most clearly articulate the incompleteness and inadequacies in existing oppositional movements, political language and imagery. To view Abou-Rahme and Abbas’ work online, go to: www.ibraaz.org/projects/31/ www.ibraaz.org/projects/52/

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Archive I, 2014 © Héla Ammar. Archive II, 2014 © Héla Ammar. The woven archive II, 2014 © Héla Ammar. The woven archive I, 2014 © Héla Ammar. Detail_Freedom_Tarz, 2014 © Héla Ammar. Detail_Video_Saadya, 2014 © Héla Ammar. All images courtesy of the artist.

Héla Ammar

The Woven Archive, 2014 Héla Ammar is a visual artist, PhD graduate of law and a self-defined militant feminist. In her photography, she has often chosen to put herself centre stage in order to express her opinion on topics that shape the contours of an endlessly shifting, contemporary feminine identity. Tarz (2014) (meaning embroidery in Arabic) constitutes the artist’s latest body of work which was first presented at Le Violon Bleu in Sidi Bou Said, Tunisia. Tarz explores the current Tunisian political situation as a historical memory where recollections of a fierce, popular-led resistance collide. In order to construct this site of memory, Ammar combines archival objects and photographs, blending embroidery with sensitive official archives, provoking a back-and-forth movement between memory and feeling. The result is a temporal space where past and present become intermeshed. Through this, the artist attempts to understand the image of the Tunisian Revolution through the imprint it has left on the sphere of her memory. Ammar is continuing to work with archives in her current project, finding that ‘This part of the world is living in an impressively fast-changing situation, our world is evolving and everything is fading away and being reinvented around us. We all need points of reference. I felt the need to use the past in order to decrypt the present.’ To see more of Ammar’s work online, visit: www.ibraaz.org/interviews/119/

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Stills from The Incorporated Phonographic Society: a video portrait, 2010. Courtesy of the artist.

Lawrence Abu Hamdan

Aural Contract Audio Archive, 2010–ongoing Since 2010, the entire discography of Lawrence Abu Hamdan’s research into the contemporary politics of listening and the role of the voice in law has been gathered under the title Aural Contract Audio Archive. Collected into this sound archive are audible extracts of his works and interviews together with specific moments of juridical listening and speaking gathered from a wide range of sources such as the trials of Saddam Hussein and Judas Priest, UK police evidence tapes, films such as Decoder and readings from texts including Italo Calvino’s A King Listens. One can hear this collection of tracks articulated through listening-seminars and voice-activated audio installations. Individual components of this archive are pooled, extracted and turned into longer audio essays, texts and investigations as the narratives folded into these three-minute segments become expanded and mixed together, generating narrative compositions and essays that weave between the content of this archive to immerse its audience in the heart of a discussion about the relationship of listening to politics, borders, human rights, testimony, truth and international law. To see more of Abu Hamdan’s work online, visit: www.ibraaz.org/channel/12/ www.ibraaz.org/projects/68/ ‘Word Stress: Lawrence Abu Hamdan in conversation with Anthony Downey’ www.ibraaz.org/interviews/21

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All images courtesy of the artist.

Burak Arıkan

On Networks of Dispossession, 2013 On Networks of Dispossession is a collective data-compiling and mapping project about urban transformation in Turkey which looks at corporations, capital and power. In the project, Burak Arıkan visualizes lobbying efforts graphically through a collaborative network analysis of links between contractors and the Turkish government. Arıkan used the Graph Commons infrastructure to develop the project. Graph Commons is a platform founded by Arıkan for investigative journalism, data research, civic activism, strategizing, organizational analysis and curating content, through mapping networks and relationships. The project was developed by Arıkan in collaboration with artists Yaşar Adanalı, Özgül Şen, Zeyno Üstün and Özlem Zıngıl, as well as anonymous participants. On Higher Education Industrial Complex is a mapping project that looks at networks in higher education (specifically private universities) in Turkey, making visible links between boards of trustees, corporations and other related institutions. The network map contains 68 private universities (in red), 625 members of the board of trustees (in black), 970 organizations (blue-coloured corporations, foundations, associations, political parties, state universities) and 2,001 relationships researched between organizations and people. The interactive network map is displayed as an installation on a 47-inch touchscreen display running on custom software and a 260 x 125 cm digitally printed map. The maps have been exhibited in Koç University and are accessible on: www.burak-Arıkan.com/ozeluniversiteler/ To see more of Arıkan’s work online, including an interview with Başak Senova, visit: ww.ibraaz.org/channel/10/ www.ibraaz.org/platforms/7/responses/157/

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Stills from The Stuart Hall Project, 2013. Courtesy of Smoking Dogs Films.

John Akomfrah

The Stuart Hall Project, 2013 I have been making projects on memory for a while now, but this one feels like the one I have been ‘preparing’ for a very long time indeed, possibly all my working life. In our teenage years, there is always at least one person we meet or see perform or watch on the screen who in that first encounter leaves such an indelible mark on our soul that we end up saying to ourselves: ‘When I grow up, I want be just like that; I want to be that cool, that hip, that confident, that compelling.’ Once we accept we are never going to be exactly like our heroes, something very interesting begins for us because the initial burst of enthusiasm they sparked off; the charismatic example they offered about the purpose and direction one’s own life could take, however, remain with you. For many of my generation in the 1970s, Stuart Hall was just such a figure. Throughout the making of The Stuart Hall Project, I have thought a lot about these questions of identity and of our ‘debt’ to this man. I have also thought a lot about the poignancy of the eulogy delivered at the funeral of Malcolm X by Ossie Davis, especially the section where Davis talks about ‘the presence of his [Malcolm’s] memory’. And the section I find the most affecting in that eulogy, the one I returned to again and again to the point where it became the organizing motif for this piece, comes at the end when Davis says, ‘in honouring him, we honour the best in ourselves’. And, in honouring him, we honour the best in ourselves. Amen to that. To see an interview between John Akomfrah and Anthony Downey visit: www.ibraaz.org/channel/4/

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p. 190 Adapted from the photo-text series Getty vs. Ghana, 2012. Courtesy of the artist. p. 191  Malaysia – Ghana – India 1947 –1957. From the photo installation Independence Day 1936–1967, 2009–present. Courtesy of the artist. pp. 192–3 Tunisia – Tanzania – Malaysia – Senegal 1955–1960. From the photo installation Independence Day 1934–1975, 2009–present. Courtesy of the artist.

Maryam Jafri

Independence Days, 2009–ongoing Maryam Jafri has long engaged with the archive. One of her projects, Independence Day 1936–1967 (2009–ongoing), comprises over 67 archival photographs predominantly picturing the first independence days of various Asian and African countries (over 23), including Indonesia, India, Ghana, Senegal, Syria, Malaysia, Kenya, Tanzania, Mozambique, Algeria, Jordan, Kuwait, Benin, Burkina Faso, Tunisia and the Philippines. Jafri observed a number of similarities and differences contained within the aesthetics and forms of such momentous events in this sustained investigation into archival documentation of such foundational moments in the history of what have long been referred to as the post-colonial nations. To see more of Jafri’s work online, visit: www.ibraaz.org/interviews/101/ www.kamellazaarfoundation.org/initiatives/4/35/

The left image is from the Ghana Ministry of Information, the right from Getty Images. The Ministry identifies their image as G/1180/1; Getty identifies theirs as 50405305. The caption accompanying the Getty image states Duchess of Kent (L) dancing with Ghana Prime Minister Kwame Nkrumah (C) at the Ghana independence ceremonies. A special note accompanying the Getty image states: No resale application use without the prior permission of Time, Inc. Contact your local office to see if we can clear this image for you. The back of photo G/1180/1 bears a purple stamp stating Copyright Photographic Services, Ministry of Information, PO Box 745, Accra. All rights reserved. The Ghana Ministry of Information charges $4 per photograph for reproduction and licensing. Licensee must credit the Ministry.

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Archive Ariella Azoulay Translated by Tal Haran

This paper is dedicated to Anat Kam, whom I consider to be the founder of the Israeli Archive of Executions, for the creation of which she has been penalized with two years of house arrest, and a four-and-a-half-year prison sentence. For the past two decades, the Hegelian concept of Aufhebung keeps appearing in the elaborate literature being written on the subject of archives, in order to describe archival work. Here is a late, characteristic example to this approach, from an essay by Ignaz Cassar: ‘To archive is to put away, to shelter, to keep […] The modality of Aufhebung, conventionally translated into English as “sublation”, ushers us into the spaces of the archive. The polysemic of the Aufhebung implies both preservation and cancellation.’1 There is something rather suggestive and seductive in this pair of opposites that encompass an entire universe, embracing the world of the archive as if nothing can escape it. However, anyone who has ever searched an archive would immediately note that the series of actions, situations and emotions experienced thereby cannot be exhausted by the opposition between keeping and putting away, preservation and cancellation. One might even get the sense that the philosopher’s archive and the archive that one has visited belong to two different worlds. For the sake of simplicity, let me call these two worlds the abstract archive and the material archive. The former is described in texts of the kind I have cited above, and shows no trace of the people who created it, nor of those who use it. This archive is envisaged as operating by itself, of its own accord, as though it were the home of that dialectic of preservation and cancellation. Photographs in which one sees spaces devoid of humans that converge into a vanishing point in infinity are a manifestation of this approach. Such a point of view on the archive, which exceeds the here and now, might be the result of physical conditions that do not allow the photographer to position him- or herself otherwise. Yet even when the archive is fully lit and relatively flat, such

a view of the archive is either invented or sought after. The second kind of archive, on the other hand, is more concrete. Its depiction is interwoven with the presence of those who occupy various positions of power, authorizing them to both preserve and expose materials, as well as with the presence of those who come to leaf through those materials. In his book Archive Fever, Jacques Derrida presents the figure of the archon, guardian of the documents, the sentry, as one of the three pylons supporting the archive. The other two are the place and the law. The discussion of sentries enables Derrida to slightly reduce the abstractness of the archive, and to speak of figures of power that legislate, repeat their law and enforce it. However, the way he looks at the sentries from the outside, as those who set archival borders, allows them to fool him at times: to force him to look at the threshold from their point of view, namely inward, at the way in which they uphold the law of the archive, leaving citizen Derrida and his fellows outside, beyond the conceptualization of the archive. Yet Derrida, in his turn, fools them, writing that: ‘It is a question of the future, the question of the future itself, the question of a response, of a promise and of a responsibility for tomorrow.’2 For a long time archons of the archive prevented the outbreak of archive frenzy as we witness it today, and through which I wish to think about what constitutes an archive. They succeeded in preventing archive frenzy since they were put in charge not only of preserving documents, and of what Foucault called the ‘space of appearance’ through which these documents are seen,3 but since they were also in charge of always distancing those wishing to enter the archive too early, before the materials stored within would become history, dead matter, the past. This distancing constructed the archive as a deposit of a time that is past, completed, one that poses no real threat to the power and to the law, and at most can serve for writing history. In real time, that which has been stored in it could have often provoked a scandal, upset people whose destiny had thereby been decreed behind their backs. In the archive, constructed as ex-territorial and as a receptacle for the past, that which had been cruel and biting is supposed to appear, or so we expect it to appear, as dulled; a piece of history, its accusing finger cut off, blunted. The time archives were allowed to rob from citizens — 20, 30 or 40 years of safekeeping documents until citizens are allowed access to look at the files — turned from being an unnecessary and unjustified sovereign violence into an essential feature of the archive. Those — many, too many — who sought to conceptualize the archive, while not contesting its being the home of the past, fell into the trap set for them by the sentries. The extensive power vested in the sentries must not cause us to underestimate the importance of the archive fever typical of our time, and the possibility it offers us to rethink the archive from its foundation — from the perspective of the fever, and of the acts of those whom it infects. Instead of asking: ‘What is an archive?’, in a manner that keeps the archive outside, as a fortress external Archive

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to our world, with us as its pilgrims, I shall begin by asking: ‘Why an archive?’, or ‘What do we look for in an archive?’ If we closely follow in the footsteps of those entering the archive, we shall discover that the way to file any document in it, let alone search for a document, is lined with a rich constellation of accessories and mechanisms that in themselves already serve as sentries — cards, forms to be filled, search engines, lists, code words, folders, clerks, laws, regulations, gloves, aprons, robes, brushes, chemicals, customs and rituals. These remind us that historic material is at hand, data and notes that must be salvaged and treated with caution; that every piece of paper must be returned to the exact place where it was found, even if we have our reservations about the place allotted to it. However, this constellation, aimed at distancing us, is meant no less to bring us closer: to ensure that, in the archive’s garden of forking paths, we shall behave in a manner that will not disturb the rest of the other items, that we will not paint an all-too encompassing picture, made up of materials from more than a handful of folders at one and the same time. This suspending constellation ensures that we will not devour the archival items the way Chronos devoured his children, in order to later regurgitate them, willingly or at random, as dwellers of the present, in the present. Think for a moment of Anat Kam: A young Israeli woman who, a few years ago, during her compulsory military service, collected digital documents containing explicit discussions and instructions regarding the ‘liquidating’ of Palestinians, euphemistically referred to as ‘targeted killing’. Two years after her release from the military she deposited the CD containing these documents at the hands of a Haaretz journalist, who published some of their indicting contents. Following an investigation by the Security Service, the journalist gave away enough information to expose his source, and Kam was arrested soon after and accused of treason. Imagine her, first, as one of the sentries, as part of the ranks guarding those sweet documents away from the public eye. Now imagine her as a citizen passing on valuable documents, in which people are doomed to their fate without being brought to trial. Imagine the awakening of her consciousness, the possible awareness that arises from viewing such documents — if I don’t rescue them (she must have thought), they will be trashed or, at best, stored in the archive for another 40 or 80 years; either way they will escape the public eye. Imagine Kam’s horror while reading the contents of those documents, and her determination, the well-known ‘fanatical dedication’ of rescuers of documents and objects, realizing that she is facing the opportunity of founding the Israeli archive of executions. Imagine her swallowing one document after another, all 2,000 of them, ingesting them, making sure not a single crumb escapes her lips. She did not neglect her duties as a sentry, in charge of the gates of that archive — she watched over the documents well, made sure to produce copies, and established several rules of her own for the sake of protecting them from others. But as two years passed, she burst

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with anger, shame, rage, fear and responsibility, realizing that keeping the documents for herself, in her own belly as it were, deprives the private archive she had collected on her computer of the public dimension that justifies the very existence of an archive, that allows it to maintain documents regarding others, that turn it from a private collection of documents into an archive per se. Therefore, in the responsible manner of an archivist, instead of whimsically depositing the documents at the hands of just anyone she happened to meet, Kam gave them to a journalist of a respectable newspaper. In hindsight this proved to be a wrong choice, since right there, in the public sphere, instead of citizens, lurk wolves. My first answer, then, to the question, ‘What do we look for in an archive?’, will be: that which we have deposited there. Not necessarily you or I personally, but you and I as those sharing a world with others; ‘we’ who are beyond the borders of a certain time and place; ‘we’ who do not converge into a collective of national or ethnic identity; ‘we’ who ought to have been regarded as the reason and sense of the archive, but were instead replaced by ‘history’ — as if at the end of time history itself would come knocking on the gates of the archive, demanding to settle the accounts. Archive fever crosses borders. It is manifest in the demand for gaining access to that which is kept in the archive, and no less in the demand for partaking in archival practice, through the founding of new sorts of archives — archives that would no longer allow the dominant type of archive, the one founded by the sovereign state to go on determining what an archive is. Archive fever is a rejection of the logic of the archive as a realization of the 15th clause of the Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen, which limits the citizens’ right to the archive to their right to ‘know’ or to ‘require of every public agent an account of his administration’. Archive fever challenges the traditional protocols by which official archives have functioned and continue to do so. It proposes new models of sharing the documents stored therein, in ways that requires one to think of the public’s right to archive not as external to the archive, but rather as an essential part of it, of its character, of its raison d’être. ‘Archive fever’ is not simply a problematic translation of a book title; Derrida’s Mal d’archive. It is a real phenomenon that Derrida ignores. It is the result of numerous individual initiatives of creating new archives and depositories, and of claiming the right to rearrange and use existing ones. Radical changes brought about by the new social (civil) media have turned these initiatives into a contagious and irreversible trend, whereby archival procedures, such as collecting, extracting and cataloguing, can be practiced through these new media in a way that contests the monopoly, let alone the authority or prerogatives, of official archival agents and institutions. These procedures are replaced by more Web-like procedures: hence collecting becomes grouping, extracting becomes sharing and cataloguing is replaced by indexing and tagging. Paradigmatic examples of this trend and its contemporary culmination Archive

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is Wikileaks, based as it is on a new understanding of the role of the sentry, or Flickr, out of which new norms and practices of depositing and sharing documents by anonymous users are shaped. The production and archiving of an excessive quantity of digital images, which greatly exceeds the capacity of its producers to ever consume so much as a portion of them, should be understood as a new type of archival contract among image producers, mediated by their cameras, cell phones and the entire technology of the internet. This contract implies the citizens’ right to share not only what is stored in the archive, but also the right to be involved in producing and depositing materials in the archive. Citizens take part in producing and sharing images, knowing that the images one produces always exceed one’s capacity to understand their content and meaning; that the interpretation of images is a task that calls for multiple collaborations; and that each of their images might one day emerge — usually by or through the gaze of others — as ‘the missing image’. Archive fever enables one to retroactively reconstruct this right as one that is inscribed in the logic of the archive from the very beginning — in its spatial organization, in its architecture and in the mechanisms that maintain it — no less than the presence of the archive’s sentries is written in its logic. The sentries’ administration and monitoring of our movements in the archive places obstacles in our way; but no less than that, it expresses the clear recognition of the fact that our right as citizens to that which is stored therein exceeds the limited access we are allowed. The spatial administration of the movements of archive users is a means for preventing the complete fulfilment of the right to (the) archive. There are many aids that assist us in the many windings of the archive: sponges over which crumbling papers must be placed, desks, lamps, photographic instruments, card catalogues, indexes and white gloves. Had our public right to access everything in the archive not been recognized as an inalienable one, no one would have gone to the trouble of supplying us with such aids — even if at times their main purpose is to keep us from complaining that such access has been denied us. Just as our body bursts with withheld rage, knowing that within the walls of the archive — sometimes between its lines — are the very items we are seeking. Withheld rage, suffocation, nausea, anger, frustration, fright, horror and helplessness, no less than the hope or passion reported by those infected with archive fever, bear witness to the fact that archive documents are not merely a collection of dead letters. They are not items of a completed past, but rather active elements of a present. They must be properly and carefully handled, precisely because they are the means by which destruction might continue to be wrought — just as they might enable some restitution of that which continues to exist as present, in the present. The habitus that I have briefly described here, motivated by a right and by the claim to practice it, is not the classical habitus of a historian tracing the past, but that of researchers whose interest in the archive is aroused by relatively novel realms of knowledge, from

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post-colonialism to gender theory, or by common sense of responsibility such as that exhibited by Anat Kam. All of them are motivated by the understanding that that which has been institutionalized as the order of things is not merely infuriating but reversible — and their archival work is one of the keys to this reversibility. Intervention, imagination and transmission are the main practices through which researchers and artists today exercise their right to (the) archive, that is, the right to share the archive, the right to make use of the archive in ways that do not take it (merely) as a depository of the past, storing materials that document what is over and done with. Traces of the constituent violence preserved in the archive can either be preserved untouched, preserving the law of the archive, or be reconfigured and reconceptualized through a new grid, whose consequences affect the way one is governed, as well as the ways one shares the world with others. Curiosity — but also rage, solidarity, resistance, dissatisfaction, doubt and suspicion — arouse citizens’ interest in the archive, in that which is stored inside, in its structure, in the forms of control it produces and is subject to and in the possible ways for unravelling and recomposing documents outside the reach of its law and authority. Such interest-taking is not external to the archive, and ought to be taken into consideration in any conceptualization of it. One cannot continue to conceptualize the archive as if such citizens had never set foot in it, and as if, had they indeed done so, no new type of archive budded at the spot where they set foot. By focusing on the figure of the sentry, Derrida’s influential essay exemplifies this omission of the archive’s citizen-users from the ontology of the archive. The famous call by Jean and John Comaroff for the creation of ‘new colonial archives of our own’, the colonial archive of sentiments developed by Ann L. Stoler or the archive of affection proposed by Leela Ghandi or Achille Mbembe are examples of a new archival contract, ‘signed’ by users without the sentries’ consent. Here are a few more examples amongst many. The archive Kurdistan, created by Susan Meiselas, who insisted on restoring that which had nearly disappeared inside the imperial narrative, and later the national one, while turning the archive into a platform for the rehabilitation of a community. Or Akram Zaatari and his partners in the Arab Image Foundation, who created a visual-political corpus undermining the borders of the nation, assuming/claiming to impose artificial divisions upon shared visual spaces. Or Walid Raad and The Atlas Group, who introduced the ‘if only’ as a living material into the organization of the archive they created. Or the Photographer Unknown archive, created by Michal Heiman, which foregrounds the figure of the photographer in environments where photographs hover in journalistic space, as if created by themselves. Or the effort to redefine the borders of a realm of knowledge, such as architecture, not from the point of view of its sovereign agents, who guard the borders of its objects, but rather from a space of relationship that

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Susan Meiselas, Kurdistan installation detail from the exhibition In History, 2008. Courtesy of artist and the International Centre for Photography, New York.

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Webpage for the Arab Image Foundation, Beirut, founded in 1997.

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Photographer Unknown archive, Tel Aviv. Photography courtesy of Michal Heiman.

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these objects create and operate — the way Zvi Elahyani does in the Israel Architecture Archive. Or creating a shared film archive, an Israeli/Palestinian one for example, reconstructing the fact that Israelis and Palestinians are inseparable ‘Siamese twins’, as Eyal Sivan did. Or the ex libris archive created by Emily Jacir of pages of books she photographed clandestinely with her smart phone during two years at the National Library of Israel where they are catalogued ‘A.P.’ (abandoned property). The books were looted from Palestinian homes in 1948 and were never returned to their owners.4 Or an archive of constituent violence, the violence that constituted the Israeli regime in the late 1940s, as I attempted to do; a civil archive of photographs that suspends the rule of the existing archives — the Zionist and that of the Nakba — reconstructing the photographs as shared documents of a potential history. The many claims archive fever has let loose in public have foregrounded the most essential and important feature of an archival document — being deposited in the name of the public, for the public, and thus not being appropriable by a single person or a group. If a right can be formulated in regard to the archive, it should be based on this feature, embodied in each and every archival document, requiring that it would potentially be accessible to all those to whom it may concern — the public. An archived document provides information or evidence, and serves as an official record that cannot be reduced to the story, deed or work of its author. It always contains an excess of information concerning others. The claim to access it is embodied in this excess. Official records preserved in the archive as remnants from a world shared by many are therefore a locus of a potential claim pertaining to this shared world: for the world is always shared, even under conditions — such as those prevailing in a disaster area — in which the idea of sharing seems most alien. Archive fever made a film director like Neta Shoshani demand access to pictures taken at the Deir Yassin massacre in 1948, and are known to be hidden away from the public eye inside the Israeli State Archives. ‘No wrong has been found in the ruling of the Ministers’ Committee regarding access to confidential archival material’ was the reply to her petition, in which she requested to study materials supposedly accessible to everyone, after 50 years in which the state was allowed by law to keep them confidential.5 However, archive fever is not reducible to the claim to study documents. Archive fever is also the claim to revolutionize the archive; the claim to a different understanding of the documents it holds, of its supposed purpose, of the right to see them and to act accordingly; the claim to the forms and ways of categorizing, presenting and using these documents. Archive fever challenges the norm that stands at the basis of how sovereign power defines archival documents: documents the writing of which are dictated by the powers that be,

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Constituent Violence 47–50, Tel Aviv, founded in 2009. Courtesy of the author.

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and who later also order their hiding. They are the ones who determine when the public will be permitted to study these documents. Archive fever reveals the binding feature of archival documents in the opposite sense to the way in which they serve the powers that be: they are not the property of these powers, and should be protected from them. They must not be rewritten or changed, they should be made available to whoever might express interest in them and to serve in any future claim as to the power exerted through and by them. As the archived documents touch upon shared life, they contain information about that life: decrees and rulings responsible for its design, claims to challenge it, documentation of its repression, proposals for change and other information ensuring its continuance. The archive fever responsible for creating other archive models exposes the fact that the distancing by law of citizens from documents regarding their lives, for decades at a time, is a violation of the basic right to share the archive, a right that is embodied in the archive as such, in the mere fact that the documents it holds regard those striving to actualize this right. Thus, instead of regarding the archive as an institution that preserves the past as though its contents do not directly impact us, I propose to see the archive as a shared place, a place that enables one to maintain the past incomplete, or to preserve what Walter Benjamin referred to as the ‘incompleteness of the past’.6 Surprisingly — or not — sovereign regimes treat photographs in a different manner than documents. They do not usually include them in the archiving regime that confiscates documents for lengthy periods of time. Photographs are not perceived as documents at all. No wonder, then, that the accessibility of photographs and their public distribution has enabled the creation of nonstate photography archives long before the possibility of creating an alternative archive became widespread, a fever. Examples include the archive of Aby Warburg, the Mnémosyne Atlas (created in the 1920s),7 Hannah Höch’s Scrapbook (created in the 1930s) and Gerhard Richter’s Atlas (created in the 1960s). The war archive that Bertolt Brecht created in the 1940s, based entirely on photographs available in the press, which he cut out of newspapers and reread in order to extract them from ‘bourgeois blindness’, as he put it, is an explicit effort to create a ‘new surface of appearance’. These alternative photography archives — whether the scattered ones created in the early half of the twentieth century, or those that have flourished in recent decades — are mostly characterized by not being based upon sensational photographs exposed for the first time after years of intentional censorship. These are archives that enable one to see in photographs, stored as well as exposed, that which previously seemed to be available only in the censor’s chambers. In order to understand how an archive enables photographs to be at the same time hidden and revealed, I shall present two competing approaches to photography, and argue that the new photography archives have flourished

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in the tension that exists between these two. The first approach, which I call instrumental and productive, identifies photography with its product — a photograph — and with the ‘photographed event’ — as though this photographed event is petrified and fixed in the photograph as such. The second approach regards the photograph as a document produced during an encounter, and therefore as never fixed and completed. The first, instrumental approach to photography, then, regards photography as a technology for producing photographs of some object X, which are the finished products of a single subject — a technician, operator or photographer. This approach is widespread in existing archives, where photographs are sorted based on what they show according to those who preserve them. As we approach these photographs, we search for them through ready-made categories to which the seen is referred. This is our common practice for viewing photographs — pointing out the seen and stating: ‘This is X’. Apparently we perform the same gesture by saying: ‘This is Aunt Hannah’, ‘This is a refugee’ or ‘This is a wanted man’, as if these three were simply proper names. When we say ‘This is X’ we are actually applying a name, category or concept to the photograph. In order to do so we first strip the photograph of the plurality inscribed in it, and reduce it to the ‘this’ that is there in the photograph or, in Roland Barthes’ famous words, to ‘This was there’. Thus, when we say ‘This is X’, we are actually saying ‘X was there’. I propose to regard this fusion of two procedures — stripping on the one hand, and pointing out on the other — the zero-degree of an iconization procedure, which is a constitutive part of the act of viewing photographs, regardless of whether a certain image is designated as ‘iconic’. By iconization I mean the transformation of the photograph into a photograph of X, in a way that makes us assume that not just ‘this’ was there but rather that ‘X’ was there. Iconization accompanies our viewing of photographs and enables us to find our way in them and to them. The filing of a document in an archive is no simple task, and the chance of the photographed image getting lost — regardless of sentries who serve particular masters — is immense.8 Although we cannot manage without a certain degree of iconization, we ought to be careful and alert about it, keeping in mind that a photograph does not document a concept or a demarcated event, but rather is a document, the product of an event shared by several participants. The process of iconization usually makes us forget this event that I call ‘the photography event’.9 This event takes place either with the mediation of the camera, or with the mediation of the photograph. This second event, which takes place in and through the encounter between a spectator and a photograph, constantly undermines the turning of the photographs in the archive into dead pages, stable references of concepts or the categories that served to file them and subsequently stuck to them like a second skin. Photographs as icons are the outcome of sovereign regimes that create sovereign archives. Official archives are based on an instrumental attitude Archive

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towards photographs, as if they were the signifiers of a typical event or situation — ‘the photographed event’ — which they document from the outside. Storing photographs in an archive and distancing the public from them, as if thereby annulling the photography event, is the way in which a sovereign regime treats the common domain, be it public space, photography or the archive. The protocol of iconization is responsible for the illusion that anyone has the power of total mastery over that which would be inscribed in a photograph: as if a photograph expresses a world-picture; as if the camera sees eye-to-eye with the person holding it, with whoever sent him or her or filed the photograph in the archive. In every encounter with a photograph in an archive, an iconization protocol is enacted. It is that which enables one to file the photograph and to extract it. Sometimes photographs yield easily to names or concepts attached to them; other times they remain a dim image that does not coagulate into a typical object, and the pointing-out ‘This is X’ gesture requires much strength in order to be linked to them. A photograph, any photograph, is produced within the framework of a shared world. Therefore, the denotation ‘This is X’ can play a practical role of identifying one by his or her name, or describing the photographed person by a family name, without this name being attached to her or him. But it can also violently constitute the photographed person through a category that shapes her or him in its image, thereby deciding the fate of the photographed person in a way that fuses together image, concept and reference. These three types of iconization are distinguished by the power exerted in the iconization process, in the fusion of the proper name with the reference, in the distancing, sharing or excluding of some of the viewers, in the sharing, considering or disregarding of the referent — the photographed person — as partners in the archive and in the operation of the items collected in it. The latter type of iconization, produced through constituent violence, creates communities and destroys others, decides fates, contests certainties, sabotages, destroys, rescues and challenges. Let me briefly turn to a few examples. There is a photograph filed in the archive under the laconic caption — ‘Afula. Arab civilians harvesting a field, Haganah members standing guard over them’. One cannot with any certainty determine whether the photographer who took it was summoned to the spot or came at his own initiative, and whether or not he was a welcome guest. We can state that the photograph itself is the product of certain negotiations between the photographer and the soldiers present, empowered to regulate the distance he was supposed to keep in order not to get too close to the objects of the photograph, and in order not to infringe the boundaries of the field of vision determined for him in advance. This is certainly not a classical snapshot taken clandestinely or in haste, but rather a deliberate instance of framing, an intended allusion to art history that clearly evokes Jean-François Millet’s The Gleaners (1857). The framing that results from the placement of the photographer is misleading: it makes the spectator acquiesce, even if only

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Fred Chesnik, Afula, Arab citizens harvesting crops in the fields; Haganah members guarding them, 1948. Courtesy of the IDF and Defense Archive.

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momentarily, that what is visible accords with the verdict of the official caption — ‘Arab civilians harvesting a field’. Were the photographer to approach any closer it would have been possible to capture the men at work not merely as silhouettes, together with the object of their intervention — the spot towards which they are all leaning. However, in spite of the relative distance from which the photograph was taken, the details inscribed in it suffice to refute the pastoral description of a grain harvest attributed to it. The armed soldiers overseeing the work of the Arabs protect their mouths and noses from some powerful stench using strips of white cloth. These are not heaps of harvested crops visible at the perimeter of the circle that the Arabs form: the field they are supposedly harvesting is not cultivated but barren. The Arab figures are gathered around a pit. At least two of them are holding hoes: they are digging a pit. The pit they dig is not shallow — some stand in it, knee-deep. Alongside this excess of details that contradict the official caption of the archive, the photograph suffers from a substantial lack of information concerning the photographed event. When the official caption is juxtaposed to the details I have described, one clearly realizes that this lack of information is no coincidence, but rather meant to prevent that which is inscribed in the photograph — the burial of something inside a pit — from emerging into plain view; to assist in burying this sight behind a bucolic caption. The photograph under discussion was exhibited as part of the archival exhibition, ‘Constituent Violence 47–50’. At the time I was working on it, I hoped that I, or one of the historians I consulted, would be able to link the photograph to a specific event and location. I therefore examined photographs and documents from various sites of massacres and battles in the area. Although I gradually reconstructed the photographic event and accumulated more relevant data, I was unable to link it to a specific date and place with certainty. This was not a matter of bad luck or coincidence, but a result of the continuous abuse of our right to share the archive with Palestinians who were deprived of it. The right to share the archive is part of a larger project that seeks to reconfigure human rights discourse, in a way that foregrounds the impact of the abuse of one’s rights on the others. Depriving the Palestinians of their right to share the archive in many ways had an irretrievable effect on decades of historiography. Since the creation of the state of Israel, Palestinians were excluded from Israeli state archives, even though so much of what is stored in them concerns their lives. They were excluded both as potential claimants and as concrete photographed persons, who had been part of the history depicted in these photos. As a consequence, such photographs were stripped of their events and tended to become mere icons. In the last decade, when I started to look at these photos from 1948, the Nakba — the Palestinian catastrophe of the same year — offered itself as a prism through which these kinds of photos can be viewed and as a framework for their interpretation. This perspective, important as it was for creating a space for the emergence

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of Palestinians as claimants of their own history, was still caught in the law of the archive — namely that of partition and separation, as if two histories had been unfolded in parallel. My task was to benefit from the new perspective without being constrained by it. The archive I created was a conscious effort to shatter the separation inscribed into both Zionist and Palestinian archives, and to archive the procedures through which this separation itself has been constituted and imposed as a law of nature. Instead of reading what was done to Palestinians through this photo, as critical historiography would suggest, I looked for the conditions that made it almost impossible to read such photos in connection with the numerous testimonies that describe almost verbatim what can be seen in them. I discovered many Palestinian testimonies, some of which matched that which is seen in this particular photograph, while others referred to places from which I could not locate any photographs. They describe how the witnesses were concentrated by soldiers at gunpoint and ordered to bury the dead, with the stench of bodies heavy in the air. These testimonies helped me restore the event of photography: not the information regarding when and where the photo was taken, but the specificity of this burial procedure, which was routinely practiced during that period. The photograph revealed itself as a rare, concrete instance of this procedure. The extent to which the various testimonies matched what I had managed to reconstruct, on the basis of the specific pattern of excess and lack configured in this photograph, made it clear to me that even if I could not determine the singular event in question, the photograph nonetheless testifies as to the precise details of a procedure typical of the late 1940s, in which Palestinians were called upon to bury other Palestinians. The difficulty of determining the time and place of this specific occurrence derives from the very nature of this procedure, and from the erasure and denial that surrounded it, which were part of the political and cognitive conditions of the archive, of archive-ability and of visibility in and through the archive. I want to briefly discuss another photograph from the Israeli archive — that of the ‘ink flag’ at Um Rashrash, identified as a victory shot marking ‘the end of the War of Independence’. In this photograph, several Israeli soldiers hold a flagpole bearing the Israeli flag, while one soldier climbs up it. The denotation ‘This is victory’ assumes that we are facing a photograph of determination in a war that took place between two sides. The repetition by a spectator of the same denotation is supported by previous visual images of victory, such as that of soldiers hoisting a flag up a pole, which has become institutionalized as an icon of victory. In the case at hand, there is a concrete visual reference — the famous photograph from Iwo Jima signifying the American victory over Japan at the end of World War II in 1945. This reference was already in the minds of those who hoisted the flag at Um Rashrash.10 Attaching the concept ‘Victory’ to the photograph produces a referential circle in which the concept — victory — indicates the image and the image points back Archive

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at the concept: victory is victory is victory. One thus forgets that a photograph is an image produced from within a shared reality. Its preservation as ‘victory’ means first and foremost the distancing of those from the archive for whom it was not a matter of victory to begin with. In a disputed reality, as in the Israeli case, such circular repetition occurring for several decades must arouse suspicion. My suspicion was aroused as I began to construct a photographic archive, focusing on the period in which the above photograph was taken. I started to question not only the outcome of the war — the Zionist narrative of victory versus the Palestinian narrative of catastrophe, the Nakba — but also whether this was war at all, and whether there were two sides to begin with. A prolonged look at the photograph enables one to notice that, besides the formal repetition of a victory icon, the photograph holds no signs of battle or war. If we exit the frame and reconstruct what happened at Um Rashrash, and then return to the photograph equipped with that information, we shall discover that it is not only the pretence of producing an icon that is responsible for the void inside the picture. Um Rashrash was not inhabited by an enemy. However, by stepping out of the limits of the frame, not only to Um Rashrash but also to an archive of that period, and by viewing photographs not through the concepts which the archive attaches to them — ‘ The battle of Latroun’, ‘Operation Yoav’, ‘Lifting the siege on Jerusalem’ or ‘Cleansing terrorist nests’ — we gradually discover that most of these violent events did not tip the scales in battles between two sides, but rather cleansed the body politic of the governed and constituted the law that institutionalized the demographic, economic, social, urban and political reality that this cleansing had produced.11 While the claim ‘This is X’ — like ‘This is victory’ — makes superfluous the renewed look at the photograph, and while the scene in this photograph, or in its archive neighbours, appears again and again as a repetition of that very same ‘This is X’, as long as none of the gaps, mistakes, injustices, lusts, lies or pieces of information revealed in the course of time do not negate the circular relation between image, concept and reference, as long as they do not undo their fusion, we as citizens must realize that, as we enter the archive, a red warning light flashes. It indicates that we are facing a non-civil archive, in which the photographs have turned from shared documents into icons that serve the archive’s sovereign. The icon, as I have shown, is an effect of the usage and mode of reading, a protocol, and not an essential characteristic of a particular photograph. The iconization of the third degree is part of a constituent violence. Within the photograph itself it produces the law of what may be seen and what may not. It recruits the viewers to preserve the violence of the law. As indicated above, the instrumental gaze of the first two degrees of iconization is not harmful, and is mostly necessary for our orientation. Iconization of the third degree, on the other hand, tends to evade us — and so too does the fact

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Miki Kratsman, Zacharia Zveidi, 2001. Published in Ha’aretz, 2001.12 Courtesy of the artist.

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of having become accomplices to the constituent violence, of having been turned into its maintainers, its sentries, the preservers of its law. Is this person not a wanted man? In this manner, acts of state — such as the decision to turn Palestinians into refugees or to execute ‘suspect’ Palestinians — while written in textual documents, are preserved for long periods of time out of the public’s reach, while being distributed across public space through photographs. Although the latter, depending on the degree of recruitment of its spectators, might be kept unseen. Here again is an example of a documented instruction, of the kind the public exposure of which Anat Kam is serving a prison sentence for. It is a public photograph taken by Miki Kratzman, published in Haaretz daily newspaper more than once. It is disseminated as a photograph of a ‘wanted man’. Not a photograph of a citizen sought by an emergency regime, but rather a photograph of a ‘wanted man’ who is destined — as we have learned from the documents collected by Anat Kam, but having known this earlier as well — to die. Our chances of seeing in Zakariya Zbeide’s portrait anything other than a ‘wanted man’ are rather limited. After all, Zbeide’s existence in our shared space has been constructed as that of a ‘wanted man’, in such a way that this concept has attached itself to him like a proper name, fused with his portrait, with his image. In viewing the photograph we are expected to say, ‘This is a wanted man’. In order to contest that this portrait is that of a wanted man, we have to place a protocol countering that of iconization, something I suggest calling ‘an iconoclastic protocol’. Archive fever instructs us that it is not the destruction of photographs that is at hand here, but rather the destruction of icons, of photographs as icons. This destruction cannot take place without undoing the point of view of preservers of constituent violence — a point of view that sees concepts where photographs are displayed — and without the destruction of the archive as an institution for preserving the past. The archive preserves items of our shared world, it preserves that which enables us to shape it differently, anew, in common. Under conditions of what I have elsewhere called ‘regime-made disaster’, when the regime produces an ongoing disaster and administers the archive of this disaster, an iconoclastic protocol is not merely a protocol of reading individual photographs. It involves the claim to naturalize existing archives, and at the same time, or in the meantime, to create alternative ones, through a wilful exposure to archive fever. Instead of going on sorting photographs by concepts or photographers, in both the archives I created — Act of State 1967–2007 and Constituting Violence 47–50 — I collected existing photographs, of the kind that dwelled safely in other archives, and removed the partitions between photographers and photographed persons, between photographed persons and spectators and between periods of time — that which has passed and that which is at our door. The inevitable separation between the ‘two sides’

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cracked open nearly by itself, and the Israeli-Palestinian history began to inevitably appear — as is the case with national conflicts everywhere — as a history of the entangled relations between heterogeneous populations. The photographs began to appear as complex events, and the disaster inscribed in them no longer appeared as the disaster of only one side, but rather as a regime-made disaster, and its victims were no longer voices of a completed past. They began to sound like living figures, partners, intervening in the present; turning to the viewer, and together with him or her creating the conditions under which the photographed documents could reappear as samples from a shared world they demand to shape: a world formed not under the conditions of the constituent violence inscribed in the photographs, but rather together, in such a way that none of the participants agrees to take part in dividing this world, by constituting humans in the mould of political concepts like ‘refugees’, ‘wanted people’, ‘collaborators’ or ‘illegal immigrants’, and by forcing the spectator to recognize them as such, since that is the way the archive has presented them. In many recent events of public occupation we see people on the move, people occupying a space. We may ascribe to them a claim to have a right to enter or occupy that space; a claim to the right to (share the) archive in which their history is preserved; the right to this land where, a few decades ago, their presence was far from contested. If we think about a similar scene involving Palestinian refugees and their descendants trying to return to their homes, looking at it this time from the point of view of the sentries who are awaiting them, the sense of their presence changes immediately. Now they are likely to be classified as ‘infiltrators’, breaching the law of a sovereign state, or even as terrorists. Let me recall very briefly several historical images: the women’s march on Versailles, the Afro-American march on Selma, blacks marching on Cape Town. In these images, part of the governed population — whose part in the body politic was not recognized — is moving towards what at the time emblematized the power that oppressed them and ignored their claim. These people are both moving towards a place and occupying it. The major happening in these different events is the public claim of part of the governed people, made by their very presence, to their right to share the territory and its rule. Implied in this claim is another claim: that of being part of a body politic from which they have been excluded. For decades, their march and claims were seen from the perspective of the sentries, who excluded them and kept them outside the body politic, whose members possess a right to make a claim. In order to see the Palestinians not as ‘refugees’, and hence as people who are not part of the body politic; in order to see them rather as instance of the ‘occupy’ movement, it was not enough to criticize the Israeli ideology that regards every Palestinian as a suspect. What was required was a conceptual shift, an archive fever whose dynamic generated a shift in the concept of the archive itself. Archive

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1. Ignaz Cassar, ‘The image of, or in, sublation’, Philosophy of Photography, Vol. 1, no. 2 (December 2010): 202. 2. Jacques Derrida, Archive Fever, trans. Eric Prenowitz (Chicago: University of Chicago Press 1996), 36. 3. Michel Foucault, The Birth of The Clinic: An Archaeology of Medical Perception (New York: Random House, 1975). 4. On the looted books see: Gish Amit, ‘Salvage or Plunder? Israel’s “Collection” of Private Palestinian Libraries in West Jerusalem’, Journal of Palestine Studies, Vol. 40, no. 4 (Summer 2011): 6–23. See also: http://www.thegreatbookrobbery.org/ (accessed 14 August 2014). 5. See the full court decision (in Hebrew) here: http:// www.the7eye.org.il/verdicts/50313/ (accessed 14 August 2014). 6. ‘The past,’ Benjamin wrote, ‘carries with it a secret index by which it is referred to redemption’: Walter Benjamin, ‘On the Concept of History’ in Selected Writings Volume 4: 1938–1940, eds Howard Eiland and Michael W. Jennings (Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2003), 390. 7. On which Georges Didi-Huberman recently wrote: ‘we could legitimately see the Atlas by Aby Warburg as a tool for gathering, or for “sampling”, by means of interposed images, the great chaos of history’. See: Georges Didi-Huberman, ‘Sampling Chaos’, Etudes photographiques, no. 27 (May 2011): 49.

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8. New technologies of tracing the form of the image, if and when applied to the photographs stored in existing archives, will enable the continued development of visual research from within an existing image. At the moment, however, they too are limited in their possibility to assume such research. See, for example: Tsila Hassinne and De Geuzen’s Image Tracer (2006–), http://www.missdata.org/israel%20tracer/index.html/ (accessed 29 July 2014).

9. See my discussion of the two photography events in: Ariella Azoulay, A Civil Imagination: A Political Ontology of Photography (London and New York: Verso, 2012). 10. For more on these two photographs see: Ariella Azoulay, ‘Declaring the State of Israel: Declaring a State of War’, Critical Inquiry, Vol. 37, no. 2 (Winter 2011). 11. See Ilan Pappe’s use of the term ‘ethnic cleansing’ not as the massacre of a population but rather as cleansing a region of a certain population: Ilan Pappe, The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine (Oxford: Oneworld, 2006). 12. For more on the context of the photo see: Ariella Azoulay, ‘The Execution Portrait’ in Picturing Atrocity: Reading Photographs in Crisis, eds Geoffrey Batchen, Mick Gidley, Nancy K. Miller and Jay Prosser (London: Reaktion Books, 2012), 249–60.

Dissonant Archives: Contemporary Visual Culture and Contested Narratives in the Middle East

The Museum Past the Surpassing Disaster Walid Raad’s Projective Futures Chad Elias

The past two decades have witnessed the emergence of a grassroots network of contemporary art spaces, galleries, schools and cultural foundations in cities such as Amman, Beirut, Cairo, Istanbul, Jerusalem and Ramallah. Institutions like Ashkal Alwan, Al-Ma’mal Foundation, Daraat Al Funun, Platform Garanti and the Townhouse Gallery have been instrumental in creating alternative and independent art networks that operate with little or no funding from the state. Indeed, these artist-driven platforms have been largely shaped in the absence of a national museum charged with collecting modern and contemporary art in the region. While these initiatives continue to play an important role in stimulating artistic and critical exchange, they have yet to really address the question of how to collect, preserve and transmit local artistic traditions. This issue becomes all the more urgent amidst the rapid construction of large-scale museums in the United Arab Emirates (UAE). Much of the focus has been on Abu Dhabi’s multi-billion dollar Cultural District on Saaidiyat Island (fig. 1), which is set to include the largest-to-date Guggenheim Museum by Frank Gehry, a branch of the Louvre Museum designed by Jean Nouvel, a Performing Arts Centre by Zaha Hadid, a maritime museum by Tadao Ando and a National Museum by Foster and Partners. Forthcoming and recently unveiled museums in Doha, Dubai, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia and Sharjah also promise to transform the terms and scale of artistic production in the Middle East. Critics have singled out the Saadiyat projects as symbols of neo-liberal ‘corporate globalization’ that threaten to subsume the already-existing art infrastructure in the region. Far from attesting to the UAE’s efforts to educate and engage local audiences, its (mostly western) detractors see the island museum complex as the packaging of art and culture into what the Abu Dhabi Tourism Authority calls ‘luxury-based experiences’ aimed primarily at jet-setting tourists with no particular attachment to the Gulf.1 By the same token, the Louvre’s decision to buy into a franchise model has drawn vociferous

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(fig. 1) Walid Raad, Index XXVI: Artists, 2009 from Scratching on things I could disavow: A history of art in the Arab world. Courtesy of the artist and Sfeir Semler Gallery, Beirut/Hamburg.

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opposition from art world professionals in France. A petition against the deal, signed by close to 5,000 museum experts, archaeologists and art historians, objected to what it saw as the selling off of France’s patrimony.2 Meanwhile, Gulf Labor, an activist group composed of an international collective of artists, has drawn sustained attention to the ignominious treatment of migrants working on the construction and maintenance of museums on Saadiyat Island. Yet it’s worth pointing out that this campaign does not oppose the Guggenheim venture itself but rather the Museum’s seeming indifference to ‘the coercive recruitment, and deplorable living and working conditions’ of labourers.3 While the global network of interests makes it impossible to start viewing the Gulf’s ongoing transformation on its own terms, in the logic of critical regionalism advocated by Rem Koolhaas, the Gulf Labor campaign highlights the important role that artists are now demanding to play in the formation of these nascent institutions.4 Rather than simply denouncing Saadiyat as an exercise in branding, these protests suggest the need to take seriously not only the problems but also the possibilities that this moment presents. Indeed, the focus on the Louvre and Guggenheim controversies has led most commentators to ignore the impact of Abu Dhabi’s planned national heritage museum. The editor of Bidoun magazine, Negar Azimi, speculates that such an institution has the potential to create a collection and education program that could ‘induce a dialogue about historiography [not just in the Gulf but] in the Middle East more generally’.5 Seen from this perspective, Saadiyat’s importance lies not in its importation of objects or cultural models but in the formation of new collections and museological practices that open onto ongoing debates about national heritage, repatriation and the contested boundaries of the ‘global museum’. Indeed, like the Museum of Islamic Art in Qatar, the Louvre Abu Dhabi has an important collecting mandate that may well serve to reverse the long-standing ‘flow’ of antiquities from east to west.6 These issues are taken up as a source of artistic reflection and critical enquiry in Walid Raad’s multi-volume History of Contemporary and Modern Art in the Arab World. Initiated in 2007, this project is comprised of a series of lecture-performances, videos and photo-conceptual installations that explore the institutions, economies, concepts and forms made possible by the building of a massive new infrastructure for the visual arts in the region. Rather than interrogating the social, economic and political network of interests driving the massive investment in and fascination with the visual arts in the Middle East, Raad asks how museums, galleries, schools and cultural foundations might productively engage with the legacy of failed or disinherited artistic traditions in the region. This involves seeing the future of places like Saadiyat not as already foreclosed but as part of a set of processes whose outcome remains contingent and open to contestation.

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While Scratching on Things I Could Disavow (2008–) looks back at repressed or forgotten episodes in the history of modern Arab art, Preface to the Third Edition (2013–), a context-specific installation at the Louvre, reflects both on the reopening of the Department of Islamic Arts and the forthcoming loan of a small number of objects from that collection to the new Louvre in Abu Dhabi. Both of these chapters consider how these cultural paradigms may have been affected, both materially and immaterially, by the various wars and colonial occupations in the Arab world over the last two centuries. While Scratching on Things and Preface reference histories that have been violently interrupted, mirroring the Atlas Group’s earlier emphasis on states of discontinuity, absence and belatedness, I would argue that Raad’s current projects are not bound by the same visual aporias and coupures that defined his work on the Lebanese Wars. For although they complicate any simple recovery of dormant or ossified artistic traditions, Raad’s histories of modern and Islamic art in the Middle East also counter the idea there is an irreparable rupture separating contemporary Arab artists from their nineteenth- and twentieth-century predecessors. In his writings, the Lebanese artist and theorist Jalal Toufic formulates the concept of the ‘surpassing disaster’ to refer to events whose effects are not only measured in the loss of lives and the manifest destruction of artworks, museums, libraries and various other sorts of physical records, but also in what he terms the ‘immaterial withdrawal’ of tradition.7 In the wake of catastrophic events such as the Palestinian Nakba of 1948, the Arab Naksa of 1967, the Israeli invasion of West Beirut in 1982, the Hama massacre in the same year and the aerial bombing of Iraq during the Gulf War, Arab artists find themselves unable to access certain paintings, films and novels, even though these works may continue to be physically extant. This withdrawal can also occur in the realm of architecture. Toufic gives the example of the Lebanese people’s general inability to perceive or record the ravaged buildings that they inhabited at the conclusion of the civil war. This obliviousness, which is manifested in the artistic ‘indifference to documenting the carnage through photographs, films, and videos’, cannot simply be explained by the fact that the war-weary population had ‘grown habituated to the destruction around them’.8 Rather, this systematic overlooking is due to the fact that the buildings belong to a history whose thread has been broken. Before the referent can be accessed again, artists first need to make visible its withdrawal. In this stage, Toufic writes, ‘art acts like the mirror in vampire films: it reveals the withdrawal of what we think is still there’.9 Acknowledging Toufic’s crucial influence on his own practice, Raad suggests that the ‘blurred, never-on-time, always-to-the-side images’ that he produced under the banner of the Atlas Group were ‘indicative of this withdrawal’ of tradition.10

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However, it is possible to see Raad’s subsequent work as signalling a different stage in artistic production after the surpassing disaster. As Toufic explains, the act of revealing the withdrawal of tradition paves the way for its future resurrection: There is going to be a time of development of the chemically developed photographs taken during the latter stages of the war [in Lebanon]. The documentation is for the future not only in the sense that it preserves the present referent for future generations, but also in that it can function as a preservation of the referent only in the future, only when the work of resurrection has countered the withdrawal.11 The images and narratives that go to make up Raad’s recent installations might be seen to correspond to the ‘time of development’ that Toufic speaks of here. This is what the artist himself seems to suggest when he states that ‘we are clearly in a period where referential relations are possible — and the forms of these referential relations are what interests me at this point’.12 In Index XXVI: Artists, 2008, the first section of his History of Modern and Contemporary Art in the Arab World, Raad displayed the names of over 150 artists who have worked in Beirut over the past century. The names are written in Arabic script and printed on white vinyl letters that match the colour of the gallery walls, making them barely perceptible from a distance. While many of the names may be unfamiliar to museum audiences outside of Lebanon, some of these artists, such as Saloua Rouda Choucair, Paul Guiragossian, Omar Onsi and Etel Adan, have attracted considerable commercial and critical attention in recent years. This has led to a situation in which a canon composed of key figures, movements and styles is being retroactively constructed, almost overnight, as museums such as Tate Modern and Mathaf: Arab Museum of Modern Art now devote major surveys to their work. Raad’s own indexing of these artists recognizes that the writing of histories of modern art in Lebanon and other Arab nations is being propelled and mediated by the rapid ascendancy of contemporary artistic practices from the Middle East. This has created a paradoxical situation in which a modern canon is at once framed through the lens of the contemporary yet also seen as discontinuous with the forms, idioms, media and techniques of the present. In the process of compiling a chronology of Lebanese artists for Index XXVI, Raad quickly discovered that most of the names were referenced in monographs, exhibition catalogues and art reviews written in French or English. Thus the process of sourcing these names also gives rise to a project of retranslation that is far from straightforward. When Index was first shown at Sfeir Semler Gallery in 2002, a local critic discovered that some of the names had been misspelled in Arabic. This critic, whom Raad describes as The Museum Past the Surpassing Disaster

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(fig. 2) Walid Raad, Preface to the Seventh Edition II, 2012. Archival inkjet print mounted on aluminium Dibond, 73.7 x 110.5 cm. Courtesy of Paula Cooper Gallery, New York. © Walid Raad.

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‘self-appointed guardian of Lebanese art and artists’, took it upon himself to correct the name of Johnny Tahhan in red pencil.13 Raad would spend the next seven years researching Tahhan’s life and work, amassing an archive of exhibition reviews, correspondence and reproductions of his paintings and drawings, While the story of the critic is based on an actual occurrence, Raad uses this event to test an altogether more unlikely hypothesis: that artists from the future had sent him these names but ‘due to a telepathic and/or thought-insertion and/or technical glitch’, one name (at least) seems to have reached him in distorted form, causing him to misspell it.14 Raad surmises that the future artists had done this intentionally, knowing that the red pigment in the critic’s handwritten corrections would supply them with the material that they needed: Future artists want or need this color because it is no longer available to them. Is the color red not available to future artists because the pigments that constitute the color are depleted or destroyed? No, the pigments remain quite abundant. The color red is not available to the artists of the future because this color has withdrawn even while extant.15 We can assume from this information that these future artists are working in the aftermath of a surpassing disaster, which is why the colour red is no longer available to them. Just as it points to a catastrophic future that reconfigures the present, Index also gestures back to a period in Lebanon’s history from which Raad and his generation feel disconnected. Following Toufic, I would argue that this rift is not merely the product of differing generational attitudes or shifting artistic paradigms, but the withdrawal of tradition following 15 years of war. From this perspective, Tahhan’s work might be seen as marking a period of unheralded modernist experimentation before the surpassing disaster. Yet Raad’s misspelling questions the possibility that his modern predecessors can be fully recovered or reintegrated into a larger corrective history that would include contemporary art. The discontinuous relation between modern and contemporary art in the Arab world is also the subject of Preface to the 7th Edition, a series of six paintings that allude to the politics of non-figurative art in the region (fig. 2). In the accompanying wall label, we learn that the paintings, which were ‘considered to be canonical examples of early twentieth century Arab abstraction’, were inexplicably removed from display at an Emirati museum. The works were censored by the ruling Sheikhs not because they were paranoid and had chosen to read these abstract forms as a veiled threat to the legitimacy of their regime. Rather, what had caused offense here was the discovery that each of the works was ‘a painting of a painting’s shadow’.16 In other words, what the Sheikhs initially take to be early examples of Arab The Museum Past the Surpassing Disaster

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abstraction turn out to conceal a practice of crypto-figurative painting. In fact, Raad had photographed the shadows cast by paintings in the Mathaf’s collection, digitally erasing the image inside the frame of each work and replacing it with its penumbra. Working with and against a revived legacy of modern Arab art, Raad’s miming of abstract painting brings to mind the work of pioneering figures such as Suha Traboulsi. Born in 1923, the Lebanese-Palestinian artist first gained national attention in the Arab world in the 1950s as an influential and often controversial member of the Amman, Cairo and Beirut art, performance and conceptual art movements. Judged by their appearance alone, Traboulsi’s paintings would seem to belong to a by-now familiar history of abstract art. Yet imagine a scenario in which Traboulsi eliminates all traces of figurative representation, not out of adherence to Euro-American modernist principles of medium specificity and essential flatness, but because she has no other option available to her. In this world, no other shapes, lines or colours are accessible to artists. Her model of abstraction, which conforms neither to an additive nor subtractive logic, is not amenable to the existing concepts or terms that we use to talk about non-figurative art even in an expanded transnational framework. Raad and Traboulsi’s works are premised on conceits that may seem fanciful, but they raise important and difficult questions about what it would mean to rewrite the history of modern art in the Arab world at a juncture marked by the increasing global dominance of the contemporary. The focus on the art of the present not only works to bracket earlier time periods but functions also to invalidate temporalities that do not conform to the dominant chronopolitics of our age. Indeed, the relatively recent interest in ‘cosmopolitan modernisms’ that have developed outside of Euro-American art capitals presents a challenge to how we conceptualize forms of cultural production that have long been condemned as ‘out of synch’ with the west, trapped in states of delayed or incomplete development.17 Recent exhibitions such as Other Primary Structures (2014), a sequel to the landmark Jewish Museum exhibition showcasing the innovations of British and American sculptors, foregrounded Minimalism’s global reach through the inclusion of artists from Asia, Africa, Latin America, Eastern Europe and the Middle East. Revisionist exhibitions of this type bring into view spatial and temporal networks that have been rendered largely invisible within a dominant Anglo-American narrative. Unfortunately, the relations of formal affinity that are set up between these artists’ works function to flatten out important aesthetic, social and geopolitical differences. Moreover, while it seems to question the authority granted to the canon, the move to incorporate peripheral modernisms here serves ultimately to reinvigorate the centre. By contrast, what Raad opens up in his History of Modern and Contemporary Art in the Arab World is more than simply a corrective history or an expanded conception of the canon.

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Rather, following Toufic, his project calls for a radical rethinking of tradition past the ‘surpassing disasters’ that have beset the Arab world in the twentieth century. This entails attending to the contradictions that mark the modern and contemporary as discontinuous but also overlapping period categories. In his most recent installations, Raad has turned his attention to Islamic art as part of a wider critical reappraisal of the term within art history and museum departments. Largely a by-product of European archaeology and museology at the end of the nineteenth century, Islamic art has only recently begun to interrogate its formation as an academic discipline. One of the major problems has to do with the question of where and when to locate Islamic art given the history of its use as a rubric for classifying a vast array of artistic production covering almost 1,400 years and spanning every continent. Indeed, Islamic art would seem to resist any straightforward temporal bracketing and spatial encompassing. The unwieldy position of Islamic art is further complicated by the fact that since the 9/11 attacks in 2001, the language and terms used to define the field have been increasingly caught between an embattled religious identity and an equally contested cultural identification.18 While this ambivalence and conceptual unwieldiness might be seen as a stumbling block, Raad’s engagement with Islamic art opens up a more expansive geography than the familiar Arab one. Indeed, ‘Islamic’ might serve as a useful conceptual counter to the latent privileging of the nation state as a locus for artistic production and exchange in the Middle East. In 2013, Raad was invited by the Louvre to create a purpose-designed exhibition for the museum’s newly opened Islamic galleries. Although the Louvre has been collecting Islamic art since the 1830s, prior to the construction of the new wing, these objects were shown in temporary and quite marginal spaces within the museum. Preface to the First Edition, which marks the beginning of what will be a three-year collaboration between Raad and the French institution, reflects on the history of the collection, its museological documentation and classification, and its exhibition history. In recent years there have been a number of important studies analyzing the processes through which Islamic art objects came to enter into European and North American collections in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. At the same time, many of the prominent collections of Islamic art have been extensively reorganized, both within existing institutions (the redevelopment of the Hermitage collections, the redesign of the Metropolitan Museum’s galleries of the ‘Arts of the Arab Lands, Turkey, Iran, Central Asia and Later South Asia’ and the newly opened galleries of the Louvre’s Islamic collection) and in recently constructed spaces (the Museum of Islamic Art in Doha, designed by I. M. Pei). The redevelopment of these collections has brought into focus two salient questions about the study and display of Islamic art. First, although objects from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries have not traditionally been included in the scope of Islamic art (due to long-standing misperceptions The Museum Past the Surpassing Disaster

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(fig. 3) Walid Raad, Prologue_I, 2014. Archival inkjet print, 157.5 x 208.3 cm. Courtesy of Paula Cooper Gallery, New York. © Walid Raad.

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of the period as one of decadence and decline), some museums are now beginning to integrate these items into their modern and contemporary collections. Secondly, until recently, displays of Islamic art have tended to focus almost exclusively on the object, its provenance and physical condition. However, research on Islamic art is now increasingly addressing issues such as the production and usage of objects, the meaning and value (both economic and symbolic) they hold for their respective societies, as well as affiliations with other objects in different spheres of life — what anthropologists would call ‘the social life of things’.19 In opposition to the museological impulse to group collections according to rigidly defined medium-based and dynastic taxonomies, Raad’s photographic riffs on the display of art in the Islamic galleries at the Louvre cast a critical eye on the architectural and discursive framing of the collection and the ways in which that framing encourages (or allows) us to see the objects. In the first series (fig. 3), Raad has used archival images of the vitrines in which the Louvre collection of Islamic art was displayed in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries; most of the photographs are from the 1920s, but a few date back to the 1870s. Raad digitally emptied the vitrines of their contents and then superimposed the cases onto one another. Viewed as a nearly abstract, architectural assemblage, the resulting image seems to erase the objects themselves and emphasize instead the museological structures that contain them. If we begin to reimagine the objects within the vitrines, however, and to imagine the path of the viewer among the cases, then we immediately get a sense of the objects’ communication with one another through and across these previously discrete displays. The vitrines become porous containers, unable to contain the objects within them or limit their potential meanings. This points to a larger supposition made by the artist: that should the objects from the Louvre’s collection decide to mysteriously ‘trade skins’ when they are sent to Abu Dhabi, then they will almost certainly also need new vitrines to house them. In the second series (fig. 4) Raad photographed the newly redesigned Islamic galleries in the Louvre using a long-exposure setting. The vitrines in these galleries are constructed completely out of glass and positioned at odd angles relative to each other. As a result, every vitrine is filled with reflections from the adjacent glass cases. This makes it almost impossible to experience an object discretely. Museologically, this might be seen as a limit, but Raad was fascinated with what the ‘fluid’ display structure — the architect Mario Bellini compares the cases ‘to fish in an aquarium’ — does to radically alter the viewing process.20 His photographs of these spaces therefore accentuate the play of reflections across the surfaces. The resulting images lack a horizon line that would allow a viewer to definitively anchor him or herself in these spaces or determine the relative location of specific objects inside/outside the vitrines. Again, the final effect here is one of overlap and exchange rather than The Museum Past the Surpassing Disaster

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(fig. 4) Walid Raad, Introduction Plate 13, 2014. Archival inkjet print, 127 x 165.1 cm. Courtesy of Paula Cooper Gallery, New York. © Walid Raad.

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(fig. 5) Walid Raad, Preface to the third edition, 2012. One archival colour inkjet print from a set of 22, each 50.8 x 38.2 cm. Courtesy of Paula Cooper Gallery, New York. © Walid Raad.

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containment: an invitation to the viewer to engage with the social existence and movement of these objects across time and space. Between 2016 and 2046, 294 objects will be loaned to the Louvre Abu Dhabi from the nearly 18,000 objects held in the Louvre’s newly established Département des Arts de l’Islam. Preface to the Third Edition proceeds from the assumption that 28 of these objects will transform through the journey in ways unanticipated by curators, artists or historians: While no one will doubt the subsequent changes, the nature and reason of their onset will be contested. Many will attribute them to the weather, asserting that the ‘corrosion’ began soon after the exquisitely crafted, climate-controlled crates were opened in the Arabian Desert. Others will insist they are immaterial and psychological, expressed only in the dreams and psychological disorders of non citizens working in the Emirate. And a few, the rare few, will speculate that they are aesthetic and came into view only once, in the enclosed 28 photographs produced by an artist during her Emirati-sponsored visit to the museum in 2026.21 The corresponding set of large inkjet photographs takes as its starting point photographs by Hugh Dubois, the museum photographer at the Louvre. As visual records of items within the museum collection, Dubois’ photographs situate individual objects within geographical locations, chronologies and medium-specific taxonomies: a seventeenth-century Egyptian dagger, for instance, is made of steel inlaid with gold. The catalogue information provides a positivistic sense of historical certainty at the same time that it denies a more complex narrative of circulation and consumption. Reading a catalogue entry for one of these objects, we seem to master (and delimit) its position within time and space, and yet we cannot describe the purpose of the object or its relation to other objects either within the collection or in the wider field of Islamic art and culture. Raad’s challenge to the illusion of epistemic mastery and containment extends also to the idea of the ‘universal museum’ now advocated by the Louvre.22 The 28 images, attributed to ‘a future Emirati-sponsored artist’, build on the idea that the objects in the Louvre’s collection of Islamic art will change when they travel east, and that this transformation ‘will only appear in certain photographs that this person will make’.23 Preface to the third edition (fig. 5), for example, superimposes the aforementioned Egyptian dagger with a floral panel from India, so that the decorative motif overlaps with and obscures the body of the dagger. The two catalogue entries are similarly superimposed, so that while parts of each entry are still legible (e.g. the words Egypt and India, one date and some material features), others are not. The transformation frees each

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(fig. 6) Walid Raad, Preface to the third edition (Édition française)_Plate_IV, 2013. Archival colour inkjet print, 111.8 x 85.1 cm. Courtesy of Paula Cooper Gallery, New York. © Walid Raad.

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object to some extent from its chronological and geographical constraints; it compels us to think of these objects as conversant with one another across periods and locations that we too often perceive as distinct and isolated. In denying our ability to ‘master’ these objects, the superimposed catalogue entries reconceptualize the boundaries of Islamic art and challenge the art historical tendency to confine objects to discrete and non-contiguous or intersecting frames. The semi-translucent coloured shapes that act as a third layer (fig. 6), on top of the superimposed photographs, are ‘skins traded’ from Persian miniatures; their uneven outlines are derived from those aspects of the original images that exceeded the frames. This is again another confluence of otherwise distinct materials and geographies: a transformation seemingly brought about by the move of the works to Abu Dhabi. Perhaps more significant, however, is the suggestion that the objects have always already existed beyond their frames — that they (and the societies from which they are taken) are somehow desirous of moving beyond neat categorization into a more expansive if complicated understanding of Islamic geography and historicity. As with his history of modern and contemporary art in the Arab world, Raad’s work on Islamic art moves in two directions at once. While the new Islamic galleries at the Louvre in Paris open up questions about the colonial legacy of the museum and the concomitant formation of Islamic art collections in Europe and the United States, the construction of the Abu Dhabi branch may serve as an opportunity to rethink the category of Islamic art precisely through the disjunctions of the historical and the contemporary, the global and the local. As against the tendency to view museological displays of ‘Islamic art’ as valorized repositories of an authentic or traditional culture that has been corrupted in the passage to global modernity, Raad’s ‘strategic anachronism’ foregrounds the ambiguities and ambivalences of the collection.24 Such an approach may well serve as a model for collecting and exhibitions practices in the Middle East.

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1. See: Tourism Development and Investment Company’s (TDIC), ‘About’, http://www.saadiyat.ae/en/ about.html/ (accessed 23 July 2014) for a description of Saadiyat Island.

17. The phrase ‘cosmopolitan modernisms’ is borrowed from Kobena Mercer. See: Cosmopolitan Modernisms, ed. Kobena Mercer (London: Institute of International Visual Artists and The MIT Press, 2005).

2. Abu Dhabi has paid $525 million to use the Louvre name, and an additional $747 million in exchange for art loans, special exhibitions and management advice.

18. On this tension in Islamic art see: Barry Flood, ‘From the Prophet to Postmodernism? New World Orders and the End of Islamic Art’ in Making Art History: A Changing Discipline and its Institutions, ed. Elizabeth Mansfield (New York: Routledge, 2007), 32.

3. Gulf Labor, ‘Who’s Building the Guggenheim Abu Dhabi?’ (July 2014), http://www.gulflabor.org/ (accessed 24 July 2014). 4. Rem Koolhaas, Reinier de Graaf, William Todd Reisz and Kayoko Ota, The Gulf: Hedge Fund Study, 10th Venice Architecture Biennale: Cities, architecture and society (2006). 5. Negar Azimi, ‘Trading Places: Negar Azimi on the New Middle East Market’, Artforum International, Vol. 46, no. 8 (April 2008), http://artforum.com/inprint/ issue=200804&id=19758/ (accessed July 11, 2014). 6. Ibid. 7. Jalal Toufic, The Withdrawal of Tradition Past a Surpassing Disaster (Forthcoming Books, 2009), http:// www.jalaltoufic.com/downloads/Jalal_Toufic,_The_ Withdrawal_of_Tradition_Past_a_Surpassing_Disaster. pdf (accessed 26 June 2014). 8. Ibid., 58. 9. Ibid., 57. 10. Alan Gilbert, ‘Interview with Walid Ra’ad’, BOMB — Artists in Conversation, Vol. 81 (Fall 2002), http://www.bombmagazine.org/article/2504/walid-raad/ (accessed 23 July 2014). 11. Toufic, Ibid., 58. 12. Email message to author, 14 January 2011. 13. Walid Raad, Appendix XXVI: Artists (2009), http:// www.sfeir-semler.com/hamburg/exhibitions-hamburg/2010/2010-01-16-walid-raad.html/ (accessed 23 July 2014). 14. Ibid. 15. Ibid. 16. Walid Raad, Preface to the Seventh Edition (2012), http://www.sfeir-semler.com/gallery-artists/walidraad/view-work/preface-to-the-second-edition.html/ (accessed 11 July 2014).

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19. These two points are discussed by Benoît Junod, Georges Khalil, Stefan Weber and Gerhard Wolf, eds in ‘Islamic Art and the Museum’, the introduction to their volume, Islamic Art and the Museum (London: Saqi, 2012). 20. Marco Bellini Architect(s), ‘The Louvre Inaugurates a New Architecture’ (2012), http://www. bellini.it/opencms/opencms/doc/THE_LOUVRE_ INAUGURATES_A_NEW_ARCHITECTURE.pdf (accessed 23 July 2014), 4. 21. Walid Raad, ‘Artist’s Statement’, Preface to the Third Edition (2014), http://www.sfeir-semler.com/ gallery-artists/walid-raad/view-work/ (accessed 11 July 2014). 22. Universalism is one of the recurring keywords in the statement posted on the institution’s website following the intergovernmental agreement to create Louvre Abu Dhabi. While the museum acknowledges that ‘the question of Louvre Abu Dhabi as a universal museum warrants clarification’, these cautionary remarks are overshadowed by the following assertion: ‘The first, and most obvious, perspective of Louvre Abu Dhabi’s universalism stems from the history of museums and particularly that of the Louvre, whose excellence will be conveyed by the future institution. The palace that became the Muséum National in 1793 was a product of the encyclopedic thought of the Enlightenment and of the French Revolution.’ See: ‘Universalism, a historical and philosophical foundation: Louvre Abu Dhabi in relation to the Louvre and French museums’, Musée du Louvre, http://www.louvre.fr/en/louvre-abu-dhabi/ (accessed 23 July 2014). 23. Walid Raad, ‘Artist’s Statement’, Ibid. 24. Here I follow Barry Flood who highlights the deployment of ‘strategic anachronism’ as a productive feature of contemporary engagements with Islamic art. See: Barry Flood, ‘From the Prophet to Postmodernism? New World Orders and the End of Islamic Art’ in Making Art History: A Changing Discipline and its Institutions, ed. Elizabeth Mansfield (New York: Routledge, 2007), 45.

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I Have The Picture The Making of Photographic Heritage in Contemporary Egypt Lucie Ryzova

Egypt’s photographic history is as old as that of photography itself. The advantages of a new technique of image making that seemed to virtually ‘copy reality’ were immediately evident to a Europe already infatuated with the east. Through the middle decades of the nineteenth century, European travellers, artists, surveyors, archaeologists, entrepreneurs and adventurists equipped with cameras came to Egypt, Palestine and other Ottoman lands in increasing numbers. A political and economic drive for colonies, natural resources, new markets and political influence was paralleled by a veritable quest for Middle Eastern images, whose distinctive ethos of emptiness, timelessness or backwardness responded to Europe’s own self-perception as the discoverer, the conqueror and the civilizer.1 The direction of the gaze as embodying the possession of knowledge and ‘civilization’, already present in western painting, was made even stronger by the assumed evidentiary and documentary qualities of the new medium of photography. Soon, the practice of photography took root in the region. Starting from the 1850s, commercial photographic studios opened their doors in the region’s major cities — in Istanbul, Cairo, Alexandria, Beirut and Jerusalem. They catered to two distinct markets. One was a western tourist market for photographs as travel souvenirs, which included landscapes, ancient monuments and various local ‘types’ and genre scenes. But a parallel, local market for photographic portraiture also developed. The same studios that sold genre scenes and souvenir landscapes to western travellers also served as portraitists for a distinctly local market, where wealthy local elites came to be photographed as proud, paying customers. In Egypt, these elites were not limited to the viceregal family, but included wide segments of what we might call the local polite society, composed of Turkish-speaking (but typically multi-lingual and cosmopolitan, in the Ottoman sense of the word) OttomanEgyptian elites, the more privileged amongst Coptic families and the many locally established Levantine minorities.2 These elites developed the same

photographic habits enjoyed by their European and American counterparts: regular visits to studios, hanging their portraits on walls, exchanging them with friends and family and composing carte-de-visite albums, and sporting albums of ‘famous personalities’ of their time. Portable consumer cameras based on a simplified and commercialized development process, known to historians of photography as ‘the Kodak Revolution’, came equally fast. By the turn of the twentieth century, handheld consumer cameras were on sale in Egypt, and they became especially popular among Egyptian-Ottoman ladies of leisure. Photography became increasingly employed by the state and its different bureaucracies and by local businesses in a multitude of official usages: in police and legal records, and in identification documents and forensics. Other scientific, technical and business usages became equally common. In the interwar period, the photographic market for commercial portraiture was substantially stratified and included roving outdoor photographers, hundreds of affordable studios spread across multiple urban centres throughout the country and a high-end niche in Cairo and Alexandria that defined photography as art. As the twentieth century progressed, photographs were intensely mobilized in Egyptian public culture in the construction of national narratives across the vast and rapidly expanding fields of press and publishing.3 It is this rich and variegated local legacy that forms the body of what I shall term in this essay, ‘Egypt’s photographic heritage’. Little is known of this local, indigenous photographic history. Egypt has no institution devoted to the preservation and study of its photographic heritage. But photographs lurk in multiple private and institutional collections across the country. They can be found in great numbers in regional and specialized museums, such as the Train Museum, the Police and Army museums, the Museum of Education and the Egyptian Geographical Society, to name just a few.4 Such institutional collections hold extensive records of technical, scientific and documentary photographic production over the past century and more. Major publishing houses, notably Dar al-Hilal, al-Ahram and Ruz al-Yusuf, hold substantial photojournalistic collections as part of their in-house archives. Private, vernacular photographic history, including both commercial studio portraiture and candid photography, is then contained predominantly in private collections. Private collections are of two kinds. One is the family archive; practically any Egyptian family of middling means owns some kind of photographic history. Part of it might be displayed throughout the domestic interior, though much more typically hides in little-used drawers and forgotten corners. Some families or individuals, usually those of long social standing and notable history, actively perceive their family photographs as an ‘archive’. Then, there is the second kind of collection by ‘collectors proper’ — individuals who have acquired extensive photographic collections through their adult life, usually by buying them on the market.5 I Have The Picture

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In this essay, I shall be less concerned with the aesthetic or visual aspects of photographs produced in Egypt over the past century and a half than with questions of how photographic heritage is constructed in contemporary Egypt. From the vantage point of a social and cultural historian, or indeed of that of a cultural critic, all photographs represent historical material in one way or another. My focus here is on how photographs are understood in diverse contexts, including Egypt’s public institutions, private collectors, newly emerging archiving ventures and in online venues such as Facebook and blogs dedicated to their circulation.6 This essay will look at how value is assigned to vintage photographs, crucially determining the modes of their circulation and use, and — most importantly — what kinds of meaning they are assigned in these contexts. ––– Widely diverging attitudes towards historical photographs and their ‘value’ currently coexist in Egypt. Long-established public archives tend to undervalue their photographic collections, considering photographs as inferior historical documents. Plagued by decades of decreasing budgets, institutional neglect and restricted access, photographs in public institutions and museums share the fate of the archival collections of which they are part: uncatalogued and uncared for, they often remain unknown to their very custodians.7 They become easy victims of loss, destruction and theft. Such neglect contrasts sharply with the overvaluation of historical photographs in private hands and on the open market. Cairo is the site of a vibrant and fully globalized market of vintage objects.8 Historic photographs are much sought after by local and international collectors and their prices sometimes rival those reached at international auctions, which is where many photographs from Egypt end up. It should be stressed, however, that while global photography fairs (such as those in London, Paris and New York) have shifted their attention towards the photographic heritage of South and East Asia, photographs from Egypt remain eagerly sought after by collectors from the Gulf. There is no doubt that there has been, in Egypt (and the region more widely) over the past decade, a kind of ‘archive fever’ widely perceptible through diverse acts of collecting, preserving, archiving, exhibiting, publishing, buying and selling, hiding or, conversely, sharing of vintage material dating to the last century or more of Egyptian history. New private archiving institutions have sprung up across the region; they are large and small, running through local or foreign funding or relying on volunteer work, incorporated as private companies, NGOs or remain one-man or one-woman shows. Regional artists and curators have drawn on vintage photographs in a never-ending range of artistic projects. The price of vintage photographs on the private market — both in upscale antiquarian shops and in downscale markets with

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used paper — has been steadily skyrocketing. Middle-class families are becoming more aware of their own private family photographs that had long been forgotten, stowed away in drawers, shoeboxes and attics (the local version of which is the sandara — a compartment built above a doorway). Many have become more protective of such family heirlooms, making potential archives less vulnerable to loss and destruction but more guarded and inaccessible. Yet others have gone in the opposite direction, putting photographs up on the Web through personal blogs or Facebook pages (in Egypt, all too often called ‘archives’), making their own family photographs, or prized finds they bought in flea markets (or a combination of both), widely available to the public. ‘Archive fever’ is a wide umbrella term encompassing diverse acts with often-incompatible agendas; but common to these acts is a shared drive to pay attention to Egypt’s modern heritage, and to collect, ‘map’ or ‘salvage’ cultural artefacts such as photographs, magazines, posters or other printed ephemera and cultural objects. Assigning some objects value in one part of the world (or in certain contexts) but little or no value in another part of the world (or in other contexts) results in a flow of artefacts in one direction, towards the contexts where they are ‘valued’. It also allows for claims of cultural superiority, in the form of ‘better knowledge’ flowing in the opposite direction. Such a situation is not reducible to an ‘East-West’ binary; it does not merely separate the ‘East’ from the ‘West’. Claims of providing ‘proper’ care for Egyptian photographs (or for historical material in general) are mobilized equally among local actors eager to prove their nationalist credentials, or to prove their ownership of ‘culture’ in the form of cultural expertise. Such claims might alternatively hide social hierarchies, class identity and political agendas as well as specific commercial interests. Such wide-reaching claims and interests are evident in the recent (in the past decade or so) mobilization among local and international actors to ‘save’ Middle Eastern photographic heritage. Take this line from a recent policy statement by the Middle East Photograph Preservation Initiative, a group of local and international curators and photography conservators: There exist hidden treasures in the Eastern Mediterranean, largely unrecognized and cared for by an enlightened few. These treasures are not the artefacts, monuments and architectural wonders that normally come to mind when pondering the incredibly rich and long cultural history of the region, but photographs dating from the early history of the medium to the present day that are the undervalued record of times past, documentation of social, political and cultural history and the expression of past and present societies.9

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The ethos of ‘saving treasures’ is widespread amongst private individual and institutional custodians of photographs in the region. The prize for being the ‘enlightened few’ who know how to care for photographic heritage is correspondingly (relatively) wide; ‘relatively’ in the sense that photography certainly does not enjoy the kind of widespread social recognition as ‘art’, ‘cultural objects’ or ‘historical sources’ as it does in western contexts.10 The two major recent initiatives whose strategies in collecting, preserving and curating the region’s photographic heritage, the Library of Alexandria and the Arab Image Foundation, are born entirely on such premise: on the need to save local photographic history from neglect and destruction (for further discussion on this, see: Ryzova, ‘Mourning the Archive’, 2014). But this ethos of ‘saving’ and of being the ‘enlightened few’ is equally present amongst private collectors and collection custodians. Many of them acutely perceive themselves as saviours of objects that represent ‘treasures’ in the midst of a society that ‘does not care’ for its own heritage. ‘Things were thrown out in the trash, these things were trash’, one long-term collector of photographs and popular-culture ephemera told me regarding the origins of his extensive collection. Another one, the son of a photojournalist and commercial photographer, recalls the birth of his own consciousness within this same landscape of neglect (referring back to the 1970s and 1980s): When my father died, we had three apartments full of old photographs that we threw away in the trash, as we needed those apartments for income; later, when I went to the arts college, I realized that I used to have a treasure and threw it away; so I started to actively look for these things. All collectors need to justify the spending of their private resources on their collections in some way. What is rather specific to the Egyptian context is the decision to collect objects that are not widely recognized by the rest of mainstream society as having any ‘value’. In other words, there is an implicit self-positioning of the collector as one who either ‘knows’ better than others, or who ‘has better taste’ or even has a specifically ‘anti-mainstream’ taste, embodied in the very decision to collect and care for a particular kind of ‘neglected’ object. But beyond the issue of taste, Egyptian collectors justify their quest for neglected objects and assign value to their historical photographs in two specific ways. One is a particular take on historical value. Some are persuaded that the photographs they own contain ‘truth’ about the history of their country. ‘This is history as it really was’, one collector said proudly while showing me snapshots of King Farouq’s private and ceremonial life. Another collector, heir of a notable Ottoman-Egyptian family that used to be very close to the royal court, after which it fell from power and was persecuted by the post-1952

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republics, perceived the custodianship of his extensive family archive as a duty not only to his family, but also to history itself. He saw his role not only as one of writing his family ‘back into Egyptian history’, but also as ‘setting this history straight’. Such perceptions, based as they are on personal experiences, also betray deeply positivist notions of truth and history. These custodians bestow excessive evidentiary demands on photographs as transparent carriers of such ‘truth’. A positivist notion of history and its linking to cultural objects (documents, photographs) has tangible roots within Egypt’s deeply politicized legacy in dealing with archives and archival documents. Rather than public depositories, Egyptian archives through the twentieth century have played the role of guardians of history as ‘truth’, alternating their mission between enforcing an official dynastic version of history (in the pre-1952 period) to that of restricting access, pure and simple (in the post-1952 period).11 Whether Egypt’s archives are perceived to contain ‘truth’ by some and ‘lies’ by others, the belief remains widespread that documents contain somebody’s truth, coupled with the well-observed notion that history, in this part of the world, is always deeply politicized. The other way in which private custodians of photographs assign value to their collections is based on purely material considerations. ‘What’s in it for me?’ is a common question that myself and my colleagues, who have been trying to access private collections in Egypt, often report having been asked (such an approach, while common, luckily does not characterize all private custodians, some of whom remain very generous, if sometimes somewhat uncertain, for reasons that I will develop below). The Dar al-Hilal photojournalistic archive, for example, is known to have asked for exorbitant sums of money to allow researchers to simply see their photographic collections. This mistrust is often closely related to the earlier-mentioned positivist understanding of photographs as the repositories of ‘truth’, and the ensuing fear that researchers might somehow ‘steal it’; that they will uncover the secrets hiding in old photographs and harvest the fame that may follow. ‘If you write your History of Photography in Egypt after having seen my collection, what will be there left for me to do?’ asked one collector, as he advised me to go and buy my own pictures in an overpriced Cairene antiquarian boutique. ‘His’ photographs were only for him to use — and, presumably, like virgin images, they could only be ‘used’ once. This tendency towards understanding private collections as assets that cannot be freely shared with others without some form of compensation is a recent one, and may partly have to do with the neo-liberal ethos of the past two decades that pushed towards the extensive monetization and marketing of both culture and history. It is then no surprise to find that virtually all of the over-a-dozen individual custodians of photographic collections I have met in Egypt (collectors and family collection owners) put much emphasis on I Have The Picture

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‘production’: on exploiting their photographs either materially or intellectually, and often both. Intellectual exploitation includes plans to open up their own archiving institutions, museums or cultural centres, or to publish books and make documentary films based on their collections. The more obviously commercial exploitation includes publishing calendars and promotional material (often for solvent clients such as big banks) with nostalgic colonial-era themes. This cultural ethos of nostalgia for a pre-1952 Egypt, much in evidence during the last decade of the Mubarak era, should be understood in the context of the full retreat from the economic and social models of the 1950s and 1960s. While this is not always evident to most of those who indulge in the consumption of such nostalgia, much of what appears to be purely commercial exploitation has an important ideological element. The many coffee-table books, websites and Facebook pages devoted to circulating unsourced and decontextualized images of Egypt or of the Ottoman Empire ‘in the good old days’ popularize an ethos of a clean, beautiful paradise that was colonial, pre-1952 Egypt. Consciously or not, they serve to unmake the complex web of achievements and failures of the post-colonial era, offering a facile and politically loaded interpretation of Egypt’s recent history as essentially a negative trajectory from a one-time modernity ‘back’ towards dirt, chaos and backwardness synonymous with the post-1952 regime. All of the actors currently involved in the shaping of photographic heritage in Egypt — individual collectors, major new private institutional custodians such as the Library of Alexandria or the Arab Image Foundation and, indeed, the general educated middle-class public in Egypt writ large — place the blame for neglect and destruction of the country’s cultural heritage squarely within the legacy of the post-1952 state. Their narratives of ‘saving treasures’ (not dissimilar on the surface from the nineteenth-century scramble for Middle Eastern images) are sharply defined against what they perceive as the state’s failure to care for cultural heritage, evident in the decay of public archives and museums and the overall deterioration of other public services in Egypt.12 Not uncommonly, such failure is understood as the failure of modernity. Its manifestations include mainstream society’s ignorance of their own cultural heritage, perceived from a secular middle-class perspective as a retreat from the ‘civilization’ that Egypt once had, and widely confirmed by the resurgence of public piety and conservative religious movements and their entry into politics. Such a ‘failure of the state’ applies equally to the expansive socialist state of the 1950s and 1960s, as it does to the more recent neo-liberalizing Mubarak regime of the past three decades. The first version of statism was too patronizing and totalitarian in its approach to ‘culture’; the nationalization of large successful business enterprises often went hand in hand with the political punishment and marginalization of notable families closely connected to the old regime (such personal histories directly concerned two family collection custodians that I have worked with). The more recent version of a

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‘failed state’, the Mubarak regime, was more akin to a web of interconnected mafias in which valuable objects could disappear at whim, and where national heritage laws enacted by the previous socialist state were newly interpreted and used to allow the seizure of valuable objects and their siphoning into the hands of regime cronies. If this is, then, the historical setting, then the current situation is even more complex. The current understanding of photographic heritage in Egypt is not only heir to historical legacies including the politicization of history and the concomitant need to guard historical documents, but also to excessive demands placed on images as the harbingers of disputed history and their past complicity in public national mobilization, and the transmutation of the state from post-colonialism to post-socialism. This heritage is also shaped by a host of more recent forces, most important being the digital revolution (discussed in the final part of this essay), which has transformed the ways in which photographs (and indeed any other seemingly two-dimensional cultural objects) can be preserved and circulated, and the belief that such technologies can provide solutions for long-term problems of storage and access. Last but not least, this heritage is also shaped by the neo-liberal understanding of culture through the prism of the market: not as ‘right’ but as ‘privilege’. As a matter of turning up ‘products’ that ought to be marketed to ‘consumers’. ––– Even as they instinctively felt that their collections had ‘considerable value’, and whether they defined this value as historical (‘truth’), monetary, or both, many of the collectors I have encountered were also genuinely confused about what it is that really ‘has value’ about their photographs. Some were generous and willing to share digital copies with researchers; others considered a digital copy to be the equivalent of the original. Giving away a scanned copy for them equalled giving away the photograph itself. As one of them put it to me, ‘If I give you a scan, why would I then have the original? There would be no point for me to have the original.’ Yet others were reluctant to even show their photographs to researchers. Such attitudes attest to a widespread confusion in contemporary Egypt between photographs as material objects and photographs as ‘mere images’. The academic community and the general public in Egypt mostly understand photographs to be ‘images of something’. They are valued for their visual content, the visual information carried on their surface, and not as material objects embedded in social and cultural contexts. It is public knowledge that copyright is widely ignored in Egypt. But above and beyond the notion of legal ownership and authorship of a photograph, key information about the provenance of a given image is equally ignored.13 Illustrations appearing in books, whether academic or of general interest, are rarely, if ever, properly sourced. I Have The Picture

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They are always captioned through the subject they represent — the person, place or event they depict. In the better cases their authors (where known or appropriate) are acknowledged, but never the medium or the provenance of any given ‘image’: the context in which it was created, published or circulated. Instead, readers are offered generic ‘images’ — orphans devoid of materiality and original contexts. For an historian or a researcher, authorship is only part of the wider package of ‘rights’ that are violated by considering photographs (or any visual objects) as ‘mere images’.14 The artefact, whether an old photograph, a postcard or a magazine illustration, has the ‘right’ to be properly identified, just as the public has the right to know what is it that they are looking at. It is the provenance of the image that bears crucial information about the material identity (medium and its original source) and original context of production and circulation that allows us to apprehend what is it that we are looking at, and its significance as primarily a cultural object embedded in, and often constitutive of, social relations. This, however, is not the case in contemporary Egypt. The confusion between ‘image’ and ‘object’, the photographic object and its digital copy, coupled with the excessive demands placed on images as the harbingers of positivist notions of truth and history, leads to such unique situations as the trade in mere digital scans. There has emerged in Egypt, in the past five years or so, a market for scanned copies of historical photographs; some dealers sell scans of images on the open market as ‘the real thing’, asking for, and receiving, prices often equalling those that photographic objects used to fetch only few years ago.15 There is also some scope to suspect that public institutions in Egypt that have recently embarked on ambitious digitization projects of their collections then discard the originals that have been scanned because they no longer perceive any need for them. Photographs stamped as the property of one public archive or another have regularly been appearing on the open market in Cairo. ––– Digital technologies play a decisive, albeit ambiguous, role in the unfolding of Egyptian ‘archive fever’ on multiple levels. On a direct level, the contemporary craze for sharing vintage photographs (ranging from one’s own family archive to some ‘pretty old pictures’ one has downloaded from somewhere else on the Web and posted on one’s page, to numerous Facebook pages dedicated to the posting of vintage photographs) explains the protective attitude of collectors and personal collection custodians, who are increasingly unwilling to share digital copies of their analogue photographs, and, indeed, in some cases, to even show them. The conflation between a photographic object and its digital copy, the understanding of photographs as ‘mere images’ of things, persons or events and the constitution of Egypt’s first major photographic archiving

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initiative under the umbrella of the Library of Alexandria along these lines have led to the unprecedented commerce in digital copies (scans) of vintage photographs as having equal value to originals. But the digital revolution has affected attitudes towards vintage photographs on a more abstract (or conceptual) level as well. Newly emerging archiving ventures and Egyptian middle-class publics writ large share a widespread belief in the redemptive power of digital technology as the solution to decades of deteriorating public education and academia, as well as to problems of storage, preservation and access. Institutions such as the Centre for Cultural and Natural Heritage (CULTNAT) and the Library of Alexandria offer new models for heritage display and consumption through cutting-edge high-tech projects, promoting digitally processed museology and virtual tourism to both domestic and international publics. Last but not least, digital technologies and social media sites are responsible (for better or worse) for the ‘freeing’ of old photographs from the confines of their pre-digital materiality. Digitized old photographs uploaded on the Web might be ‘saved’ and ‘liberated’ from dusty corners and forgotten drawers, from being locked away in inaccessible archives or public museums, destroyed or stolen, thrown in the trash or sold to dealers, whether intentionally or by mistake, but this ‘liberation’ comes at a price. They are simultaneously ‘freed’ from their historical meanings and social context that made them meaningful as socially salient image-objects. Thus ‘freed’ from their original contexts, they are simultaneously reassigned with new meanings that are acutely contemporary. In the final part of this essay, let me briefly look at what happens to vintage photographs in Egyptian online venues. Over the past few years, pages dedicated to old photographs of Egypt have proliferated on Facebook. Most of them are in Arabic, but some of their users use both Arabic and English interchangeably. Amongst the most popular (those with most ‘likes’ and followers, and those most widely shared on Facebook) include Masr al-an wa zaman [Egypt Now and Then], Masr Ayyam Zaman [Egypt in the Olden Days], Ahl Masr Zaman [Egypt’s People in the Olden Days], the King Faruq official page (al-Safha al-rasmiyya li mawqi‘ al-malik Faruq al-awwal–Faruq Masr), Suwar Qadima li Masr [Old Images of Egypt], Al-Qahira al-Tarikhiyya [Historic Cairo], Suwar Masr Qadima [Old Images of Egypt], Klasikiyyat al-Zaman [Classics of the Olden Days], Fotografiyya Masr [Photographs of Egypt], Suwar Masr Zaman [Images of Old Egypt], Egyptian Streets and, most recently, Foto Masr [Photo Egypt]. The raison d’etre for all of these pages is to post and circulate images that depict aspects of life in Egypt zaman. Zaman might be translated simply as ‘back then’, but it is more accurately translated as ‘in the olden days’ because it carries a particular nostalgic quality and a positive value judgement attached to ‘back then’. Also the word ‘image’ remains porous in Arabic (the term sura means both ‘image’ and ‘photograph’, but it incidentally and rather I Have The Picture

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(fig. 1) Screen grab of Timeline photos on Suwar Masr al-an wa zaman Facebook page. Images posted at different times during the winter of 2014. Retrieved 8 August 2014.

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(fig. 2) Egyptian actress Miriam Fakhreddin posing on an advertising for Vespa motorbikes in a popular magazine (title not provided, but likely to be Akhir Sa‘a). Colourized photograph, late 1950 or early 1960s. Published on Egyptian Streets Facebook page on 5 April 2014. Retrieved April 5, 2014

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significantly also means ‘a copy’) and, more importantly, in the understanding of the page owners and patrons. Some of these pages focus uniquely on digitized old photographs of multiple genres (street scenes originally circulated as postcards, family photographs made in studios or as home snapshots and, last but not least, staged photographs of ancient monuments and ‘types’ known as Orientalist photographs). Others are more eclectic and include advertising and other diverse popular culture ephemera (fig. 1). Some post current news, in a curious conflation of genres that is both proper to the Facebook environment (its generic heterogeneity and ephemerality, whereby posting and sharing means being) as it is to the broader self-identification (or self-appointed mission) of many of these Facebook pages to posit as ‘archives’ of not only what Egypt ‘was’ (what it ‘looked like’ as depicted on vintage photographs), but also what it ‘is’. It is worth noting that it is not only the contemporary meanings through which photographs are read — the very reason why they are unearthed and deployed — but also the new notions of ownership that emerge through such practices. Take, for instance, a recent posting on the Egyptian Streets Facebook page of an ‘album’ of 23 vintage images titled ‘Egypt’s Golden Years’. The title image of this album (fig. 2), shows the actress Miriam Fakhreddin posing with a Vespa in front of the Cairo Citadel. Originally a colourized photograph, this is a late-1950s advertisement for Vespa motorscooters, printed in a popular magazine. As it transpired in a brief online skirmish with a competitor blog (one of those brief and undocumentable ‘action’ moments on Facebook), these images were ‘stolen’ verbatim from a competitor blog, Vintage Egypt, itself a sister blog to the renowned urban activist venture Cairobserver.16 Cairobserver’s founder and administrator, a young Egyptian holding a doctorate in architecture and urban planning from NYU, complained about Egyptian Street’s ‘theft’ of ‘his’ album from his Facebook wall. The matter was presumably resolved since the posting on the Egyptian Streets blog now includes a provenance notice: ‘These photographs [sic] are available thanks to Vintage Egypt.’ But going back to the ‘original’ post on Vintage Egypt, these images (only some of which are actually photographs, the majority being drawings) appear there as already orphaned images. All originate as scans from mid-century Egyptian popular magazines, but no single publication date or name of source (the actual magazine) is given. This orphaning is partly due to the nature of Facebook. Sharing material on social media is by definition an act of decontextualization; the only ‘origin’ that matters is the last site in the chain of endless sharing. Anyone who shares becomes the ‘source’ for the next person reposting the item and — for a fraction of time — its de facto ‘owner’. Anxiety about widespread copylifting from competitor sites is sometimes countered by the use of watermarks and digital signatures (fig. 3), by which administrators seek to assert their primacy as being the first one who ‘found’ and posted a given item. A new notion of digital ownership is emerging here, in which the one who first introduces an image I Have The Picture

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into this environment and initiates the circle of sharing becomes the ‘owner’ of the image — and certainly the only ‘source’ that now matters. Such ownership more often than not already means stealing, copylifting (i.e., downloading from other online sites without acknowledgement), or orphaning (denying analogue referent or source of provenance when it comes to images scanned from books and magazines, or personal collections of old photographs). This orphaning of vintage photographs and their proliferation on blogs and Facebook pages articulates with a number of specifically Egyptian concerns, both historical and contemporary: feelings of ‘stolen’ or ‘silenced’ heritage, of a modernity gone wrong whether at the hands of failed nationalist modernizing regimes or their religious alternatives. In such a context, the uniqueness of photographs as objects can be entirely dispensed with. Materiality is what caused the photograph’s loss, its closure, its silence. Freed of the limitations of materiality that was the photograph’s curse, digital images can multiply freely and endlessly in the virtual environment or even rematerialize in endless forms and incarnations as calendars, postcards, posters, books or banners. Stripped of their provenance, of any contextual information that would preserve their original meaning as socially embedded photographic objects, digitized vintage photographs might be silenced as historical sources for historians and researchers, but for their contemporary users in Egypt and for Egyptians across the world, such decontextualized and dematerialized photographs are resignified with new meanings that are already there waiting. The more severed they are from their original contexts, the more ‘free’ they become to perform new kinds of cultural work. The unprecedented ease of online sharing, the urge to use photographs and other historical material in order to ‘finally show how things really were’ (as the collector discussed above put it), couples here with an acute necessity to navigate a difficult present. Unsurprisingly, digitized and thus ‘freed’ vintage photographs circulating on blogs and Facebook serve as visible ‘proof’ of the modernity Egypt once had. Let us return to the actress-model posing for Vespa advertising in figure 2. The album (a selection of scans from old magazines) was described by the page’s admin in the following terms: Egypt in [the] 1900’s was a different place: it was a place of liberal spirits, unhampered by sectarian and ethnic prejudices, and the rights of men, women and children were championed. Click below to take a glimpse at Egypt’s ‘golden years’ and to remember the Egypt that you might have forgotten ever existed.17 A vintage advertising photograph of a model posing on a motorbike thus illustrates the extent of women’s rights back in the Golden Age, which has only declined since: ‘Imagine a woman driving a motorbike in Cairo today!’ commented a user, generating many approvals. This post (with 593 ‘likes’ and

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890 shares in first 20 hours after posting) sparked a long debate deploring the decline of the present, the reason for which is most commonly (in this and virtually every other similar Facebook discussion) attributed to either religion or nationalism (i.e., the post-1952 republic). For the historian of photography it is most curious to see the contemporary meanings middle-class Egyptians currently assign to that problematic body of old photographs of Egypt, produced, throughout the second half of the ninteenth century, by mostly foreign photographers catering to western publics. Featuring idyllic landscapes, ancient monuments and social ‘types’, these photographs have now become almost anathema among Middle-East historians. They have been labelled, and dismissed, as ‘Orientalist’ for their complicity in the colonial project by portraying the region as stagnant, backward and passive, and thus ready to be ‘taken’ by the active-because-civilized colonizer, in a relationship that has been extensively gendered. What they show is less ‘Egypt’ than a certain image of Egypt that was already there in the mindsets of those who came to take these photographs and then carry them home to another continent. Selective, staged and demeaning they are, as we are careful to acknowledge. But this is far from how they are currently read when ‘freed’ of their context, their historical baggage and circulated on Egyptian Facebook pages. Take this late nineteenth-century landscape photograph showing an Egyptian village with pyramids in the background (fig. 4). It was published on the Masr al-an wa zaman Facebook page and introduced by the page’s administrators in the following terms: ‘Hardly could we find a better picture from the Olden Days (zaman) to advertise our page. This picture was taken in 1880. If you appreciate our effort and care about the history of your country to reach the whole world, do share.’ Seventy-one readers obliged. A reader commented: ‘God bless those Olden Days, days of plenty (ayyam al-kheir al-wafir).’ In the present afterlives of vintage Orientalist photographs on the Web, colonialism never happened. The very images mobilized in nineteenth-century Europe to prove the region’s backwardness and stagnancy (chosen with an imperialist eye focused on showing idyllic landscapes or picturesque ‘native’ urban neighbourhoods to exclude and thus visually erase a burgeoning modern Cairo just a few hundred feet away), become here, in their present-day digital incarnations, testimonies of authenticity, and even something approaching civilization: they are most commonly commented on as ‘poor maybe, but clean, and orderly’. (‘Look at the amazing cleanness! I wish we become like this again!’ comments a user.) Photographs are not taken by cameras, but by people. The majority of Orientalist photographs were taken by people with a pre-existing idea of what they wanted to photograph. The same happens now with their new digital incarnations in online environments: old photographs are unearthed and circulated to yet again provide visual proof of an existing cultural and I Have The Picture

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(fig. 3) Late nineteenth-century photograph of an Egyptian village, produced as a souvenir for the tourist market. Posted on Masr al-an 3 April 2012. Retrieved 18 March 2014.

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(fig. 4) Example of extensive watermarking to protect the ‘ownership’ of ‘primacy’ in posting an image by a Facebook page. Photograph posted on Ahl Masr zaman Facebook page 4 April 2012 (original in colour). Retrieved 7 August 2014.

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political project — an existing idea of Egyptian history which is all about the present, a project that looks back with admiration on its own colonial past as a moment of greatness. Generic Orientalist photographs are deployed to prove the authenticity of the past, and postcards of the colonial metropolis are mobilized to prove a once-possessed modernity; all of them are then used to indict the present — such as the rule of the Muslim Brotherhood as it came to power through Egypt’s first ever free presidential election. ––– On the surface, the attitudes of private collectors discussed at the beginning of this essay have little in common with the proliferation of vintage photographs online. Collectors, after all, pay money to purchase unique objects. But at a closer look, all of these different sites and acts through which vintage photographs are currently activated amongst social actors in Egypt are implicitly connected. Online sharing of orphaned photographs, where posting means being, where every page or person claims vintage material as their ‘own’ to compete for popularity and to increase their page’s online traffic, is what informs the protective attitude of private collectors, especially of those among them who refuse to share or even show their material to others, carefully guarding their own ‘treasures’. But, more importantly, similar perceptions of what a photograph ‘is’ emerge across these diverse venues and contexts in which photographic heritage is currently produced in Egypt. All of the actors currently engaged in saving, collecting or archiving place excessive demands on photographs as harbingers of past ‘truths’. Photographs in contemporary Egypt do not function as social and cultural objects, the meaning and historical value of which depends on their provenance, the context of their circulation and social usage — and, indeed, those meanings might have always been multiple, shifting, contested and socially contingent — but are rather understood as mere visual ‘documents’, as mechanical imprints of things that were once in front of the camera. The state’s cultural institutions, private collectors and middle-class publics writ large all place excessive expectations on photographs as visual ‘evidence’ of ‘how things really were’, or what Egypt ‘really looked like’. Many collectors justify their activities as a response to failed state custodianship of cultural heritage, or more widely as a failure of society or of modernity, but, by insisting that they retain sole control of the production of meanings of the material they hold, what they do amounts to very much the same thing. Similarly, vintage photographs circulating online are reassigned with new meanings that are, once again, acutely political. In all of these contexts, photographs are approached as ‘treasures’ that can only be ‘found’ and ‘used’ once. Sharing means losing. All of these actors believe that because they ‘have’ the material — they ‘have the picture’ — they also have the ‘truth’ that resides in the image, as many of them would like to think. I Have The Picture

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There is, in fact, nothing ‘archival’ about the ongoing archive fever in Egypt. I mean ‘archival’ here in the twentieth-century sense of the term whereby an archive is a public service, based on the twin principles of the preservation of the material within its own historical context and the insuring of open access (notions which themselves ought to be historicized and are not always unproblematic or successfully enforced). In that sense, Facebook is deeply anti-archival, as it is based on fragmentation, decontextualization and ephemerality. It is impossible to find or retrieve anything that was once posted on Facebook. Similarly, the Library of Alexandria’s digital database is anti-archival, as it considers discrete images as mere data, plagued with misidentification, decontextualization, copylifting and outright copyright theft; it is also impossible to retrieve anything seen there. Private collectors might have well-cared-for analogue collections, but most of them insist on remaining the sole guardians of both the access to their material and the production of meaning based on it. From the perspective of an historian, one cannot but mourn the archive, for the increased attention to vintage photographs in contemporary Egypt paradoxically leads to the loss of historical knowledge. From another perspective, however, things are not all that bleak. What appears as a rape (of meaning, of history) might in fact be another life. It is not, after all, only the photographs that matter. Rather, what truly matters is their continued cultural work: the way humans engage with photographs and the meanings that they keep assigning to them. From this perspective, photographs housed in proper archives (those that adhere to both of the twin notions of contextualized preservation and public access) can also be understood as preserving history at the expense of the present: photographic objects might be well preserved for future generations but they are also made sterile, their stories — their social salience — frozen in the past. Whether we like it or not, what is, in fact, fascinating about the contemporary production of photographic heritage in Egypt is that vintage photographs continue to be socially salient in the present. Instead of mourning the loss of ‘original’ meaning, instead of focusing on instances of loss, theft, destruction, decontextualization, misreading and gross misinterpretation, we might just sit back and watch the fascinating cultural work that such ‘images’ keep performing in the contemporary social field, in which photographs yet again prove how immensely socially powerful things they are.

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1. The literature here is immense. See, for example: of Alexandria and the Arab Image Foundation, see: Nissan Perez, Focus East: Early Photography in the ‘Mourning the Archive: Middle Eastern Photographic Near East, 1839–1885 (New York: Harry Abrams, 1988); Heritage Between Neo-liberalism and Digital Colin Osman, Egypt Caught in Time (Reading: Garnet Reproduction’, Comparative Studies in Society and Publishing, 1997); Engin Ozendes, From Sebah & History, Vol. 56, no. 4 (2014); for the proliferation of Joaillier to Foto Sebah: Orientalism in Photography vintage photographs on Facebook as a vernacular (Istanbul: YKY, 1999); Dror Wahrman, Capturing archive of Egypt’s failed modernity, see: ‘Nostalgia for the Holy Land: M.J. Diness and the Beginnings of the Modern: Archive Fever in Egypt in the Age of PostPhotography in Jerusalem (Cambridge, MA: Harvard Photography’ in Photographic Archives and the Idea University Press, 1994); Issam Nassar, European of Nation, eds Costanza Caraffa and Tiziana Serena Portrayals of Jerusalem: Religious Fascinations and (Berlin and Munich: De Gruyter , 2014); and for the Colonialist Imaginations (New York: Edwin Mellen Press, nexus of vintage photographs on Egyptian Facebook 2006); and Ken Jacobson, Odalisques & Arabesques: pages and contemporary politics see: ‘Unstable Icons, Orientalist Photography 1839–1925 (London: Contested Histories: Vintage Photographs and NeoQuaritch, 2007). liberal Memory in Contemporary Egypt’, Middle East Journal of Culture and Communication, Vol. 8, no. 2 2. The situation of two parallel markets existed in (2015). other major cities in the region, such as Istanbul and Jerusalem. See: Engin Ozendes, From Sebah & Joaillier 7. See, for example: Clare Davies et al., Egyptian to Foto Sebah, op cit., and her Abdullah Frères: Ottoman Geographical Society Photograph Collection, op cit. court photographers (Istanbul: YKY, 1998); and Issam Nassar, ‘Familial Snapshots. Representing Palestine in 8. Such objects range from Pharaonic, Coptic and the Work of the First Local Photographers’ in History & Islamic antiques, to vintage (i.e., twentieth-century) Memory, Vol. 18, no. 2 (Fall–Winter, 2006). ephemera including books, paintings, various art objects, stamps, posters, private papers and ephemera 3. For more on the history of photography in Egypt, see: and photographs. For more on this market see: Lucie Maria Golia, Photography and Egypt (London: Reaktion Ryzova, ‘The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly: Collector, Books, 2009); and Beth Baron, Egypt as a Woman. Dealer and Academic in the Informal Old-Paper Nationalism, Gender, and Politics (Berkeley: University Markets of Cairo’ in Archives, Museums, and Collecting of California Press, 2005). Practices in the Modern Arab World, eds Sonja MejcherAtassi and John Pedro Schwartz (Farnham, Surrey: 4. In recent years several mapping initiatives have Ashgate Publishing, 2012). gone a long way to locate photograph collections in Egypt and the wider region, though their findings 9. Nora Kennedy, Debra Hess Noris, Zeina Arida and remain largely unpublished. See: Survey of photograph Tamara Sawaya, ‘Preservation of the Photographic collections of Egypt, ongoing project carried out by the Heritage of the Eastern Mediterranean’ (2010), http:// Photographic Memory of Egypt Program at CULTNAT www.meppi.me/publications/ (accessed 24 July 2014). (Centre for Cultural and Natural Heritage, Cairo); Clare Davies et al., Egyptian Geographical Society Photograph 10. The PA (name withheld) to the former minister of Collection: Overview and Guide, unpublished internal antiquities was genuinely surprised that photographs document (Cairo: CULTNAT, 2012); http://www.speakmight be considered protected antiquities according memory.org/uploads/ArchiveMapEgypt.pdf (accessed to the definition of the current Egyptian Antiquities July 2014); and http://www.meppi.me/meppi-survey/ Law no. 117 of 1983 (amended by Law no. 3 of 2010), (accessed July 2014). which stipulates that every object, of either cultural or natural origin, that is older than 100 years constitutes 5. There are interesting generic differences between an ‘antiquity’ and is protected under the provision of these two kinds of private collections. Family collecthis law; such protection means the prohibition of trade, tions naturally tend to be more homogeneous in terms sale and disposal. The PA was personally responsible of their subject matter, where the focus on the ‘family’ for co-ordinating the 2010 amendment, and was thus and its various members, often spanning many generintimately familiar with the law (personal communiations, is most salient (even if very diverse in terms of cation with author, October 2011). There is an ongoing, medium and context). Acquired collections of ‘collecinformally shared opinion within collector circles in tors proper’ are markedly more heterogeneous in the Cairo that three types of objects are ‘exempt’ from this sense that they include not just different photographic law: books, maps and photographs. Reportedly, this inmedia, but also very different subject matter, and formation was intimated to some collectors personally often combine vernacular photography with the earlier by the former minister of antiquities, the infamous Zahi mentioned technical, scientific, documentary and Hawas. I was unable to corroborate this information, entertainment photography (cinema-related material given the litigation currently under way against the being especially popular amongst Egyptian collectors). former minister and the general state of disarray of the Both kinds of collections, family and acquired, are never Antiquities Ministry following the revolution. I met the framed as ‘photographic’ only, and include photographs minister’s former PA precisely because I wanted her to within a wider framework of documents, popular culclarify the position of photographs in respect to the law. ture ephemera and antiques or other objet-d’art. The PA had never heard of such an ‘exemption’, but was also genuinely intrigued to hear that photographs do 6. This essay synthesizes three other essays that indeed fall under ‘her’ law. each develop a different angle on the contemporary production of photographic heritage in Egypt in much greater depth, including discussion of my positionality. For more on the archiving strategies of the Library

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11. For an extensive discussion of the legacy of Egyptian archives and history writing see: Yoav Di Capua, Gatekeepers of the Arab Past (Oakland: University of California Press, 2009).

14. As might be clear already from my insistence on ‘provenance’ rather than purely ‘authorship’, as an historian I see the rights of the author on a par with other rights: with the rights of the reader (or ‘consumer’) to be properly informed, and those of the artefact (the 12. For a more nuanced assessment of the state’s legacy ‘image’) to be properly identified. Authorship is for me in the field of culture see: Pahwa and Winegar, ‘Culture, only part of the wider context of provenance. I also unState, and Revolution’, MERIP (Middle East Research derstand such rights in purely ethical, and not material and Information Project), no. 265 (Winter 2012); and terms. For a comprehensive and definitive statement Jessica Winegar, Creative Reckonings. Politics of Art on the importance of ‘objectness’ in approaching visual and Culture In Contemporary Egypt (Redwood City: sources see: Photographs, Objects, Histories: On the Stanford University Press, 2006). Materiality of Images, eds Elizabeth Edwards and Janice Heart (New York: Routledge, 2004). 13. As examples of what is a widespread practice, one can mention: Samir Raafat, Cairo The Glory 15. The Library of Alexandria’s Memory of Modern Egypt Years (Cairo: AUC Press, 2004); Samir Raafat, Maadi digital database, with its understanding of images as 1904–1962 (Cairo: Palm Press, 1994); Casablanca, Cairo, mere ‘data’ and its fat wallet, is largely responsible for Constantinople, ed. Sherif Boraie (Cairo: Zeitouna, the emergence of trade in orphaned digital copies. For 2006); Dar al-Hilal: Madrasa al-tanwir, ed. Mahmud more see: Ryzova, ‘Mourning the Archive’, op cit. Ezzat (Alexandria: Bibliotheca Alexandrina, 2010); and periodicals such as Misr al-Mahrousa. 16. See: http://www.vintageegypt.tumblr.com/archive/ (accessed 24 July 2014). 17. Published 5 April 2014, http://www.egyptianstreets. com/ (accessed 24 July 2014).

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The Global in the Local Implicating Iran in Art and History Sussan Babaie

In its most elemental definition, the term ‘archive’ is tangled up with history in the simple fact of an archive being a collection of historical records, shelved, so to speak, to be retrieved, the latter an action latent in the very accumulation of documentary material. Archiving through images, texts, oral transmissions and performances of the body is universal enough to belong to no particular definition. Yet, the meanings and mechanisms could be universalized, as it were, when the archival turn is embedded into the embrace of the global turn in art, a phenomenon of the contemporary (re)invention of world art and art histories. The point is not to remove the universality of the idea of the archive or the mechanisms of its accumulation and acculturation, but to dislodge the myth of the universal that needs to always be referenced through a hegemonic understanding of the archive, a point still embedded in the dominant paradigms of post-colonial Europe-centred critique of world art. The archive, as a phenomenon, is deeply rooted in the histories of the region this volume is concerned with. After all, the very idea of the archive, as a repository of documents of human interactions across diverse social spheres of action, originated in the city-states of ancient Mesopotamia; and it had been cast at its most sophisticated global scale as the administrative armature of the Achaemenid expanse emanating from and converging onto central Iran and reaching from the Nile to the Indus in the fifth century BCE.1 To the historian, the operations of the archive, or the very presence of an archive, seem self-evident for a historical venture to be launched, including those of the visual and the spatial. In contemporary art parlance, on the other hand, the archive tends to be defined in the abstract terms of an idea, a mental posture or a methodology. Artists and collectives as widely and wildly different as Walid Raad and Slavs and Tatars share a commonality in their propensity for the archive as providing documents for work as much as being a site for the documentation of work.

This sort of understanding of the archive has been a recurring theme in contemporary art as much as in theoretical and philosophical ruminations since Freud speculated on the relationship between ‘the operation of memory’ and ‘archival practice’.2 Further influential writings on the theme of the archive by Foucault and Derrida have been followed more recently by reflections on the subject from art historians, critics and philosophers, to artists from a wide range of practices and places, thus bringing to the foreground the effects of the gathering storms of a critical mass of interest in the role of the archive.3 Centring on the archive is especially notable since the turn of this century and in such important publications as The Archive (2006), edited by Charles Merewether and published by the Whitechapel Gallery in London as an assembly of essays, and the 2008 exhibition (and publication) Archive Fever: Uses of the Document in Contemporary Art held at the International Center for Photography in New York and conceptualized by Okwui Enwezor.4 In the former case, the archive was broadly defined to include all forms of documentation and its uses in art practice. In the latter case, the issue especially hinged on the photographic and filmic forms of the archive. Both furthermore aimed to bring a global lens to the role of the archive in ways that have since become de rigeur. The triangulation, so prominent for the past decade or so in contemporary art practice between art, the archive and, by implication, history, has not been isolated for the region to which this volume dedicates its collective energies. Nor has it been addressed in the specific terms of the role of the archive and the formulation of a critical and locally meaningful art history; that is, with the specificity of a historical location in a given culture. As it stands, and for the most part, the question can only be tackled in a fragmentary fashion and perhaps needs to remain provisional because the task is monumental. It needs specificities of time, place, things, events and persons and thus requires deep archival and visual research into the particular phenomenon, artist or practice. Large-scale, themed publications under such rubrics as contemporary Arab or Iranian arts, in both cases ethnocentric absurdities at best, tend to be surveys in collage format of a few sample works per artist, with added biographic entries and some general outlines of ‘movements’ and trends. While scanning the surface of a complex cultural revolution — for it is indeed a revolution to have art making, however it were to be defined, as one of the most globally connected activities of our time — most have to rely, for their data and critical analyses, on gallery brochures and the marketing documents of commodities. Few have yet managed to go beyond this sort of approach with regard to the contemporary art of the Middle East.5 Admittedly, then, this essay also considers in sketches the implications of the sort of ‘archival turn’ mentioned earlier for a history of art that is especially, but not exclusively, concerned with contemporary practices of a global Iran. To start with, however, it seems necessary to at least voice one’s

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misgivings about the dominant and seemingly universally applicable trend of the post-postmodernist uncoupling of the artist as maker from the art as object. This essay asks, then, whether positing art as existing not as an objective phenomenon but solely as the artist’s process of making, or of her/ his performance of being an artist, is not yet another west-centric way of articulating a world in its own image.6 And it also launches from an understanding of the global that can only exist because of the local; that the global is an impossibility without a local and that the notion of the present is contingent on the conjunction of the past and the future. It also chooses to observe the close ties between ‘archive’ as a strategy and ‘archive’ as a subject of the contemporary conceptual art of the region. More importantly perhaps, it takes note of the fact that such a role is drawn out in the practices generated by people whose origins lie somewhere in the region but who tend to live and work, or at least to have launched the ‘archive’ in their practice, somewhere in Europe and/or North America. The artists and collectives most readily associated with the utilization of the archive almost invariably seem to have taken the archive as a medium for creative re-engagement with an ‘originary’ home; Beirut, Tehran, Kirkuk. The point is not to say that the archival turn is triggered from ‘outside’, but to observe that the urge to create its vectors of influence and mobilize the powerful magnetism of its potentialities to articulate historical locations of artistic practice seems to be more readily conceptualized in ‘archival’ sites outside the region. The Atlas Group, established in 1999, is perhaps the best known, and a stunningly original early example of the compulsion towards the archive. A brainchild of Walid Raad, it presents the aims of the project as a group effort to ‘preserve, study, and produce audio, visual, literary and other artefacts that shed light on the contemporary history of Lebanon’.7 Multimedia works and performances along with documents of all sorts about fictitious personages and institutions, anonymous actors and archival pieces make up the projects under the collective title of the Atlas Group. They have, over the past decade or so, unfolded through Raad installing and talking about the pieces of the imaginary collective’s work at venues across the globe before they became The Atlas Group Archive, now physically housed in Beirut and New York. The conceptual complexity of this web-like multi-sensory crisscrossing through time and space of vectors of knowing and recording makes the Atlas Group an art-based practice extraordinarily self-conscious of its own historical venture. Both it and Walid Raad seem to be making their own archive; they/he speak and write about it and narrate its own histories; and they/he have now accumulated in a real, not virtual, archive an art historically entangled project. Raad, in other words, has taken over his work, as much as its brain and spine as its archivist and art historian. The archive as a window on history implicates the conceptually different ways of thinking about history in the photographic and filmic ‘Excavations’ The Global in the Local

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Slavs and Tatars, Friendship of Nations: Polish Shi’ite Showbiz, 2011. Installation view, REDCAT Gallery, Los Angeles, 2013. Courtesy of the artists.

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Nasrin Tabatabai and Babak Afrassiabi (PAGES), Two Archives, 2011. Installation View, Untitled, 12th Istanbul Biennial, Istanbul, Turkey, 2011. Courtesy of the artists. © Nasrin Tabatabai and Babak Afrassiabi.

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by Jananne al-Ani (shown also at her most recent exhibition at Hayward Gallery Project Space).8 Photographs from prominent archival holdings of the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, DC, dating from the second half of the nineteenth century to the middle of the twentieth, and documenting the archaeological and exploratory (for oil and other natural resources) ventures of European and American teams roaming the Middle East (Syria, Jordan, Iraq, Iran), have become Al-Ani’s visual archives of a personal but also regional history. Her moving, poignantly and powerfully as much as literally, aerial views capture the traces of raked, pockmarked, gouged and altogether scarred topographies of the lands colonial powers, from late Ottoman until the World War II, had unwittingly, and certainly uncaringly, left behind. Her practice is rooted in a subtle learning from the archive and as such is at once both specific — to the lands above which she flies to take the pictures and films — and universal, as the scarring can be of an American landscape as well as those of Jordan and Iraq.9 Similarly loaded with scars of European colonial ventures was the installation presented at the 2011 Istanbul Biennial of an archive-rich portion of a two-part work by Pages, a collective founded in Rotterdam in 2004 by Nasrin Tabatabai and Babak Afrassiabi.10 The Istanbul installation focused on copies of pages from documents produced through the work of the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company (AIOC) before the nationalization of the oil industry in Iran in 1951. The installation, amongst other associated activities including the bilingual Persian-English Web and print magazine Pages, as well as architectural proposals, video and installation works, constitutes part of an ongoing series of works that juxtapose two episodes in Iranian efforts towards modernity. The collective capitalizes on the presumed dissonance between the Anglo and the Iranian sides of the oil industry venture that brought the two together. It then posits such investigative projects as pertains to the AIOC documents as ways to access, and perhaps document ‘the emergence of modernity’ in Iran. To do so, as Pages does, through the juxtaposition of ‘the collection of Modern Western art from the Tehran Museum of Contemporary art [sic]’ as ‘part of the country’s government’s rapid modernization project in the cultural field’ and the archives of ‘British Petroleum’s origin in Iran between 1901 to 1951’, may seem far-fetched in every respect.11 And it is entirely dissonant to any mode of historicity that the archive may suggest. Nevertheless, the project mesmerizes with its sheer repetitiveness of bureaucratic documentation, and with the exposure, perhaps unwittingly, of the banality of the routes to modernity. And, just as Raad and Al-Ani reconstitute an artist’s history of art, the practice of Pages is also an archive-based rethinking of art history in so far as it implicates the Tehran Museum of Contemporary Art. For a historically informed access to art or art practices, however, one wants to adopt a strategy akin to excavation, as Al-Ani does with her use of archival photography. One may hope to access a deeper intuition of how, for instance, the local The Global in the Local

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fashioning and understandings of modernity in Iran in the first half of the twentieth century had come about.12 If you grew up in the 1950s and 1960s in Abadan, a city based on a model of an English town and built to serve the British administrators and technicians working at the AIOC, your understanding of modernity would be differently fashioned than those of the cousins who visited from Tehran for their holidays during Nauruz (the Persian New Year at spring equinox). As these practices seem to be indicating, there is an implied divergence between the art histories of artists and of art historians. Yet, the history of art, as all these instances indicate, is also about fixities of time and place, and of the personal, in the sense both of the positionality of the artist or the historian and of the subjectivity of the persons and events being placed under the microscope. And an art history is not necessarily about an exercise in fixing historical sequences and their documentation in a diachronic arc, from A to B and so on. It is indeed a phenomenon of the past decade and it is in artbased ventures into the region of interest to this discussion that referents, both living and documented as history and as global or universal as the art practices might claim them to be, are extracted from the local archive. And while some may be self-art historicizing, reflecting on and making their own archives, they have not rejected the cultural location of the making of their activities. Understandable as the desire to remain free of the frames of time and place may be, it seems more an artistic ploy, a plot, a posturing, to say, as for instance Pages indicates, that ‘activities are taken as ongoing processes of research, which inevitably tend to undermine predefined and geographically bound notions of subjectivity and locality’; or that ‘Both the projects and the bilingual magazine undergo constant rethinking of their disposition in regard to the social and political contexts to which they refer.’13 Nevertheless, what is certainly worth reiterating here is the way that the triangulation between making/practicing ‘art’, the archive and a history of art seems to be shifting ground towards a process that resembles deep research, an exercise shared by both practitioners of art and historians of art. In this regard, one of the most compelling examples of a practice and an art historically informed research process is the work of Slavs and Tatars. Here again is a pair of artists who prefer to stay anonymous in all instances of their online, published and installed works except for when they do the actual performance of those projects: giving talks, making things, installing, guiding viewers and the like. Slavs and Tatars bring together Polish and Persian cultural identities and deep-seated knowledge of a vast region across Eurasia.14 Their methods are uncannily similar to those practiced by historians of art: they hone their remarkable range of linguistic skills (in practice what a researcher in any field of the humanities would do), isolating the relevant archival resources, local contacts and institutions, and relocating to the region on which their research focuses, be it Azerbaijan, Iran, Uzbekistan, Poland or anywhere an in-progress

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project might demand. The results are multi-media, research-based and archival-rich platforms of investigation. They may take the prismatic mirror work in the Shi’a shrines of Iran to explore funerary practices of Iran and central Asia, producing material that can be just as relevant to the historian of that region’s architecture as to art. Or, for an historian of the arts and economies of Safavid Persia (sixteenth to seventeenth century), Slavs and Tatars’ work on the historical ties between Iran and Poland remains utterly relevant for rethinking strategies of enquiry, even though perhaps not quotable in a scholarly publication. Slavs and Tatars traced links through carpets and textiles that were commissioned in the seventeenth century from Persian craftsmen for Polish princes; and they reappropriated those art historical traces to commission their own designed banners from Polish women who embroidered an epigraphic phrase lahestan nesf-e jahan [Poland is half the world] in a twisted comment on the original phrase Isfahan nesf-e jahan (the seventeenth-century epithet of Isfahan, the great capital of the Safavid dynasty in central Iran). It is in that vein, of archiving and historical framing as instruments of art making, that a practice such as that of the Slavs and Tatars may be considered a window, a conceptual opening onto the way a contemporary art practice and an art history may intersect and inform one another. Any art historian can search for motifs and monuments from the history of the arts in a given region to historicize and interpret sources of inspiration or cultural referents for an artist. The point, however, is not to pin the contemporary to some prescriptive, predetermined frame of reference. Rather, one hopes that the knowledge of those pasts could inform the historian of the contemporary as much as it seems to be informing artists. In the end, one might also say that the sort of authoritarian imposition of an existence only in the present that has become essential for the art or the artist to partake in the supra-national, self-consciously internationalized marketplace of art seems to be a strategy hardly sustainable, or indeed scarcely helpful to develop an understanding of the multiplicity of visual regimes and their own histories of art.

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1. Maria Brosius, ed., Ancient Archives and Archival Traditions; Concepts of Record-Keeping in the Ancient World (Oxford: Oxford Studies in Ancient Documents, 2003). 2. Quoted in: Charles Merewether, ed., The Archive: Documents of Contemporary Art (London: Whitechapel Gallery and Cambridge, Massachusetts: The MIT Press, 2006), 10, 20–24. 3. Jacques Derrida, Archive Fever; A Freudian Impression, trans. Eric Prenowitz (Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 1996); Michel Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge, trans. Alan Sheridan Smith (London: Tavistock Publications; New York: Pantheon Books, 1972), 79–131. For a range of art historical and artist reflections, see essays in: Merewether, The Archive, op. cit. 4. Charles Merewether, ed., The Archive: Documents of Contemporary Art, op cit.; Okwui Enwezor, Archive Fever: Uses of the Document in Contemporary Art (Göttingen: Steidl Verlag, 2008); and the exhibition of the same title at the International Center for Photography, New York, see: http://www.icp.org/museum/exhibitions/archive-fever-uses-document-contemporary-art/ (accessed 4 August 2014). For an equally provocative consideration of the role of the archive in contemporary art, see: Simone Osthoff, Performing the Archive: The Transformation of the Archive in Contemporary Art from Repository of Documents to Art Medium (New York and Dresden: Atropos Press, 2009). 5. For an exception, see: Talinn Grigor, Contemporary Iranian Art: From the Street to the Studio (London: Reaktion Books, 2014). Grigor attempts to make sense of the explosive emergence of new artists in the post-1979 period through a cross-disciplinary approach whereby artist biographies and ‘ethnographic’ data interweave with critical analyses of institutional formations and theoretically sophisticated framing of historical issues. 6. Martin Irvine’s very handy chart offers a useful reference point for the ways in which new categories of art and strategies by artists and institutions have dislodged the older systems since the 1990s, especially with the globalization of the post-postmodern: http://www. faculty.georgetown.edu/irvinem/visualarts/art-theory-intro.html/ (accessed 4 August 2014). 7. See: http://www.theatlasgroup.org/ (accessed 16 May 2014).

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8. See: http://www.southbankcentre.co.uk/whatson/ jananne-al-ani-1000492/ (accessed 6 July 2014). Beginning in 2007, Jananne Al-Ani’s body of work titled The Aesthetics of Disappearance: A Land Without People has inspired her recent projects Shadow Sites I and the recently exhibited Shadow Sites II at the Arthur M. Sackler Gallery, Washington, DC (August 2012– February 2013). The latter was deeply resonant with an accompanying exhibition of prints from that collection’s archival photographs taken by the archaeologist Ernst Hertzfeld (1879–1948) of sites in the Middle East. See also her essay and photographic documentation of the 2011 Shadow Sites II in: Sharmini Pereira, ed., Footnote to a Project — The 2011 Abraaj Capital Art Prize (Dubai: Abraaj Capital Art Prize, 2011), 105–208. 9. Al-Ani’s most recent work, Untitled (Groundworks) is a multi-channel video project of aerial views over Arizona’s Sonoran Desert with its equally poignant somatic marks of human and natural scarring of the land. See: http://www.sharjahart.org/projects/projectsby-date/2013/shadow-sites-i-shadow-sites-ii-excavators-untit/ (accessed 4 August 2014). 10. Pages is a collective who, alongside other activities, produce a magazine also called Pages. See: Untitled (12th Istanbul Biennial), 2011: The Companion (Istanbul: Istanbul Foundation for Culture and Arts and Yapı Kredi Publications, 2011), 268–71. See also: http://www. pagesmagazine.net/ (accessed 6 July 2014). 11. Quotes from the Two Archives project: http://www. pagesmagazine.net/ (accessed 4 August 2014). 12. On the problematic aloofness to history, and aloofness of the contemporary global art industry to past and precedence, see: Sussan Babaie, ‘Voices of Authority: Locating the “modern” in “Islamic” Arts’, Getty Research Journal, no. 3 (2011): 133–49. Two recent publications, each accompanying a pioneering exhibition, have made significant contributions towards relocating the modern and contemporary arts of Iran into a historically informed context. See: Shiva Balaghi and Lynn Gumpert, eds, Picturing Iran: Art, Society, and Revolution (London: I. B. Tauris, 2002); Fereshteh Daftari and Layla S. Diba, eds, Iran Modern (New Haven and London: Asia Society Museum and Yale University Press, 2013). 13. Quoted from Pages’ description of the collective: http://www.pagesmagazine.net/ (accessed 4 August 2014). 14. See: http://www.slavsandtatars.com/ (accessed 6 July 2014). They are uniquely prolific in research and publication projects that are an integral part of their installations and performances. See, amongst others: Kidnapping Mountains (London: Book Works, 2009) and Friendship of Nations: Polish Shi’ite Showbiz (London: Book Works and Sharjah Art Foundation, 2013).

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Arab Digital Expression Foundation Laura Cugusi

In the first two years following the 2011 uprising, the radical transformations in the Egyptian public sphere opened up unprecedented possibilities for collaborative projects among civil-society organizations, cultural institutions, independent initiatives and individuals interested in public participation at all levels, from urbanism to education, human rights, culture and art.1 For the Arab Digital Expression Foundation network of open-source pioneers (Adef) and knowledge advocates, educational activists, techies and artists, the temporary opening of this window of experimentation represented a strategic opportunity to initiate projects and partnerships that were unimaginable until then. One of the essential elements of Adef’s mission is promoting the culture of open archives. In recent years its members and affiliates have been working on the development of digital archives for other local organizations such as El Mawred El Thaqafi — Culture Resource, Mosireen, Shadow Ministry of Housing, Mashroua el Marrekh and CIC, among others. Internally, they have been developing tools, software, web applications and open content management systems such as Pan.do/ra, Open Street Map, Open Biblio and Wiki. Adef employed these tools in the planning of a collaborative web publishing initiative and a platform for activists’ collaboration. Through training programs and by building technical manuals online in Arabic, they supported and strengthened their partners’ technical capacity. As individual experts in different fields, Adef’s members and peers worked together on drafting law proposals, policy papers, research papers and articles to advocate for freedom of expression and open-source technology, in particular targeting alternative educators concerned with expanding the use of information and communication technology among the youth as a tool for free expression and social change. After 25 January 2011, Adef initiated a media archive project as an attempt to coordinate efforts in documenting and archiving the unprecedented amount of user-generated content shared during the revolution. It also aimed

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Courtesy of the Arab Digital Expression Foundation.

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at creating an expanded network of individuals and communities capable of sharing and independently disseminating video and photographic material about the events that followed the uprising. Together with the raw files, the media archive would be developed with the intention of including a rich selection of metadata so as to render it searchable through tags and keywords, allowing users to retrieve raw data and, potentially, to contribute to the collective construction of a historical memory of the events through multiple narrations. Adef co-founder Ranwa Yehia recounts, ‘In 2011, even one of the most security-laden Egyptian governmental institutions, Dar el Kotob, the National Library and Archive, opened its doors to Adef to host a workshop on the digitalization of the library’s content along with public discussions on the myriad of implications of the archive’s accessibility online. That was a dream come true for many of us.’2 Significant collective efforts, labour and enthusiasm were poured into such projects as all actors involved started to fantasize about the positive impact that these initiatives could have on younger generations, on the artistic community and on civil society at large. Due to the severe changes in the political atmosphere in Egypt following the coup d’etat of July 2013, many of those ambitious archival projects had to be interrupted or put on hold.3 In the words of Adef’s Ahmad Gharbeia, ‘The general sense of distrust towards grass-root independent organizations and the actual police crackdown on all forms of public participation made it difficult for Adef and its partners to continue working on projects that celebrated self-organization and challenged central planning and governance.’4 In this atmosphere even a group of teenagers using a GPS to locate themselves and generate a map of their ‘illegal’ neighbourhood that does not exist on official state records represents a threat for an authoritarian regime.5 Activities such as sharing independent, user-generated media content, digitizing state archives, building maps of informal neighbourhoods, tracking vernacular urban practices or simply those making information accessible online are now activities considered to be suspicious — not only by the government but also the general public. At the present time, non-governmental organizations, including Adef, cannot claim to take part in activities related to human development and youth empowerment without fearing accusations or even repercussions from the state. Street artists have been jailed for creating graffiti tributes to the martyrs of the 2011 uprising, even uploading a revolutionary hip hop song on YouTube can lead to arrest, and publishing archive footage of unauthorized events that took place in the public space is even more dangerous. Media activists and artists cannot safely share and promote their work anymore, nor exchange their experiences on social media. Despite the disillusionment with the political situation, the people involved in Adef’s extended network continue their open discussion about the importance of archiving as a practice, waiving a conclusive evaluation of the archive through the impact that these common Arab Digital Expression Foundation

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efforts were expected to have. For, as Yehia claims, ‘Basing the value of the archive on the tangible evidence of its products is limitative […] The obsession with justifying the presence and the practice of the archive with a clear set of expected results can be misleading as putting time and effort to make raw information available for the simple reason of giving access to knowledge to other people is itself an act of public service.’6

Archiving the archive As an ongoing permanent practice Adef documents, translates and publishes online detailed accounts of its daily activities. The organization’s database includes a great variety of resources and formats: technical manuals, scanned books of poetry or alternative education literature, photographic and video documentation of artists’ and children’s workshops, personal reflections about informal in-house discussions, images of street murals and videos of live music or theatre performances, as well as a manual of instructions on ‘How to build a useless machine’.7 As Maysara Abdulhaq stated in an interview with Ibraaz in March, ‘People share content for different reasons. Things that seem to be buried in the archive might acquire a completely different meaning and value in a different context. It will still have power though a different kind of power.’8 Yehia also highlights the importance of documenting the process, archiving discussions and discourse on the archives’ ability to visualize changing perspectives of the different ways of conceiving the archive as the organization evolves throughout time, tracking back to what idea sparked what and analysing shifts of relevance around a certain issue. The Image is not just the Visible, the Text is not just the Sayable9 In the past years, the community that has grown around initiatives aimed at spreading the culture of free access to knowledge in Egypt and the region has become itself a living archive. Adef’s genesis consisted in an open networking process among Arab techies, writers, activists, educators and artists aimed at transmitting their accumulated knowledge and experience to their audiences, especially the youth. Yehia sees Adef’s role as supporting these networks, ‘Human relationships are impossible to reproduce and difficult to “store”, but they can be maintained and reinforced with the help of technology.’10 Kinda Hassan, the coordinator for Digital Expression Community Area (DECA), Adef’s local youth empowerment open space in Moqattam, Cairo, outlines their perspective: ‘In the future, I see a need to expand this rich network and reinforce the regional presence […] We have the capacity, the resources and the motivation for doing so and I think it’s our role to facilitate regional collaborations and push systematic mutual exchange. What’s missing in the

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Arab world is “thinking big” and not just focusing on the local dimension. We need to think of collaborations by facilitating connections, distribution of archives and replicability of projects themselves, linking projects that are alike and expanding their scope on a regional level.’11 Adef has organized and documented a number of training sessions and workshops with well-known artists and musicians from the region, responding to local, emerging artists’ need to explore their practices and develop their artistic paths in the context of an independent mentorship program. The possibility of curating the documentation that has been archived and turning it into a didactic format or a self-learning tool for artists from different backgrounds is of great value and the potential of such an exercise is yet to be explored. Yehia asks ‘What is the value of the archive if it’s not open, accessible, searchable? Our role is in mediating these processes.’12 Archival practices should be an integral part of any cultural and artistic institution as the preservation of artistic heritage and cultural history is an issue of global interest. However, the work of archiving, conserving, organizing and labelling the incredible amount of data in the region is often left to the personal initiative of independent entities, with all the positive and negative implications that this phenomenon entails. Independent archivists are faced with copyright and intellectual property controversies if they share content that they do not own, as well as complex and ever-shifting legislative systems to untangle language gaps and lack of control over the basic infrastructure. There is a need for specialized manpower, time, storage space and modern equipment; we need to bring the financial cost of archiving into the equation. The limitations of the current situation are highlighted by Maysara Abdulhaq, who observes, ‘We calculated that it would be faster to snail mail a hard drive to Berlin and connect it to a server there for its data to be easily accessible online in Egypt than trying to connect it in Cairo.’13

Owning the infrastructure All physical supports of digital memory are subject to decay or irremediable damage and all informational infrastructures are subject to control by governments and supranational entities. Pad.ma offers a way to understand the function of an archive that is constructed outside of such institutions: To not wait for the archive is often a practical response to the absence of archives or organized collections in many parts of the world. It also suggests that to wait for the state archive, or to otherwise wait to be archived, may not be a healthy option. […] The archive that results may not have common terms of measurement or value. It will include and reveal conflicts, and Arab Digital Expression Foundation

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it will exacerbate the crises around property and authorship. It will remain radically incomplete, both in content and form. But it is nevertheless something that an interested observer will be able to traverse: riding on the linking ability of the sentence, the disruptive leaps of images, and the distributive capacity that is native to technology.14 The production and circulation of knowledge is not confined anymore to governmental institutions alone. Yehia elaborates: ‘We ask ourselves what will remain of this era? Perhaps Hollywood movies… as they are the most widely shared type of content so if a copy gets destroyed there will be a thousand more archived elsewhere in private collections.’15 One of Adef’s key efforts in promoting the culture of open archives consists in transferring the know-how on how to build them autonomously using open-source, free software. As Yehia points out: ‘You cannot rely on a platform that you know won’t survive. You need to be able to recreate the infrastructure, have control over the back hand.’16 Maysara Abdulhaq adds: ‘We often hear remarks such as “what do we do if the system crashes?” For me it’s not acceptable that a system just crashes and everything is gone. It’s not a black box. It’s (our) right to understand how it functions, and this is strongly related to a broader notion of freedom and ownership of a certain project and all processes around it. We cannot let the system control our lives […] the infrastructure shouldn’t control or compromise our mission or limit our actions.’17 The demand for organized, accessible knowledge in different media formats is strongly present in the communities Adef is involved in, for example among cultural producers and collectors, but there is a lack of modern Arabic tools to facilitate the creation, maintenance and dissemination of this type of content. The need for a culture of open archives becomes even more urgent in a present where history gets systematically erased or manipulated to serve hegemonic power.18 The danger of such a situation is all-too familiar, as Yoav Di Capua describes: ‘[D]eprived of basic archival infrastructure […] history writers could say and write whatever they wanted, but the overall sum of their activity cancelled itself out in a future, magic-like cycle of one undocumented account competing against another.’19 Pad.ma draw our attention to the ways the archive can function beyond this cycle of historical account and erasure: If the archival imagination is to rescue itself from this politics of redemption, it will have to allow for a radical contingency of the ordinary. It will have to engage with ‘forms of life’ which exceed the totalising gaze of the state as well its redemptive other. Radical contingency recognizes the possibilities of surprise in the archive and in the possibility that a descent into the ordinary suspends the urgent claims of emergencies […] But there is another

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place in the contemporary where the role and responsibility of the archive may lie. That is, in addressing the reserve, that which is not yet deployed. And that which, like residue, is cast in shadow. The archive assembles another site where we can conceive, differently or similarly, of the connections and the distance between the functions of writing and of images. It suggests the possibility of art, if art is the alteration of resemblances between the two.20 As Yehia puts it, ‘We should not care about the use of the archive. The same way we should not care about the use of art or its historical relevance. Anything can be a source of inspiration for an artist and it is not the archivist’s jobs to put limits to imagination.’21

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1. Sociology proffessor Mona Abaza argues that there was a visible cultural transformation ‘expressed in the blossoming and daring youth subcultures and artistic expressions, which Tahrir magically released. […] These have opened new visionary paths and dreams that will be difficult to suppress.’ Mona Abaza, ‘Art, subcultures and the reinvention of public space in Egypt’, Ahram Online (24 July 2011), http://english.ahram.org.eg/ NewsContent/4/0/17201/Opinion/Art,-subculturesand-the-reinvention-of-public-spa.aspx/ (accessed 17 September 2014). 21. Ranwa Yehia, interview with the author, September 2014. 3. The archive project with Dar el Kotob stopped earlier in 2012 as the resistance of the deep state was hard to break through despite the privileged access Adef had to decision makers in the government. 4. Ahmad Gharbeia, interview with the author, September 2014. 5. Sarah El Sirgany, ‘The ongoing campaign to restrict Egypt’s public space’ Atlantic Council (11 September 2014), http://www.atlanticcouncil.org/blogs/egyptsource/the-ongoing-campaign-to-restrict-egypt-s-public-space?utm_content=bufferf0f8a&utm_medium=social&utm_source=twitter.com&utm_campaign=buffer#. VBVUbqiqrzp.twitter/ (accessed 17 September 2014). 6. Ranwa Yehia, interview with the author, September 2014 7. Arab Digital Expression Foundation, ‘The machine is useless’ (2 March, 2014). http://arabdigitalexpression. org/wiki/‫!اآللة_عديمة_الفائدة‬ 8. Laura Cugusi, ‘Free Expression: The Arab Digital Expression Foundation in conversation with Laura Cugusi’, Ibraaz (8 May 2014) http://www.ibraaz.org/ interviews/128/ (accessed 17 September 2014). 9. Pad.ma, ’10 Theses on the Archive’ (April 2010), https://pad.ma/texts/padma:10_Theses_on_the_ Archive/ (accessed 17 September 2014).

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10. Ranwa Yehia, interview with the author, September 2014. 11. Kinda Hassan, Laura Cugusi, ‘Free Expression: The Arab Digital Expression Foundation in conversation with Laura Cugusi’, Ibraaz, 8 May 2014: http://www. ibraaz.org/interviews/128/. 12. Ranwa Yehia, interview with the author, September 2014. 13. Maysara Abdulhaq, interview with the author, September 2014. 14. Pad.ma, ‘10 Theses on the Archive’ (April 2010), https://pad.ma/texts/padma:10_Theses_on_the_ Archive/ (accessed 17 September 2014). 15. Ranwa Yehia, interview with the author, September 2014. 16. Ibid. 17. Maysara Abdulhaq, interview with the author, September 2014. 18. Judy Barsalou, ‘Recalling the Past: The Battle over History, Collective Memory and Memorialization in Egypt’, Jadaliyya (22 June 2012), http://www. jadaliyya.com/pages/index/6007/recalling-the-past_ the-battle-over-history-collect/ (accessed on 17 September 2014). 19. Yoav Di Capua, Gatekeepers of the Arab Past: Historians and History Writing in 20th Century Egypt (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2009). 20. Pad.ma, ‘10 Theses on the Archive’ (April 2010), https://pad.ma/texts/padma:10_Theses_on_the_ Archive/ (accessed 17 September 2014). 21. Ranwa Yehia, interview with the author, September 2014.

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 ‘Screen Play: Chronoscope, 1951, 11pm’, ARTMargins, 1.1 (February 2012): pp. 132–47. © 2012 ARTMargins and the Massachussetts Institute of Technology. Reprinted courtesy of MIT Press Journals.

Media Farzin and Alessandro Balteo Yazbeck

Chronoscope, 1951, 11pm, 2009–2011 Chronoscope, 1951, 11pm is the title of a video installation by Alessandro Balteo Yazbeck, made in collaboration with Media Farzin, as part of an ongoing cycle of works based on the Cold War’s cultural and archival artefacts. The video installation was first shown at the 12th Istanbul Biennial, in Istanbul, Turkey, September through November 2011. The present transcript was first published in the journal ARTMargins 1:1 (MIT Press, February 2012), with an introduction by the authors.

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Residents on Tripoli Street Archive War, 2012. Mobile phone photographs, treated and text. All images courtesy of the artist. All material author’s own.

Adelita Husni-Bey

Residents on Tripoli Street Archive War, 2014 Misrata, the third largest city in Libya, was the site of one of the longest and bloodiest sieges during the civil war/revolution. Post-uprising the Loyalist forces had reoccupied most of the towns in Tripolitania, the western region of Libya, except for Misrata: civilians, journalists and doctors were caught in the to and fro of fighting amongst rebels and loyalists, gaining and losing posts, ground and people daily. The battle consumed the city for over four months and is documented by The Guardian as starting on 18 February 2011, with the capture of the city by rebel forces, and ending on 15 May according to CBC News with the fall of the airport and remaining army bases. The fighting often shifted, predictably, to the city centre: Misrata’s Tripoli Street. Boundaries were liquid, the distinction between civilians and rebel forces became harder to define both for news outlets and fighters on the ground. The battle made and unmade targets, pushing areas and spaces previously thought of as ‘protected’ into crisis with contradictory claims of victory and occupation which characterized the conflict, constantly enounced by both sides. The evident chaos that ensued made symbolic gains more and more significant and the effective takeover of Tripoli Street became one of the markers of success or failure. To see more of Husni-Bey’s work online, visit: www.kamellazaarfoundation.org/initiatives/4/31/

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Jim Goldberg, Akima and Arif, Bangladesh, 2007. Dye diffusion transfer prints and mixed media. Courtesy of the artist and Pace / MacGill Gallery, New York. Mariam Ghani, And we wondered, 2014. Courtesy of the artist. Andreas Siekmann, Untitled, 2014. Collage with photo and vectorial graphic. Courtesy of the artist. Anna Stump, ‘Migrant Labor did not exist in the Wonderland of Knowledge Encyclopedia, 1938’, 2013. Gouache and collage on paper. Courtesy of the artist. 52 Weeks of Gulf Labor, 2013. Poster. Courtesy of Gulf Labor. Mabel O. Wilson, Who Builds Your Architecture? WBYA?, 2014. Courtesy of the artist. Rawi Hage, Excerpt from the Novel CARNIVAL, 2014. Text translated in five languages. Image and text conception by Rawi Hage. All rights reserved © 2014. Nida Sinnokrot, KA (JCB JCB), 2009. Courtesy of the artist. Janet Koenig, 2015: Grand Opening of the Louvre Abu Dhabi, 2014. Digital collage. Courtesy of the artist. Pedro Lasch, Of Saadiyat’s Rectangles & Curves, or Santiago Sierra’s One Sheikh, Two Museum Directors, Three Curators, One University President, Two Architects, and One Artist Remunerated to Sleep for 30 Days in 13 x 14 foot Windowless Room with Shared Bathroom and No Door, 2013. From ART BIENNIALS & OTHER DISASTERS. Courtesy of the artist. John Suleiman Jurayj, 30 Untitled Men, 2014. Digital archival print on vellum with burn holes, 30 images, 2007–2011, poster. Images are courtesy of the Trustees of the British Museum. Courtesy of the artist.

Gulf Labor

52 Weeks, 2013–14  Gulf Labor is a coalition of artists and activists who have been working since 2011 to highlight the coercive recruitment and deplorable living and working conditions of migrant labourers in Abu Dhabi’s Saadiyat Island (Island of Happiness). Our campaign focuses on the workers who are building the Guggenheim Abu Dhabi, Louvre Abu Dhabi and the Sheikh Zayed National Museum (in collaboration with the British Museum). 52 Weeks is a one-year campaign that started in October 2013. Artists, writers and activists from different cities and countries were invited to contribute a work, a text or action each week that relates to or highlights the unjust living and working conditions of migrant labourers building cultural institutions in Abu Dhabi. To see more of Gulf Labor’s work online, visit: www.ibraaz.org/essays/62/ www.ibraaz.org/projects/50/

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pp. 310–11 Untitled 1, Drift / Resolution series, Lebanese Archive project, 2013 (From the collection of Diab Alkarssifi, by Diab Alkarssifi and Unknown, Lebanon, 1976, c.1940). pp. 312–13 Champion Skiers and Beirut Swimmers, Drift / Resolution series, Lebanese Archive project, 2013 (From the collection of Diab Alkarssifi, by Unknown, courtesy of Baalbeck Photo Print Studio, Albums of Hakmat Awada, Lebanon, c.1955, 1950). p. 314  Om Ashad, Drift / Resolution series, Lebanese Archive project, 2013 (From the collection of Diab Alkarssifi, by Diab Alkarssifi, Shleefa Village, Lebanon, 1984). p. 315  Untitled 6, Drift / Resolution series, Lebanese Archive project, 2013 (From the collection of Diab Alkarssifi, by Diab Alkarssifi, Baalbeck, Lebanon, 1980s, 1970s). p. 316  Untitled 10, Drift / Resolution series, Lebanese Archive project, 2014 (From the collection of Diab Alkarssifi, by Diab Alkarssifi, Baalbeck, Lebanon, 1980s, 1990s). p. 317  Untitled 12, Drift / Resolution series, Lebanese Archive project, 2014 (From the collection of Diab Alkarssifi, by Diab Alkarssifi, Baalbeck, Lebanon, 1970s, 1980s).

All images courtesy of the artist.

Ania Dabrowska

Drift/Resolution (from Lebanese Archive), 2013–14 Ania Dabrowska’s Drift/Resolution (2013–14) is a series of photographic grids, triptychs, diptychs and collages sourced from an archival collection of Diab Alkarssifi. The archive includes Alkarssifi’s own personal photographic work, found family albums and studio prints collected from across the Middle East, including the Baalbeck Photo Print Studio, studios in Beirut, Saida, Damascus and Cairo. The collection stretches back to the late 1890s, covering the Lebanese Civil Wars and the post-conflict years, up to 1993 when Alkarssifi immigrated to the UK. Dabrowska first came across the archive as a chaotic collection of Alkarssifi’s personal recollections whilst working as an artist in residence at Arlington, a hostel for homeless people in London. In Drift/Resolution the photographs have been stripped of dates and captions and repositioned in seemingly random contexts to reflect on the familiarity and strangeness of the Middle East as seen through the eyes of an outsider discovering its culture and histories through Alkarssifi’s archive. Taken out of their historical context, the images reflect on the role of personal memory in the construction of migrant homes, issues affecting the preservation of archives and protection of the modern cultural heritage in the Middle East, and allow the artist a playful meditation on the power of photography to evoke narratives. The series will be included in an upcoming book as well as featured in an exhibition following the project in 2015. To see more of Dabrowska’s work online, visit: www.lebanesearchive.co.uk/

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Stills from Asfan’s Long Day, 2014. Film, 40 minutes. Courtesy of the artist.

Naeem Mohaiemen

Asfan’s Long Day (The Young Man Was, Part 2), 2014 He is the victim of a late night pickup by death squads. I want to feel the tragedy but I’m fading out of the story. I know all these things happened, I just wish that generation had saved stories a little better. I drift away. Afsan is talking but I’m looking out the window. Wondering. Making plans. Should I take a Gypsy? BQE or Atlantic? Take cash out of the first ATM or wait for Citibank to save the fee? What will I eat now? The falafel store is open late. Or get ambitious and buy some vegetables. If she were here, she would know how to make a healthy, pleasant meal. Something comforting. There would be wintry broth. We would touch each other’s feet, warmth from soothing presence. A shift back into the phone. Afsan is finishing up. I’m out of time. – What will you do now? Here. – I’m looking for a teaching job, at a state university. But if that doesn’t happen, I’ll become a security guard. Isn’t that what all the over educated migrants do? – I don’t know. Is it? I’m looking out the door for a Gypsy taxi.

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pp. 326–27 The Library of Unborrowed Books. Section I: Stockholms Stadsbibliotek (Stockholm Public Library), 2012. Sitespecific installation with books, shelves, brass sign, two contracts. Venue: Konstakademien, Stockholm. Photographer: Jean-Baptiste Béranger. p. 328 The Library of Unborrowed Books. Section II: Center for Fiction, 2013. Site-specific installation with books, shelves, brass sign, two contracts. Venue: Art in General, New York. Photo credits: Art in General, New York. p. 328 The Library of Unborrowed Books. Section III: Sydney Mechanics’ School of Arts Library, 2014. Site-specific installation with books, shelves, brass sign, two contracts. Venue: Art Gallery of New South Wales, 19th Biennale of Sydney. Photographer: Gunther Hang. p. 329 The Library of Unborrowed Books. Section IV: Centro de Documentación Regional ‘Juan Bautista Vázquez’, 2014. Site-specific installation with books, shelves, brass sign, two contracts. Venue: Museo de la Medicina, 12th Cuenca Biennial. Photo credits: Cuenca Biennial. p. 329 The Library of Unborrowed Books. Section V: The Gennadius Library, ASCS, Athens, 2014. Site-specific installation with books, shelves, brass sign, two contracts. Venue: The Gennadius Library, ASCS, Athens. Photo credits: Neon Foundation. All images are courtesy of the artist, Galeri NON, Istanbul and Galerie Nordenhake, Stockholm.

Meriç Algün Ringborg

The Library of Unborrowed Books, 2012 There is a selection made of what books accompany us into the future. Within education, for instance, the establishment of a canon is clear — it is the venue for the particular echo that determines what books persevere, those that are to be kept in the loop and read again by the next generation. This comes naturally, a selection is necessary and is made in different instances either conscious or unconscious. Nevertheless, the books that are left behind —  those deemed useless or for unknown reasons are abandoned — still exist in physical form, organized and systematized within the one institution representative of knowledge in all its forms, the library. The Library of Unborrowed Books bases itself on the concept of the library as an institution manifesting language and knowledge, of the passing on of awareness and openness to all types of people and literature. This work, however, comprises all the books from a selected library that have never been borrowed. The framework in this instance hints at what has been disregarded, knowledge essentially unconsumed, and puts on display what has eluded us. Why these books are not ‘chosen’, why they are overlooked, will never be clear but whatever each book contains, en masse they become representative of the gaps and cracks in history, or the bureaucratic cataloguing of the world, the ambivalent relationship between absence and presence. To see more of Algün Ringborg’s work online, visit: www.ibraaz.org/projects/94/ www.ibraaz.org/interviews/144/

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p. 332  Algiers 1830 Tlemcenian Woman, from The Golden Age project, 2011–ongoing. p. 333  Algiers 1830 Kabyle Woman, from The Golden Age project, 2011–ongoing. p. 334  Algiers 1830 Kabyle Man, from The Golden Age project, 2011–ongoing. p. 335  Algiers 1830 Constantinian Man, from The Golden Age project, 2011–ongoing. p. 336–7 Fresco 1, from The Golden Age project, 2011 – ongoing. p. 338 Casbah mise en abyme, from The Golden Age project, 2011–ongoing. p. 338 In Miramar Street, from The Golden Age project, 2011–ongoing. p. 339 Abdelaziz Bouteflika, from The Golden Age project, 2011–ongoing.

All images courtesy of the artist.

Amina Menia

The Golden Age, 2011–ongoing This romantic title, full of promise, is used ironically to express regret rather than appreciation for a state of affairs. In using this title, I am making a reference to the Golden Age as discussed by Freud who writes about taking refuge in the past, which is made to seem marvellous in order to escape a bitter present and avoid projection into the future. Algerian society, in a large part, has taken refuge in the past. Unsatisfied with the present, anguished by the future, it refuses to move forward. This is visible in all domains. When I listen to conversations around me, in both the eldest and the youngest generation’s words, ‘I sigh and even feel sorrow because nothing could ever be the same again, it was much better before’, and other kinds of sentiments in this lexicon of regret. In my hometown and in most of the cities in the country, the names of cafes and shops are tinged with nostalgia. Inside their houses, Algerians love hanging black and white photographs of ancient Algiers, or reproductions of the infamous painting Femmes d’Alger dans leur appartement. Numerous persons still use the ancient names of streets, renamed long ago. There is a great nostalgia for colonial Orientalism at its worst; urban frescoes painted on ceramic tiles being the most symbolic illustration. Those examples dotting the city of Algiers are mainly reproductions of Orientalist painting or colonial postcards, and are often inspired by the artwork of Étienne Dinet (1861–1929), the photographer Mohamed Kouaci (1929–96) or the miniaturist Mohamed Racim (1896–1975), amongst others. To see more of Menia’s work online, visit: www.kamellazaarfoundation.org/initiatives/4/17

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Production stills from Shadow Sites II, 2011. Single-channel digital video. Courtesy of the artist and Abraaj Capital Art Prize. Photography by Adrian Warren.

Jananne Al-Ani

Shadow Sites II, 2011 The film Shadow Sites II is part of Al-Ani’s ongoing project The Aesthetics of Disappearance: A Land Without People, which explores the disappearance of the body in times of war and examines the relationship between film, photography and twentieth-century conflict. The starting point for Al-Ani was the work of forensic anthropologist Margaret Cox, who spent her time in Kosovo in the late 1990s searching for a blue butterfly that feeds exclusively on the wild flower Artemisia Vulgaris. Her interest in the flora and fauna of the region was driven by the search for mass graves of Albanian victims of Serbian genocide, for wherever the soil had been disturbed and the nutrient levels increased as a result of decomposing bodies, the flowers and the butterflies could be found in abundance. Al-Ani undertook extensive archival research, focusing on unpublished reconnaissance photographs taken over the western front during World War I; the work of early pioneers of aerial photography in the Middle East; and landscape photographs taken by archaeologists working in the region, all of which had an impact on the form and content of the film. Al-Ani also investigated the discipline of aerial archaeology; her title comes from aerial archaeology’s term for sites whose outlines are revealed from the air only when the sun is low in the sky and casting long shadows. Made from high-resolution aerial photographs shot in the Middle East, Shadow Sites II adopts the vantage point of a predator drone and replicates the action of locking onto a target. To see more of Al-Ani’s work online, visit: www.ibraaz.org/interviews/137/ www.ibraaz.org/reviews/59/

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p. 348  Chief Commander (14 – 3), 2011. C-print 120 x 154 cm. p. 348 Chief Commander (25 – 42), 2011. C-print 120 x 154 cm. p. 349 Chief Commander (28 – 12), 2011. C-print 120 x 154 cm. p. 349 Chief Commander (21 – 12), 2011. C-print 120 x 154 cm. p. 350 Chief Commander (55 – 13), 2011. C-print 120 x 154 cm. p. 351 Chief Commander (38 – 57), 2011. C-print 120 x 154 cm. p. 351 Chief Commander (06 – 25), 2011. C-print 120 x 154 cm.

All images courtesy of the artist and Rampa Istanbul.

Vahap Avşar

Chief Commander, 2011 Vahap Avşar’s Chief Commander (2011) is a series of seven large-scale photographs of popular postcards depicting famous monumental statues in major cities in Turkey. Thousands of these postcards were printed in the late twentieth century in Turkey but vanished in 1999 as if to mark the end of an era. After a long search Avşar found and acquired the whole archive in 2010 and continues to excavate it in order to make some of its obscure phenomena visible. The postcards depict the earliest statues of Ataturk ever made which were produced by two European sculptors in the 1920s; Heinrich Krippel and Pietro Canonica. Due to the fact that the representation of the human form had been forbidden during the Ottoman period, there were no Turkish sculptors trained to produce the figurative Attatürk sculptures and so the government turned to European artists. Avşar’s interest in the statues lies not in their intrinsic artistic quality but rather in their ideology, style and status as symbols of Turkish cities and the Modernist project. These particular sculptures differ in their ideological stance from the thousands of other Ataturk statues produced in the twentieth century. They depict Ataturk as the ‘Chief Commander’, with military attire and weapons — not as the educator, statesman or father figure that he reportedly aspired to be. In re-presenting the postcard archive, Avşar questions this change in representation: did Ataturk order, endorse or simply agree with the European sculptors’ vision of him as a military leader or was something simply lost in translation? Did Ataturk and his staff give too much leverage to these sculptors because they represented the European history of art and humanities that Ataturk admired? What transpired between the sculptors and the founder of modern Turkey, or what misunderstanding occurred, remains a mystery, but these monuments symbolize the modernization project for a supreme nation state that continues to unravel today.

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10 Theses on the Archive Pad.ma April 2010, Beirut

1. Don’t Wait for the Archive 2. Archives are not reducible to the particular Forms that they take 3. The Direction of Archiving will be Outward, not Inward 4. The Archive is not a Scene of Redemption 5. The Archive deals not only with the Remnant but also with the Reserve 6. Historians have merely interpreted the Archive. The Point however is to Feel it 7. The Image is not just the Visible, the Text is not just the Sayable 8. The Past of the Exhibition Threatens the Future of the Archive 9. Archives are governed by the Laws of Intellectual Propriety as opposed to Property 10. Time is not Outside of the Archive: It is in it1

1. Don’t Wait for the Archive To not wait for the archive is often a practical response to the absence of archives or organized collections in many parts of the world. It also suggests

that to wait for the state archive, or to otherwise wait to be archived, may not be a healthy option. This need not imply that every collection or assembly be named an archive, or that all of art’s mnemonic practices be, once again, cast into an archival mould. It suggests instead that the archive can be deployed: as a set of shared curiosities, a local politics or epistemological adventure. Where the archival impulse could be recast, for example, as the possibility of creating alliances: between text and image, between major and minor institutions, between filmmakers, photographers, writers and computers, between online and offline practices, between the remnant and what lies in reserve, between time and the untimely. These are alliances against dissipation and loss, but also against the enclosure, privatization and thematization of archives, which are issues of global, and immediate, concern. The archive that results may not have common terms of measurement or value. It will include and reveal conflicts, and it will exacerbate the crises around property and authorship. It will remain radically incomplete, both in content and form. But it is nevertheless something that an interested observer will be able to traverse: riding on the linking ability of the sentence, the disruptive leaps of images and the distributive capacity that is native to technology. To not wait for the archive is to enter the river of time sideways, unannounced, just as the digital itself did, not so long ago.

2. Archives are not reducible to the particular Forms that they take Archival initiatives are often a response to the monopolization of public memory by the state, and the political effects that flow from such mnemonic power. But attempts at creating an archive are not necessarily supplementing the memory machine of the state. The state archive is only one instance of the archive, they are not the definition of archives, but merely a form. As a particular form, state archives do not exhaust the concept of the archive. The task of creating an archive is neither to replicate nor to mimic state archives but to creatively produce a concept of the archive. An archive actively creates new ways of thinking about how we access our individual and collective experiences. An archive does not just supplement what is missing in state archives, it also renders what is present unstable. Nietzsche defined happiness as the capacity or power to live one’s life actively — affirming the particularity or specificity of one’s moment in time. In doing so he refused to subsume the conceptual possibility of what it means to be happy under a general form of happiness. When we subsume the concept of archives to its known form we are exhausted by it and suffer from archive fevers and archive fatigue. Contemporary archival impulses attempt to realize the potential of the archive 10 Theses on the Archive

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as virtuality, and challenge us to think through the productive capacities of an archive beyond the blackmail of memory and amnesia. The production of a concept is a provocation, a refusal to answer to the call of the known and an opportunity to intensify our experiences. The archive is therefore not representational, it is creative, and the naming of something as an archive is not the end, but the beginning of a debate.

3. The Direction of Archiving will be Outward, not Inward We tend to think of archiving as the inward movement of collecting things: finding bits and pieces, bringing them together, guarding them in a safe and stable place. The model of this type of archiving is the fortress, or the burning library. This model already provides a clear sense of the limits, or ends, of the archive: fire, flooding, data loss. Can we think of the archive differently? When Henri Langlois, founder of the Cinémathèque Française, stated that ‘the best way to preserve film is to project it’, he hinted at the very opposite philosophy of archiving: to actually use and consume things, to keep them in, or bring them into, circulation and to literally throw them forth (Latin: proicere), into a shared and distributed process that operates based on diffusion, not consolidation, through imagination, not memory, and towards creation, not conservation.2 Most of today’s digital archives seem to still adhere to the model of the fortress, even though, by definition, they no longer preserve precious and unique originals, but provide cheap and reproducible copies. These copies can be ‘thrown forth’ on a much larger scale, and with much greater efficiency, than Henri Langlois — or Walter Benjamin, theorist of analogue reproduction, advocate of its technological potential and critic of its practical political use — would have ever imagined. To archive, and to be archived, can become massively popular. The astonishingly resilient archiving practices around Napster or The Pirate Bay, and the even more virulent promise of actual or imaginary archives far beneath or beyond them — if, for one moment, we could step outside the age of copyright we all inhabit, and fully embrace the means of digital reproduction most of us have at our disposal — not just directly follow the trajectory traced by Benjamin and Langlois, but extend it to a point in the not-so-distant future where we will think of archiving primarily as the outward movement of distributing things: to create ad-hoc networks with mobile cores and dense peripheries, to trade our master copies for a myriad of offsite backups and to practically abandon the technically obsolete dichotomy of providers and consumers. The model of this type of archive, its philosophical concept, would be the virus, or the parasite. And again, this model also allows us to make a

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tentative assessment of the risks and dangers of outward archiving: failure to infect (attention deficit), slowdown of mutation (institutionalization), spread of antibiotics (rights management), death of the host (collapse of capitalism).

4. The Archive is not a Scene of Redemption Important as the political impulse of archives is, it is important to acknowledge that archives cannot be tied to a politics of redemption. A large part of what may be thought of as progressive impulses in historiography is informed by a desire to redeem history through a logic of emancipation. The resurrection of the subaltern subject of history, the pitting of oral against written history and the hope that an engagement with the residue of the archive will lead to a transformative politics. Benjamin’s theses on the philosophy of history has served as an important intellectual reference point for such initiatives. Benjamin says that: The tradition of the oppressed teaches us that the ‘state of emergency’ in which we live is not the exception but the rule. We must attain to a conception of history that is in keeping with this insight. Then we shall clearly realize that it is our task to bring about a real state of emergency.3 Benjamin does not hide the redemptive messianic thrust in his thesis: according to him, ‘Our image of happiness is indissolubly bound up with the image of redemption.’4 Hope, in this formulation, is primarily messianic, ‘For every second of time is the strait gate through which the Messiah might enter.’5 Elsewhere, Derrida writes that ‘Aspectral messianicity is at work in the concept of the archive and ties it, like religion, like history, like science itself, to a very singular experience of the promise.’6 Archival initiatives have unconsciously continued this theological impulse. Their desire to document that which is absent, missing or forgotten stages a domain of politics which often privileges the experience of violence and trauma in a manner in which the experience of violence is that which destroys the realm of the ordinary and the everyday. Thus if you examine the way that histories of the oppressed are written about, it were as if life is always subsumed under the threat of death, and living is forever condemned to a shadowy existence under the idea of a ‘bare life’. The subsumption of life into a condition of bareness is as illusory as aesthetic practices which attempt to redeem experience from the clutches of time and history. If the archival imagination is to rescue itself from this politics of redemption, it will have to allow for a radical contingency of the ordinary. It will have 10 Theses on the Archive

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to engage with ‘forms of life’ which exceed the totalizing gaze of the state as well its redemptive other. Radical contingency recognizes the possibilities of surprise in the archive and in the possibility that a descent into the ordinary suspends the urgent claims of emergencies.

5. The Archive deals not only with the Remnant but also with the Reserve Capitalistic production proceeds by isolating the extract from raw materials, producing the remnant, that which is left behind. And the archive, resisting obsolescence, is constituted through these remnants. This is one common view. But there is another place in the contemporary where the role and responsibility of the archive may lie. That is, in addressing the reserve, that which is not yet deployed. And that which, like residue, is cast in shadow. In surveillance systems, for example, we are forced to rethink the idea of ‘waste’. Those millions of hours a day of CCTV images are not just the leftovers of the surveillance machine, they are its constitutive accumulation. They are the mass which waits for the event, and it is this mass that produces the threat. Following Michel Serres we could describe this mass as having ‘abuse value’, something that precedes use value or exchange value.7 Of course, abuse value and exchange value can change hands. The line between residue and reserve can be unstable. Suddenly, the nuclear arsenal is rendered waste, and is sold as junk. Our accumulated ideas expire. But to look to the reserve has a strategic value for the archive. It is a way of addressing capital not only as the production of profit from labour and commodities, but as the accumulation that can be used for speculation, and to extract rent. The archive in this sense is sympathetic to those practices which sabotage capitalistic accumulation, and those which have an interest in the future, and in the ‘unrealized’.

6. Historians have merely interpreted the Archive. The Point however is to Feel it. Archives have traditionally been the dwelling places of historians, and the epistemic conceit of history has always been housed in the dust of the archives. But in the last decade we have also seen an explosion of interest in archives from software engineers, artists, philosophers, media practitioners, filmmakers and performers. Historians have responded by resorting to a disciplinary defensiveness that relies on a language of ‘the authority of knowledge’ and ‘rigor’ while artists retreat to a zone of blissful aesthetic transcendence. There is something incredibly comfortable about this zone where history continues to produce

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‘social facts’ and art produces ‘affect’. Claims of incommensurability provide a ‘euphoric security’ and to think of the affective potential of the archive is to disturb the ‘euphoric security’ which denies conditions of knowing and possibilities of acting beyond that which is already known. Rather than collapsing into a reinforcement of disciplinary fortresses that preclude outsiders and jealously guard the authenticity of knowledge and experience by historians, or resorting to a language of hostile takings by activists and artists, how do we think of the encroachments into the archives as an expansion of our sensibilities and the sensibilities of the archive. Archives are not threats, they are invitations. Lakhmi Chand, a writer based in the media lab of the Cybermohalla in New Delhi, asks ‘Kya kshamta ke distribution ko disturb karta hai Media?’: Does media disturb the distribution of ‘capacity’ or ‘potential?’.8 The invitation to think of the ability to disturb the kshamta of the archive seems to be marked by a different relation to time. The idea of capacity marks a time: this time is neither in the past nor in the future though they may be related, it is a marker of the present — or exactly where you are. Anna Akhmatova writes in Requiem: In the dreadful years of the Yezhov terror I spent seventeen months in prison queues in Leningrad. One day someone ‘identified’ me. Then a woman standing behind me, blue with cold, who of course had never heard my name, woke from that trance characteristic of us all and asked in my ear (there, everyone spoke in whispers): – Ah, can you describe this? And I said: – I can. Then something like a tormented smile passed over what had once been her face. 1 April 1957 9 The question ‘can you describe this?’ was not a question about the possession of a skill, or even the possibility of language to speak of certain things under certain conditions. It is about a moment or a context that arises in which anyone can be faced with the question of: Can you? And they must either answer ‘I can’ or ‘I can’t’.

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How do we think through the ways that archives challenge us to think about the experience of potentiality? To dwell in the affective potential of the archive is to think of how archives can animate intensities. Brian Massumi argues affect is critically related to intensity. We are always aware of our potential to affect or to be affected, but this potential also seems just out of our reach. Perhaps because it isn’t there actually — only virtually. Massumi suggests that: Maybe if we can take little, practical, experimental, strategic measures to expand our emotional register, or limber up our thinking, we can access more of our potential at each step, have more of it actually available. Having more potentials available intensifies our life. We’re not enslaved by our situations […] Our degree of freedom at any one time corresponds to how much of our experiential ‘depth’ we can access towards a next step — how intensely we are living and moving.10 How do we imagine archival practices as the little practical, experimental and strategic measures that we pursue to expand our sensibilities? The affective potential of archives is therefore both a political as well as an aesthetic question in its ability to activate ones capacity to act, and it is on the very faculty of imagination and possibility that this conflict is located.

7. The Image is not just the Visible, the Text is not just the Sayable Serge Daney makes a famous distinction between the image and the visual. The image is what still holds out against an experience of vision and the visual. The visual is just the optical verification of what we may know already, or which may be read or deciphered through reflexes of reading. The image, on the other hand, is alterity.11 Jacques Ranciere, in The Future of the Image, will develop this by saying that images are not restricted to the visible. He will reject the subordination of the image to the text, of material to history and of affect to meaning. He suggests that the commonest regime of images is one that presents a relationship between the sayable and the visible (between image and text, between presence and inscription), a relationship that plays on both the analogy AND dissemblance between them. But, of course, ‘this relationship by no means requires the two terms to be materially present. The visible can be arranged in meaningful tropes, words deploy a visibility that can be blinding.’12 Ranciere thus invents the ‘sentence-image’. The sentence-image is a form that could appear in a novel, equally as it could appear in a cinematic

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montage. In it, the ‘sentence-function’ provides continuity against chaos, while the ‘image-function’ disrupts consensus.13 The sentence-image provides a way to think across the modernist incommensurability of painting, literary works and films, that is their autonomy. It allows us to acknowledge their appropriations, invasions and seductions of each other. The archive assembles another site where we can conceive, differently or similarly, of the connections and the distance between the functions of writing and of images. It suggests the possibility of art, if art is the alteration of resemblances between the two. With the introduction of software, we have yet another possibility for the disjunct: a third heterogeneity, another possible element of surprise. And perhaps to extend our thesis then: the software is not just the searchable, or the database.

8. The Past of the Exhibition Threatens the Future of the Archive What is the relation between memory and its display? Between the archive, ‘the system that governs the appearances of statements’ and a culture of appearances?14 In ‘Archives of Modern Art’, a 2002 essay for the journal October, Hal Foster develops three useful stages of the museum as the site of memory, in modern art.15 In the first stage, in the mid-1800s, Baudelaire writes that ‘Art is the mnemotechny of the beautiful.’16 Which with Manet, for example, has become the art of outright citation. Here art is the art of memory, and the museum is its architecture. The second moment occurs with Adorno’s essay, the ‘Valery Proust Museum’, which marks a point of suspicion of the museum, as the ‘mausoleum’ of art. The museum is where art goes to die. But, it is also the site for a redemptive project of ‘reanimation’. The third moment occurs when this reanimation is possible through other means, that is through Benjamin’s mechanical reproduction. The key difference here is between Benjamin’s reproduction, which threatens the museum, and Malraux’s, which expands it infinitely. For Malraux, it is precisely the destruction of the aura which becomes a basis for the imagination of the museum without end. But there are ‘problems of translation’, gaps, between Malraux’s Musee Imaginaire, its English name the ‘Museum without Walls’ and the concept of a ‘Museum without End’. Which, on the one hand, have fed many a modernist museum architect’s fantasy of endless circulation, and views through the glass, while, on the other, continue to offer the promise that art’s institutional structures can have a relationship with the world. Foster’s account of modern western art’s archive ends with a split in art itself, between its display function

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that appears in spectacular form in the exhibition, and its memory function, which retreats into the archive. The challenge for the archive, which today threatens the exhibition with its own sensual ability to relink and rearticulate these two functions, is how not to end up as a spiral ramp, or as flea market. In other words, how to avoid the tyranny of the two historical ‘freedoms’: one, the (modernist) formal strategies of audience participation in the spectacle, and two, the (post-modernist) eclecticism in which anything, included and curated, could be accorded ‘exhibition-value’. Or we could put it this way: how does the archive avoid the confusion that persists in the exhibition (as Irit Rogoff notes about the Tate), between accessibility as entertainment and marketing strategy, and access as something deeper, as something that is ‘closer to the question’?17

9. Archives are governed by the Laws of Intellectual Propriety as opposed to Property As the monetary value of the global information economy gains more importance, the abstract value of images get articulated within the language of property and rights. The language of intellectual property normativizes our relationship to knowledge and culture by naturalizing and universalizing narrow ideas of authorship, ownership and property. This language has extended from the world of software databases to traditional archives where copyright serves as Kafka’s gatekeeper and the use of the archive becomes a question of rights management. Beyond the status of the archive as property lies the properties of the archive which can destabilize and complicate received notions of rights. They establish their own code of conduct, frame their own rules of access and develop an ethics of the archive which are beyond the scope of legal imagination. If the archive is a scene of invention then what norms do they develop for themselves which do not take for granted a predetermined language of rights. How do practices of archiving destabilize ideas of property while at the same time remaining stubbornly insistent on questions of ‘propriety’? Intellectual propriety does not establish any universal rule of how archives collect and make available their artefacts. It recognizes that the archivist plays a dual role: they act as the trustees of the memories of other people, and as the transmitters of public knowledge. This schizophrenic impulse prevents any easy settling into a single norm. Propriety does not name a set of legislated principles of proper etiquette, instead it builds on the care and responsibility that archivists display in their preservation of cultural and historical objects. The digital archive translates this ethic of care into an understanding of the ecology of knowledge, and the

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modes through which such an ecology is sustained through a logic of distribution, rather than mere accumulation. It remembers the history of archivists being described as pirates, and scans its own records, files and database to produce an account of itself. In declaring its autonomy, archives seek to produce norms beyond normativity, and ethical claims beyond the law.

10. Time is not Outside of the Archive: It is in it In his history of the book and print cultures, historian Adrian Johns argues against what has traditionally been seen as the ‘typographical fixity’ which was established by the print revolution.18 Earlier scholars had argued that scribal cultures were marked by all kinds of mistakes of the hand, and the book was therefore not a stable object of knowledge until the emergence of print technology. Adrian Johns demonstrates the fallacy of this assumption by looking at the various conflicts that erupted with print technology, and far from ensuring fixity or authority, the early history of printing was marked by uncertainty. For Johns, the authority of knowledge is not an inherent quality, but a transitive one. It is a question that cannot be divorced from the technologies that alter our senses, our perception and our experience of knowledge. Rather than speaking about ‘authority’ as something that is intrinsic to either a particular mode of production of ‘knowledge’ or to any technological form, John’s work demonstrates how it would be more useful to consider the range of knowledge apparatuses which come into play to establish authority. The preconditions of knowledge cannot easily be made the object of knowledge. It is a matter of making evident or making known the structures of knowledge itself, which emerge in ways that provide definitive proof of the imperfectability of knowledge. Archives are also apparatuses which engage our experience and perception of time. This is particularly true for archives of images, since photography and cinema are also apparatuses that alter our sense of time. The traditional understanding of an archive as a space that collects lost time sees the experience of time as somehow being external to the archive itself. It loses sight of the fact that the archive is also where objects acquire their historical value as a result of being placed within an apparatus of time. The imagination of a video archive then plays with multiple senses of the unfolding of time. In her reflections on the relationship between photography, cinema and the archive, Mary Anne Doane states that photography and film have a fundamental archival instinct embedded in them.19 And yet this archival nature is also ridden with paradox, because of the relationship of the moving image to the contingent. The presence of the contingent, the ephemeral and 10 Theses on the Archive

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the unintended are all aspects of cinematic time, and the challenge of the moving image as archive is the recovery of lost time, but within the cinematic. The recovery of the lost time of cinema and the contingent can be captured through an experience of cinephilia, for what cinephilia names is the moment when the contingent takes on meaning — perhaps a private and idiosyncratic meaning, but one in which the love for the image expresses itself through a grappling with the ephemeral. The archive is therefore an apparatus of time, but its relation to time is not guaranteed or inherent, it is transitive and has to be grafted. The archive of the moving image grasps this problem in an erotic and sensuous fashion, grafting the experience of time as an act of love. Negri speaks in Insurgencies about the love of time: these two registers, of love, of time, and of cinema allow us to think about the cinematic and archival apparatus of time, and the way they shape our relation to our time and the time of the image.20

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1. Co-authored by members of pad.ma: Lawrence Liang, Sebastian Lütgert and Ashok Sukumaran during ‘Don’t wait for the Archive — I’ (workshop, Homeworks, Beirut, April 2010).

10. Brian Massumi, ‘Navigating Movements: A Conversation with Brian Massumi’ in Hope: New Philosophies for Change, Mary Zournazi (Annandale: Pluto Press Australia, 2002), 214.

2. Henri Langlois cited in Professor Richard Roud and Mr François Truffaut, A Passion for Films: Henri Langlois & the Cinematheque Francaise (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999).

11. Serge Daney made the distinction in numerous articles and on radio, recapped in ‘Before and After the Image’, Cahiers du Cinema (April 1991). See: http:// home.earthlink.net/~steevee/Daney_before.html/ (accessed 21 October 2014).

3. Walter Benjamin, ‘On the Concept of History’ in Walter Benjamin: Selected Writings, (Volume 4: 1938–1940), eds Eiland & M. W. Jennings, trans. Harry Zohn (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2003), 392. 4. Walter Benjamin, Illuminations: Essays and Reflections, ed. Hannah Arendt, trans. Harry Zohn (New York: Schocken, 1969), 254. 5. Ibid., 264. 6. Jacques Derrida, ‘Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression’, Diacritics, trans. Eric Prenowitz, Vol. 25, no. 2 (Summer 1995): 27. 7. Michel Serres, The Parasite (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2007), 75. 8. Cybermohalla Ensemble, ‘No Apologies for the interruption’ trans. Shveta Sarda, s a r a i / a r c h i v e. See: http://archive.sarai.net/items/show/16/ (accessed 22 October 2014). 9. Anna Akhmatova, Requiem, trans. A. S. Kline. See: http://www.poetryintranslation.com/PITBR/Russian/ Akhmatova.htm#_Toc322442229 (accessed 30 September, 2014).

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12. Jacques Ranciere, The Future of the Image, trans. Gregory Elliot (London: Verso Books, 2007), 7. 13. Ibid., 46. 14. Hal Foster, ‘Archives of Modern Art’, October, Vol. 99 (Winter 2002): 81–95.

15. Passim. 16. Op. cit., 82. 17. Irit Rogoff, quoted in ‘The Implicated: Reflections on Audience’, Artconcerns.net, archive available at http://www.zoominfo.com/p/Irit-Rogoff/405885605/ (accessed 21 October 2014). 18. Adrian Johns, The Nature of the Book: Print and Knowledge in the Making (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998). 19. Mary Anne Doane, The Emergence of Cinematic Time: Modernity, Contingency, the Archive, new edition (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003). 20. Antonio Negri, Insurgencies: Constituent Power and the Modern State, trans. Maurizia Boscagli (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999).

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From Archive to Analytics Building Counter Collections of Arabic Social Media1 Laila Shereen Sakr (VJ Um Amel)

To amass an archive is a leap of faith, not in the function of preserving data, but in the belief that there will be someone to use it, that the accumulation of these histories will continue to live, that they will have listeners. In the contemporary world, there is an archival impulse at work that represents something palpable — an opportunity to provide a counter-collection, standing against the monumental history of the state. Such an impulse has resulted in new public archives, individual projects, digital archives (including digitization of old manuscripts, as well as collecting digitally born information), fictional archival projects and collections of urban histories. This essay critiques historical information on the contemporary Middle East by engaging with independent archival projects that collect information currently under siege, in real time and place, as cultures change and are lost in conflict. Recent scholarship has taken the subject of the archive and investigated it as a cultural object in and of itself. From the Journal of Visual Culture to the Arab Studies Journal, both academic journals have dedicated their most recent issue to the archive. As Timothy Mitchell explains in Colonising Egypt, the practice of science and systems of ordering national standards are modern projects that enable governments to maintain discipline and surveillance. A cog in the colonial project, the science of documenting every political act reflected a ‘tendency of disciplinary mechanisms’, as Michel Foucault has called these modern strategies of control, ‘not to expect and dissipate as before, but to infiltrate, and colonise’.2 Participants in the panel will discuss the logic behind independent archives. How might they engage with the public and public institutions? Or how might research that draws from the press and cultural ephemera rather than state documents and ‘official’ archives tell a slightly different version of the story of modernism in twentieth-century Egypt, for example. This essay will shed light on alternative appropriations of ‘the archive’ as a transformative site of knowledge production.

The Digital Turn In the context of recent events in the Middle East, many people have struggled to make sense of the role of technology (especially social media) in the fomentation of political mobilization and change. Through digital practice and textual analysis, the process that lead to this argument entailed a survey of the existing body of literature on the formation of politics and the political subject in virtual domains. Stepping aside from the seductions of the presentist approaches of media studies, this archival project looks to historical work, in particular, in order to trace and historicize this formation. This research has led to the design of a knowledge management system for collecting and analysing content from social networking sites using innovative computation. R-Shief, Inc. is a lab harvesting ‘one of the largest repositories of Arabic-language tweets’.3 Through the development of R-Shief since 2008 and during the 2011 uprisings, I have been able to analyse the frequency of consumption, production and circulation of social media, as well as the semantics and tropes used on Twitter and Facebook. How does R-Shief, as a knowledge management system, speak to the existing body of knowledge production on political mobilization in the Middle East? R-Shief joins a history of archival art works that urgently seek to critique historical information on the contemporary Middle East — information currently under siege, in real time and place, as cultures are destroyed or lost in conflict. For example, Walid Ra’ad’s The Atlas Group is an intervention in the archive, where documentation and archival processes dominate the screen and the archived data is fictitious. Akram Zaatari’s Arab Image Foundation project, also situated in the Middle East, archives twentieth-century photographs and portraits of everyday Arab families. Indeed, the R-Shief Initiative is inspired by a number of high-quality, cultural, artistic and intellectual endeavours including Bidoun, a print magazine on art and culture which is ‘conceptualized for a transnational audience at home in Cairo or New York, London or Beirut’.4 Whereas Bidoun is a print magazine that covers material on the Arab world and Iran (similar, though linguistically different cultures), R-Shief organizes its information based on language. The prototype, for example, was in both English and Arabic. Three similar archiving initiatives that involve archiving media from the recent 2011 Egyptian revolution are Filming Revolution, The Mosireen Collective and 18DaysinEgypt. Filming Revolution is an interactive website about documentary filmmaking since the revolution: a meta-documentary. Mosireen is a collective for the purpose of documenting the events during and after the 2011 Egyptian revolution. They are known for having collected hundreds of short documentaries publicly available on YouTube. 18DaysinEgypt also collects short documentaries, but through crowdsourcing on their website. However similar R-Shief is to these projects, rather than interviewing and documenting people, it is a media system that is concerned From Archive to Analytics

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with archiving, indexing and analysing directly from the internet, in regions across the Middle East and where revolutionary movements have risen up, such as those in Spain, Brazil and the many locations of Occupy. R-Shief curates a platform that brings all voices across social media platforms like Twitter, Facebook and Instagram together in one digital landscape for research and cultural production. By the end of first decade of the twenty-first century, we have clearly moved from the world of ‘new’ media to a world of ‘more’ media. When we reached 2011 and the Egyptian revolution — which many hailed as ‘the revolution brought to you by Facebook’ — the ubiquity of computers, digital media software and computer networks had led to an exponential rise in the numbers of cultural producers worldwide. No longer simply a matter of the rise of new media production in new global contexts, these social media platforms served as the database architectures for the accumulation of data on a scale heretofore unknown. With the dramatic increase in the scale and scope of data-making — where the data now takes shape as ‘tweets’, ‘likes’, ‘status updates’ and ‘shared links’ — it is extremely difficult, if not impossible, to understand the relationship between the production of data and original social contexts. In short, I argue that this shift in data production makes it difficult to truly understand global cultural developments and dynamics in any substantial detail using twentieth-century theoretical tools and methods.

The Design R-Shief, Inc. has developed a knowledge management system, or a media system, that is telling a story nobody else is telling with social media data using its collections of social media data from the Arab uprisings and Occupy movements from 2008–14. R-Shief offers three collections of multi-lingual internet posts, along with tools to analyse and visualize the content. It is a living ‘big data’ repository in terms of volume, velocity and variety intended for research, art and activism. The R-Shief 3.0 current model is designed to support the following: 1. The Archive R-Shief has archived three collections of multi-lingual internet posts from the Arab uprisings and Occupy movements from 2008–14. — Facebook, YouTube and websites (2008–13) — Twitter by Hashtag (2010–13)

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— Twitter, Facebook and Instagram (in real time over the last 30 days) 2. Tools Kal3a (qal‘a or ‫قلعة‬, the Arabic word for castle) is our name for the application stack that collects, stores and indexes the social media data behind R-Shief’s research.5 Elasticsearch is behind our faceted search index. It interfaces directly with CouchDB (a NoSQL database) and indexes every new or changed item. It returns the tweets you search for and provides the capability for sorting by users, languages and sources. Kal3a supports the R-Shief Trends Widget, Search API, The R-Shief Hashtag Visualizer and real-time stats dashboard (see, for example, figs 2 and 3). Arabic Text Analysis API is a text analyser of Arabic content that uses Wikipedia as its knowledge base to show various occurrences of Arabic words in Wikipedia. It provides contemporary linguistic analysis of Arabic and is a foundational step in our development of an Arabic Smart Engine. The component is available to try out in the demo form, or as a web API. The Instagram Geolocator API allows you to use your finger to circle a part of a geographical map, and returns to you all the Instagram posts taken in that location. 3. Education R-Shief is currently building an education portal to promote digital literacy. This portal provides interactive teaching modules and resources for workshops conducted internationally. I have begun developing teaching modules for undergraduate college courses on Middle East Internet Studies, Data Visualization and Social Media Analysis. These interactive teaching modules include lesson plans, syllabi on topics such Computational Arts, Information Visualization, Games and Apps, Designing and Hacking Systems, Global Media Activism, Arab Media and Arab Uprisings. To support these modules and extend them, R-Shief will conduct threeday annual workshops and hackathons in partnership with local organizations.

The History of R-Shief: the BETA Launch R-Shief began in 2008 when I invited three individuals who had made considerable contributions to the field of Arab media — filmmaker and political scientist Bassam Haddad, Professor Marcy Newman and Lebanese journalist Lynn Maalouf — to a conversation on how to move forward with this archiving From Archive to Analytics

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idea. How could we build something that would make this ever-growing scope of content accessible and bring it into a more manageable state? R-Shief’s first installation was at the Middle East Studies Association (MESA) conference in November 2008. Aware of the need for language translation in today’s global climate, a proposed journal would extend collaborative translation tools between Arabic and English into a biannual publication. R-Shief sent out this call for papers: We are seeking submissions around the subject of surveillance and sousveillance, the practice of watching from above (sur-) and below (sous-), as is relevant to contemporary transnational Arab publics. The first edition is dedicated to exploring the cultural and political implications of this panoptic behaviour, which also unfolds in an era of increased self-surveillance, encouraged by both the government and the culture of participatory and ‘transparent’ media. R-Shief publishes original essays, academic manuscripts, interactive and non-interactive projects, digital video and project documentation. R-Shief will launch its first edition on June 5, 2009. That publication never materialized. Ultimately, the decision to build R-Shief as an archive and not a journal was reached after a threaded email discussion articulating our various roles within the R-Shief Initiative. The project’s focus was clearly on aggregating, storing and recovering data, all of which are digital archiving processes. And so a pattern emerged, albeit informally, where with each public event or announcement about R-Shief, I would check in with what grew into a 12-person advisory board. We communicated collectively or individually on IM, social networking sites and Skype. In the time following the MESA conference, I set up an account with Basecamp, an online project management tool, to begin documenting and recording all communications, milestones and to-do lists. And thus began the process of documenting the development of the R-Shief media system. Now, in 2014, we have accumulated over five years of project documentation on Basecamp. The initial archiving effort began in December 2008. When the war on Gaza escalated, my inbox was inundated with posting notifications, Twitter feeds, Facebook messages, email messages, YouTube videos, fundraiser announcement, new music, new art, new political debates and new media. The urgent need to participate in deepening our understanding of the events became quite clear by the winter months of 2009, as the war on Gaza continued. While the culture and land of Gaza, Palestine, was being invaded in real time, the impulse to archive maddened. When a civilization’s museums libraries, schools and universities are destroyed, their history is defertilized and they are left with little documentation to pass along. What of their own legacy?

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R-Shief is a digital archive that satisfies an urgent need to accumulate and aggregate the cultural artefacts, the people and the culture of Gaza, Palestine, while more and more cultural artefacts are destroyed. As a starting point, we — the board and I — decided to build the prototype of R-Shief around the archive of my own collection of media, websites of organizations, journalism, multimedia, art and collective action in response to the war on Gaza, Palestine.

The January 25 Revolution in Egypt With myself and one other programmer, R-Shief began mining Twitter by hashtag after a transformative workshop I attended with fellow Arab techie women in Beirut in May 2010. It was in participation with these Arab techie activists where I grasped the significance of Twitter. When I returned home and realized that, after seven days, Twitter no longer showed you what we had tweeted, I went on a mission to archive Twitter by hashtag. R-Shief’s Twitterminer began by collecting two hashtags: #Gaza and #Flotilla in August 2011 immediately after the first flotilla ship was denied entry into Gaza. So when the revolution began in January 2011, R-Shief was already equipped with a system to harvest and analyse Twitter. However, we were not prepared for the scale of tweets and had to work relentlessly to move R-Shief’s Twitter analysis from a shared server onto a stable cloud computing system. We managed to successfully transfer the system by February 2011. Some of other hashtags we began to collect were #Jan25, #Tunisia, #Wikileaks. From that point until June 2013, we collected over four billion tweets on 1,800 hashtags. Meanwhile, the debate on the interplay between the application of structure and resistance has been transformative.

R-Shief 2.0 On 10 June 2011, R-Shief released the second version of its system. The press release, titled ‘New R-Shief Web Site Tracks Arab Public Opinion in Real Time’, read: The new R-Shief.org site provides real-time analysis of opinion in the Arab world about late-breaking issues. R-Shief uses an interactive map to allow users to slice through aggregate web, Facebook, Twitter and other data in order to analyse what Arabs are saying about the issues that impact them. Users can see which posts are gaining the most traction and which topics are dominating the chatter on Twitter and Facebook. R-Shief provides this analysis by sorting through thousands of Twitter feeds and From Archive to Analytics

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other sources and using multiple search criteria to determine the most talked-about topics and issues. The site also parses this data in order to produce visual representations that help untangle the different threads of the social conversations taking place in Egypt and elsewhere. A series of sentiment and semantic analyses are being produced with the support and collaboration of USC’s Annenberg Innovation Lab.

The Fall of Qaddafi in Libya By August 2011, R-Shief had collected a massive database of Arabic-language tweets during the ‘Arab Spring’. We were using a machine-learning tool to aggregate data and identify its patterns and we were lauded by the US State Department for correctly predicting the fall of Tripoli.6 In 2011, that one word caught my attention as I surveyed millions of Twitter postings in real time on Libya. It surged like a pulse as tweets streamed out of Libya in the throes of what would later be called the ‘Arab Spring’. Within hours of the word flashing through my data stream, a 42-year dictatorship crumbled before the world’s eyes. R-Shief became known as the system that predicted the fall of Muammar Gaddafi in Libya in August 2001 using Twitter analytics. The calculation was off by only six hours. It was a wake-up call underlining just how much political and cultural dialogue was taking place online — and how crucial it was to preserve and study it.

The Archival Intervention This research engages a set of methodologies that emerge at the intersection of both cultural and technical analytics. The first objective is to provide some historical context for the growing interest in the analytic properties of social media content. I argue that the stock of ‘primary data’ is important, but not determinant in creating nuanced cultural analyses. This research will consider the work of data visualizations, especially in relationship to the stock of primary data (actual tweets, status posts [etc.]). The second objective is to argue for the importance of paying attention to the specific language of the stock of primary ‘social media’ data. In my work, I focus specifically on the use of Arabic online. This is absolutely critical for a number of reasons. Of course, there is the cultural moment of what has been called ‘The Arab Spring’. But most analyses of this so-called ‘social media’ revolution had not taken into consideration the analysis of the meaning of

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actual Arabic language use. After harvesting and analysing Twitter posts for more than five years (2008–14), I became aware that the use of Arabic language online was steadily rising. For example in one month alone (April 2012), more than 80 per cent of the tweets that used the English-language hashtags #Tahrir and #Jan 25 were written in Arabic. More than 95 per cent of tweets using related Arabic hashtags were written in Arabic. Hence, by presenting this work, I hope we come closer to identifying and addressing the gaps in the textual analysis of digital information on the Middle East and North Africa. Initially, my aim was to use this essay to debunk several myths in the work and instead develop several principles that should inform our work in the field: 1. Technologies are not objective, accurate or void of political or cultural formations. In my research, I have expressed concerns over Arabic software localization — which is a means of adapting computer software to different languages and regional differences. At an even deeper level, the shift in programming from using C++ (a highly mathematical computer language) to using Java (a computer language that contains lots of English based vocabulary) has meant a shift into what is culturally English-based. Yet, the academic field of Internet Studies is so young that its ethical standards and traditions are still being debated. Results are often published without public access to the data or tools used in the analysis. Critiques of race, power and colonialism are rarely brought into studies on how, for example, Egyptian activists have used Silicon Valley tools to design their own virtualities specific to local culture and history. As recently as 2006, developers were still building applications to enable Arabic characters on a keyboard. Several open-source projects to develop software for Arabic on Drupal, Yamli, Google and other platforms enabled Arabic-language content to grow dramatically in the years to follow. Over the past decade or more, there has been a movement towards software localization in Arabic among Arab programmers. Earlier, there was a huge concerted effort to get RTL working to UTF-8 for Arabic Script. For example, see Alaa Abdel Fattah’s open-source development in Drupal. And then there were projects like Kalimaat, Yamli, GNOME and other tools that served translation. There are activist platforms such as Katib and Take Back the Tech (to end violence against women), based out of Lebanon, and then there is a lot of work on Arabic language analyses from e-Space’s Arabic Morphological Analyser, to Taha Zerrouki’s Arabic conjugator project named Qutrub. At R-Shief.org we are building an Arabic Smart Engine. We just released the alpha of our Arabic Text Entity Extraction API that we built using the lexicon in Wikipedia, which was one of the first crowdsourced platforms to work in Arabic. We are working towards building artificial intelligence (AI) in Arabic — which is still From Archive to Analytics

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steps behind AI in English. What does this say about the Arabic user and digital literacy rates? 2. It is not okay to study only English-language posts when researching Arab social media. Any scholarly project that studies digital media or social media on the Arab world must consider the Arabic content which comprises 80–99 per cent of posts on the region. Studying only the English-language tweets is simply not enough and will skew the results. In my visualized analysis of Facebook users, for example, the case for why it is imperative to read the Arabic text is clear. R-Shief is concerned with Arabic script on the web being optimized and integrated with other languages. In the first BETA prototype, the menu and user-interface for the content management system have been manually translated and uploaded. R-Shief was first conceived to offer one platform — a website — where activists, scholars and new media artists can archive, discuss and visualize ‘global cultural flows’ in the Middle East and its diasporas in various languages (initially Arabic and English, and later Turkish, Hebrew and Farsi).7 In response to the dominance of English-language media, R-Shief’s accessibility to speakers of various languages initiates transformational change in information sharing and becomes meaningful to various communities and disciplines, ultimately affecting the terms on which cultures interact. Building R-Shief’s prototype was a challenge at the time because of the way in which Arabic characters are encoded in font systems; Arabic script appears significantly smaller than Roman script, illegibly so for some people. In the case of R-Shief’s bilingual interface, simply increasing the font size makes the Roman script look disproportionately large in comparison. Another challenge was managing right-to-left (rtl) directionality. Using an open source module in Drupal, we were able to enable the jquery bidi module,8 which determines the directionality of every bit of markup and then adds a ‘dir’ attribute to it. From issues with Arabic characters on the screen, to more complicated semantic technical inaccuracies, the work in Arabic software development yet has much room to learn and grow. One example of an interesting failure in sentiment analysis occurred over a year ago in Cairo. In preparation for a conference at the American University in Cairo in June 2011, I prepared sentiment analyses (compiling English and Arabic tweets separately) on likely Egyptian presidential candidates based on a month of Twitter posts that included the hashtags: #Jan25 and #Egypt. Abdel Moneim, Abou El-Fotouh, Hisham Bastawisi and Amr Moussa were among the candidates who remained in the race through the first round, while candidates who were referenced in larger volumes of posts, such as Mohamed el-Baradei and Naguib Sawiris, dropped out earlier.

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While the volume of tweets on each candidate is a precise representation of the data sampled, the accuracy of the sentiment values in these graphs remains questionable. The same technical process to determine sentiment was implemented in these charts on the English-language tweets within the sample data where presidential candidate Mortada Mansour came out with a 100 per cent positive sentiment. Anyone who had been following the Egyptian media scene knew such a statistic was wildly inaccurate since Mansour was both a notorious, controversial character and was perceived by the majority of Egyptians as a buffoon. Since most of the positive sentiment expressed in tweets reflected positive expressions about Mansour in jest or parody, the tool and process used to determine sentiment clearly failed to detect sarcasm and tonality. Since then, R-Shief has released the first step in a robust Arabic Smart Engine. Our Arabic Entity Extractor API uses Wikipedia as a knowledge base to provide basic information about every entity in Arabic. Future research plans are to provide a sentiment open-source API for Arabic as a critical building block and tool for networking and analysis in Arabic online. 3. Big data is not notable due to size, but because of its relationality to other data. Another more common definition of big data, given by business analyst Doug Laney, points to three key qualities of such data: volume, velocity and variety.9 This has larger theoretical implications. Indeed, big data is a poor term to describe the storage and analysis of large and/or complex data sets using techniques such as NoSQL and machine learning. The challenge to normalize uneven data inputs into one system or database requires building a network where each data point has its position and function in relation to all the other data points. When the size, speed and variety of the data reaches a threshold, new, creative methods are developed to keep all the pieces working together. The traditional table of rows and columns are not always the most efficient way to store and process data. It is in the relationality of the data to each other where machine learning can take place and programs can be built to be ‘smart’. This is the theoretical foundation from which R-Shief has developed its collection system and its Arabic Entity Extraction Engine. Kal3a is an infrastructure that collects and stores an ever-growing volume of social media data. It is built around standard APIs and protocols so that other tools and visualizers can work alongside our search interface. Kal3a collects data from various providers (Twitter, website and Facebook feeds, other databases, CSV files), archives the data in its original form, normalizes the disparate data structures to a common data standard (Atom entry documents) and stores this normalized form in a database. Kal3a also provides a Web interface for searching the From Archive to Analytics

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(fig. 1) VJ Um Amel, Riot Smoke, 2012.

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database, configuring the collection parameters (the RSS feed URLs, keywords tracked on Twitter), and displaying statistics about its collections. Kal3a’s archives combine two of R-Shief’s legacy collections of millions of Arabic and English social media posts created since August 2010. Before Kal3a, R-Shief collected social media data using PHP scripts, which polled feeds and API endpoints and stored the responses in MySQL databases. Over time, as different tools were used, data was stored in different places, in different formats and sometimes duplicated. Highly developed tools such as the Twitterminer were responsible for data collection, storage and visualization all at the same time, which created data silos. The requirements of a specific visualization created assumptions about how data should be collected, which in turn imposed a cost on reusing the data if we wanted to analyse or visualize it some other way in the future. The current Arabic Entity Extraction Engine under development is a Named Entity Recognition system, based on Arabic Wikipedia. Rather than building a single dictionary, we are focused on building a tool to periodically download and process Wikipedia dumps, and build an updated dictionary regularly. We are also focused on the matching layer, the part of the engine that will match text being analysed with the proper named entities in the knowledge base previously prepared. In 2014, I would say the methodological shift to using big data in textual analysis in the humanities has meant a shift from big data to smart data — or big, smart data. 4. Visualizations of internet data do not make claims about material bodies or the intentions of communicators. They are traces of an embodied moment of intentional use of digital media. Every data point has an embodied analogue at some moment. And tweets, as a particular category of digital data, have a very particular (historically specific, geo-specific) moment of origin that is exceedingly tangled with material bodies. My project is to figure out what the emerging patterns tell us about the virtual body politic. A difference between the body politic and the virtual body politic is that while the former is understood as an abstraction of a group of people governed by one authority, the latter is that abstraction of people who exchange ideas publically online about the governance of an authority. Yet, how do we analyse the negotiation between the materiality (the analogue) and information patterns (the data points). In a world that is witnessing Arab revolution and counter-revolution and Twitter popularity, how might even minimal participation in virtual, networked publics — through retweeting, video documenting, blogging and so on — affect the body politic?

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Visualizing the ‘Now’ Philosophical underpinnings to the nature of a virtual world are neither new nor revelatory; nor does this argument purport that the ‘what’ that is being expressed online in the digital world is necessarily representative of what happens on the ground. In places like Egypt where literacy rates only reach 66 per cent,10 analyses of internet penetration bear less weight.11 However, elements of the virtual become actualized under unique, local, temporal conditions that cannot be predicted. They only happen in the ‘now’. Approaching this logic from a visual arts lens, as Laura Marks does in her book, Enfoldment and Infinity: An Islamic Genealogy of New Media Art, she traces new media art along a unique historiography of Islamic thought from the birth of the algorithm in ninth-century Iraq through fifteenth-century Islamic mysticism and neoplatonism, or ‘beginnings of virtual reality’.12 One of the critical points Marks builds upon is a notion of events in time as unique and foldable, and therefore, transformative. Taking it one step further, similarly, Kant’s nineteenth-century notion of the ‘sublime’ event can be transformative. For an event to be transformative, it relies on unpredictable conditions. In other words, the act of Bouazizi lighting himself on fire in Tunisia was as sublime as it was horrible. The data visualizations below seek to illustrate and improve our understanding of the sensibilities and cultural logic(s) being expressed by the people on Twitter, Facebook and Flickr. Rosetta Stones from Cyberspace and the mosaics (figs 2 and 3) are sets of images created by writing computer code. These images represent the immense and unwieldy social media activity during the month of July 2011. They draw upon one of the most rare and comprehensive archives of social media content from the Arab revolutions — R-Shief.org. This growing repository urgently seeks to critique historical information on the contemporary Arab world — information currently under siege, in real time and place. When this project began it was exclusively about the archive as a repository for data. The sheer speed and size of this substance is necessarily remarkable. My intentions shifted to offer a new perspective on the microcosms within macrocosms of this world, somewhat unfinished, and unknowable — to bring these complex representations of movements of millions/billions of people with many leaders together in a way that allows one to experience through the senses what cannot be processed cognitively/rationally. The image mosaics are a series of images created by writing computer code. They represent the immense and unwieldy social media activity from 2011 to 2012. Figure 1, Riot Smoke, is comprised of profile thumbnails from the top 987 Twitter users contributing posts on the hashtags #abbasseya, #abasiya, #abassiya and Flickr photos with the same keywords ‘Abassiyya’. The original photograph was taken by Jonathan Rashad, which he makes available on his Flickr stream under creative commons licensing. The caption From Archive to Analytics

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(fig. 2) VJ Um Amel, Walk Like An Egyptian, 2012.

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reads: ‘6230 Riot CS Smoke, produced by US-based firm “Combined Tactical Systems”. Used by police-backed “thugs” on May 2 against protesters in Abbasiya near Egypt’s Ministry of Defense.’13 In Figure 2: Walk Like an Egyptian, I gathered profile thumbnails from the top 1,199 members contributing to the Facebook page, ‘We are all Khaled Said’, from January 2011 to February 2012. Applying procedural techniques to manipulate colour, chroma, luminosity, scale, opacity and the directionality of this large scale of information, I composited the thumbnail images to imitate the popular meme of the man holding up a sign that reads, Kefeya (the Arabic word for ‘enough’). These are expressively artistic interpretations of particular moments. The theoretical form of these visual expressions is intentional — one single image is never the totality of the moment. Instead, such iconic images come to stand for an infinite number of visual memories, some recorded, most not. The use of the mosaic mode of ‘assemblage’ is intended to capture this notion of the infinite, reiterative algorithmic form of any single visual expression. These mosaics demonstrate yet another layer of encoding and decoding of the data. In response to the fetishizing of technology, or data or the ‘Arab Spring’, they represent a secret world of code in an abstract, algorithmic aesthetic, blown up and situated in and out of time. The mosaic images are not literal representations of this body of text; they are a stand-in, a metonym for it. Thus, the aesthetics of the work I am proposing also trace back to choices made while creating the archive — understanding not only the text within the archive, but that the archive itself is a text is also imperative. #Gaza Audio-Visual Narrative by a Cyborg: Images Tweeted by Hashtag (fig. 3) is from a recent interactive, audio-visual narrative I made using five sets of posts from Twitter on #Gaza that I gathered and analysed. It includes an interactive mosaic of the surveillance image that went viral of the boys killed on a beach in Gaza, along with computerized sound files of the tweets and an organized gallery of the images most tweeted. The mosaic is made up of over 1,000 images posted on Twitter within an hour on 26 July 2014. The design process I used to make this piece combines a method of cultural analytics with a world-building approach to narrative and is displayed through a Web interface. This project theoretically draws upon the works of Lev Manovich and Jeremy Douglass in cultural analytics. However, rather than using formal elements like colour or hue to determine the procedural form of the image, my process involves pulling culturally significant content and prioritizing images that are most popular in my representation of social media on Gaza. This is determined through analysing trends on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, YouTube and other websites. On my syllabi in introductory media classes, I have designed lesson plans that teach students how to do social media analytics on a range of topics from science to gaming to education.

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(fig. 3) VJ Um Amel, #Gaza Audio-Visual Narrative by a Cyborg: Images Tweeted by Hashtag, August 2013. Screenshot of interactive audio-visual mosaic.

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Those lessons plans are accompanied with theoretical discussions on subjects such as cultural analytics and history. By clicking on the #Gaza Audio-Visual Narrative by a Cyborg website, the user is able to enter this world of images and audio tweets.14 The immersive design experience is influenced by Andy McDowell’s work in 5D cinema and the Leviathan Project, aesthetically grounded by Victoria Vesna’s edited volume on Database Aesthetics: Art in the Age of Information Overflow.15 In the graduate course that I teach on immersive cinema, my syllabus includes a series of design steps to world building — including defining your world’s rules, its narrative and the objects in that world and how they function. These studio courses are accompanied with seminar discussions on new cinematic narratives, the database and the archive.

‘What does all this mean?’ Though many people are positively intrigued by this digital arts-based research, they are often left with questions and repeatedly ask me — What does all this mean? Can you pinpoint people and predict events? By the summer of 2011, it had become clear to me that the fetishization of data had consumed many researchers to the detriment of the substance of what was being communicated, and the phenomena being investigated and described. What I am tempted to resist are overzealous prejudiced arguments that overstate the value of quantitative objectivity and accuracy to an extent that rhetorical indicators are flattened and there is no longer room for critical interventions. In a Foucauldian sense,16 the project of archiving tweets, posts and comments became about recording traces of the genealogy in the online media — the username of who posted, profile picture of user, various user settings (including language, gender, age [etc.]), when posted, latitude/longitude from where posted (with permission), from which server posted, which device was used, the tags of post, the title of post, the subtitle of post and eventually the post itself. My contributions to the cultural production stem from an amalgamation of R-Shief’s database material and visual making through the processes of design, animation, illustration, compositing, lighting, performance and programming. In the end, what is produced from this technologically based art practice is editing the multitude of fragments intersecting over time — remixing the data stream. Rather than attempting the impossible task of understanding the totality of what Arabic speakers are producing online — this archival process collects modest percentages of data and from within defines scopes of analysis. In other terms, then, discontinuity is a bifurcation, a switch from one virtual pattern to another. Critical research and artistic practices are all tied up together — they inform each other. I am suggesting an interdisciplinary

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approach to questioning and learning that incorporates an art research methodology. Research is the praxis of systematic critical reflection that focuses on compelling questions. And these questions can only be investigated when we unsettle the very tools we use to examine them. Since all acts of digitization are acts of remediation, understanding the identity of binary code, digital files, the migration of analogue materials and the character of born-digital materials is essential to understanding digital environments. Networked conditions of exchange play another role in the development of digital humanities (and other digital) projects. Standards and practices established by communities form another crucial component of the technical infrastructure that embodies cultural values. Common myths about the digital environment are that it is stable, even archival ([e.g.] permanent) and that it is ‘immaterial’ ([e.g.] not instantiated in analogue reality). Every actual engagement with digital technology demonstrates the opposite. R-Shief’s intervention is its ability to enable these conversations to occur, even if in discreet bits of knowledge, across barriers in languages and geographies. This interdisciplinary and multi-sited project is long overdue. R-Shief serves across a broad spectrum of discourses and practices including database aesthetics, digital media research, social computing, collaborative art practices, Middle East initiatives and transnational social theory. Its implementation and aims affirm the importance of generating new data banks of qualitative and quantitative knowledge through increasingly egalitarian and participatory modalities of sharing, collaborating and creating across boundaries. The results of the project are intended to provide rich data sets to a variety of audiences (scholars, journalists, activists, artists, community organizers, policy analysts), and last but not least, the project serves an enduring archive of events as well as the media through which these events are made known and meaningful. The project’s potential to generate and influence auxiliary projects — workshops, books, pamphlets, documentaries, educational materials, websites, blogs, music, art and policy making — has been as exciting as it is revolutionary.

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1. Laila Shereen Sakr is VJ Um Amel online. See: http:// www.vjumamel.com/ (accessed 15 September 2014). 2. Timothy Mitchell, Colonising Egypt (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), 35. 3. Greg Miller, ‘Social Scientists Wade into the Tweet Stream’, Science, Vol. 333, no. 6051 (30 September 2011): 1878–81. 4. See: Bidoun, http://www.bidoun.org/about/ (accessed 9 June 2010). 5. See: R-Shief, http://www.kal3a.r-shief.org/search/ (accessed 16 September 2014). 6. Assistant Secretary Rosemary Gottemoeller, ‘From the Manhattan Project to the Cloud: Arms Control in the Information Age’ (Sidney Drell Lecture at Stanford University, Stanford, 27 October 2011). See: Rose Gottemoeler, http://www.state.gov/t/avc/rls/176331. htm/ (accessed 15 September 2014). 7. Arjun Appadurai, Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996), 33. 8. See: Drupal, http://www.drupal.org/project/jquery_ bidi/ (accessed 16 September 2014). Egyptian activist and blogger Alaa Abdel Fattah, who was jailed in Tora Prison, Cairo after receiving a 15-year sentence in 2014, built this module. 9. Doug Laney, ‘Application Delivery Strategies’, META Group Inc. (6 February 2011).

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10. UNICEF, http://www.unicef.org/infobycountry/ egypt_statistics.html (24 December 2013) (accessed 17 September 2013). According to UNICEF’s statistics by country, the total adult literacy rate in Egypt between 2005–10 is 66 per cent. 11. According to Socialbakers, among internet users in Egypt, the total number of Facebook users is reaching 10.7 million, which translates into a Facebook penetration rate of 13.26 per cent. See: Socialbakers, http:// www.socialbakers.com/facebook-statistics/egypt/ (accessed 22 September 2014). 12. Laura Marks, Enfoldment and Infinity: An Islamic Genealogy of New Media Art (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2010). 13. See: Jonathan Rashad, http://www.flickr.com/ photos/drumzo/7144575985/in/photostream/ (2012) (accessed 16 September 2014). 14. See: VJ Um Amel, http://www.vjumamel.com/portfolio/gaza-audio-visual-narrative-by-a-cyborg-imagestweeted-by-hashtag/ (accessed 15 September 2014). 15. Victoria Vesna, Database Aesthetics: Art in the Age of Information Overflow (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2007). 16. In The Archaeology of Knowledge (London: Tavistock Publications, 1974), 66, Michel Foucault attempts to define a method of historical analysis that is free from the formations of knowledge making. This debate on structuralism is aimed to question teleologies and cultural totalities … in the histories of ideas, science, philosophy, thought and literature, the focus is on different types of ruptures and discontinuities, of ‘transformations that serve as new foundations’.

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Excerpts from a Grammar of Redaction Joshua Craze

It begins with a sentence, of sorts. Figure 1 is part of a page from Other Document #131, a heavily redacted CIA report on the capture and waterboarding of Abu Zubaydah, a Saudi man detained in Faisalabad, Pakistan, on 28 March 2002.1 Abu Zubaydah spent four and a half years in detention at CIA black sites, and was vaunted by the American government as a ‘very senior Al Qaeda operative’ and one of its ‘highvalue detainees’. The government later acknowledged that Abu Zubaydah was not a member of Al Qaeda. He remains in captivity. Almost the entirety of Other Document #131 is redacted. When I first looked at the report, my eyes were drawn to the sentence contained in Figure 1: ‘Zubaydah subjected to the water board’. It is not, strictly speaking, a sentence. The words used to compose it, etched out of their black surroundings, presumably formed parts of other sentences, with other meanings, that we are no longer able to see. The sentence that emerges is an effect of the redaction. It reminded me of the concrete poetry of the 1960s, in which significance emerges in ellipses, through the fragmentation of phrases. The redacted page is an image. To understand it, I realized I could not discount the redactions as if they were non-sense: the annoying suppressions that get in the way of significance. I could not simply look for words, as if the redactions did not exist. I did not want to hunt for significance; it was already there, in the black. I just did not know how to see it yet. Intrigued by the composite sentences of Other Document #131, I looked into the legal framework governing redaction. There are a number of reasons that the CIA can either deny a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request in full, or else redact elements of a document. Most of the criteria for redaction are related to the national security risk posed by the exposure of information contained in the documents, the danger presented to a private individual by publication of records related to them or the necessity of concealing

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(fig. 1)

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ongoing covert operations. None of these criteria sufficed to explain the way the remaining words formed a sentence in Other Document #131. As I read more of the redacted documents related to the interrogation of Abu Zubaydah, I began to see that there was a strange sort of visibility at work in the texts. The word ‘waterboarding’ appears again and again, surrounded by stiff black blocks of redaction. All we learn from many of these documents is that someone was waterboarded. For those involved in uncovering the American government’s actions in the war on terror, such words are clues. The investigative journalists chronicling the war acted as detectives, hunting for the broken branch that would lead them through the forest to the beast. Their task — and it was a vital one — was to transform these fragments of text into meanings, and use them to tell a story of extradition, detainment and torture. In one of my other lives, as a journalist, I had occasion to search through redacted documents in this manner. I was hunting for what was being withheld, and the redactions were but an obstruction. How I often wished I could just read the unredacted reports, and not have to patch meanings out of absences. The black blocks were recalcitrant. I could not ever get to the things themselves. All I could do was see the areas around them, the words that hugged the black, and use this context to guess at the contours and significance of the redactions. The more I looked, the more the black blocks started to develop qualities of their own. Some, I felt sure, must refer to proper nouns; the logic of the words around them dictated that this was so. Others seemed like verbs, or else qualifications that have no place in a firm government narrative. The longer I spent with the texts, the more attention I started to pay to the redactions, and the less interested I became in the words. I began to think that as journalists, we were missing something by not paying attention to the redaction itself. Partly, I was simply overwhelmed by the documents’ sheer mass. The whole archive of texts (memos, reports, inquiries, emails) related to the detention and torture of ‘enemy combatants’ from 2001–8 amounts to more than a million pages (to say nothing of the documents related to the drone war that succeeded it). Yet we were treating each document individually and not considering the logic of the archive as a whole. Perhaps this sense of the documents’ importance is an excuse. I was increasingly dissatisfied with my work in nonfiction, which, in its relentless emphasis on the empirical details of the war on terror, began to feel like it was not able to grasp how these details became available: it treated interviews and redacted documents alike as merely sources of information. From 2009–11, I investigated the men who trained the American police force in counterterrorism, as part of an inquiry I carried out with Meg Stalcup for the Washington Monthly, funded by The Nation Institute Investigative Fund. We wrote a long article about the hustlers who, sensing a profit, had reinvented themselves as prophets, and taught local law enforcement officers Excerpts from a Grammar of Redaction

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about the imminent Hezbollah invasion of small-town America.2 The article generated a lot of publicity, and was quoted in a Senate inquiry. I remained dissatisfied. None of my experiences with these men could be included in the article, which was an investigative polemic. I could not mention the strange lust in the trainers’ eyes when they schooled American cops on the danger of Muslim paedophiles. Nor could I write about the fear felt by the former marines who, in this post-Cold-War epoch, spoke suspiciously about a world in which ‘anyone could be an enemy’. Reading more of the redacted documents, I began to see a logic to US counterterrorism policy that could not be described in the established forms of nonfiction that dominate American magazines and newspapers. It often felt like the way we approached these documents missed the point. The debate over waterboarding is exemplary. There were endless talking heads on television, musing on the duration that one needs to be to be drowned before the pain becomes severe. A radical decontextualization was at work: waterboarding became a term to be talked about in undergraduate philosophy classes, or else an activity for journalist Christopher Hitchens to undergo and find disagreeable. In these debates, waterboarding was not done in a ‘situation’ (to Abu Zubaydah, in a black site), but to a ‘reasonable man’, to be paraded before courts of law, or else debated in cafes as an instance of moral philosophy (if there was a ticking bomb, would you …). I began to see the public debate about waterboarding as the worldly analogue of the decontextualization of the redacted documents, which present you with only a single fact: Abu Zubaydah was waterboarded. Public debate and redacted documents alike formed part of a structure that encouraged me to cut waterboarding away from its context, and not consider it as simply one instance of a much broader system of warfare. To understand this system does not just mean adding context, or filling in more of the story. Political analysis on its own does not cut it either. One needs to understand the redaction itself: the way in which waterboarding was decontextualized, and the way the redacted documents constructed — through their eliminations and ellipses — a narrative of the war on terror. What, I thought, if rather than treating the redacted spaces of these documents as negatives — without information; the annoying absences that block meaning — one were to attempt to study these redactions in their fullness? I started two projects, which interrelate. The first is a novel, Redacted Mind, that deals in fictional terms with my experiences in Tanzania, Sudan and America, at the margins of the war on terror, and attempts to give life to the redacted documents — to the fragments of stories contained in these bureaucratic webs that could find no place in my nonfiction. The other project is a grammar of redaction entitled How To Do Things Without Words.3 This grammar — an excerpt of which you are reading — is a typology of the structures

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formed by the interrelationship of redaction and text. It is thus not exactly a linguistic grammar, but rather a grammar of images. This grammar does not attempt to go beyond these images of redaction; better writers than I have already told the story of Abu Zubaydah. The task of the grammar is not to unveil the hidden words underneath the black. I treat the documents as texts that might have something to say in and of themselves: just as there is a logic to the sentence that emerges from the redaction of Other Document #131, which does not depend on the actuality of what happened to Abu Zubaydah. This grammar is not an unveiling, but an attempt to trace the logic of the veiling itself. A lot of the redacted documents that this grammar looks at contribute to what Michael Taussig, in his book Defacement: Public Secrecy and the Labor of the Negative, calls public secrets: things we all know about, but know we should not know too much about.4 The word ‘waterboarding’ is right there in front of us, in the middle of the page. The government acknowledges it exists. We know it exists. Yet the word stands without context: we do not know where it happens, or what precisely is involved. Equally, we know there are black sites — CIA prisons outside America — but to this day, no country has admitted the existence of a black site on its territory, even those countries (Thailand, Poland, Somalia) for which there is extensive evidence to indicate that such sites exist. We know they are there, and we know not to ask too much. Words in the redacted documents often feel like keys to doors we cannot open. Intimations of what is concealed in the black that we know we do not want to know. The redactions have a regulative function. They mark the limits of our knowledge, and of our certainty, and they open up a space of fantasy. I spent the last two years teaching at the University of California, Berkeley. I had taught there earlier in my life, but before last year I had never noticed the extent to which my undergraduate students were invested in conspiracy theories. They all claimed that the CIA was monitoring their phone calls and emails (and what could I tell them other than that this was not a conspiracy theory?). They all thought that there was a web of covert government activity that dictated most of America’s economic and political life. This is the obverse side of the public secret; the redacted spaces around the word ‘waterboarding’ are not just spaces we do not know — they become containers for our imaginary life, and are all the more real for being fantastical. As I began to investigate these fantastical spaces, the typology that structures the grammar took shape. In the documents related to the war on terror, redacted subjects do decontextualized actions to redacted objects. Elsewhere, verbs disappear, and subjects do unmentionable things to Abu Zubaydah, before, in a temporary moment of visibility, the redacted report announces that the detainee appears to be co-operating, and so the enhanced

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interrogation techniques can be stopped. Sometimes, the visible spaces are words. Elsewhere, it is the redacted text that makes something visible. I named these redacted spaces in homage to Donald Rumsfeld’s famous epistemology of known knowns, known unknowns and unknown unknowns, and called them visible invisibles. They are not visible spaces of planning and calculation, whose content can be assessed and quantified. Nor are they outside the limits of what can be seen. They gesture instead at the borders of the visible, and give one a momentary vision, within the redacted documents, of an invisible space that signals the limits of legitimated knowledge. I detected four types of visible invisibles, and the grammar of redaction stabilized into four corresponding sections. ‘Subjects without Objects’, the section that is included in this excerpt, is an inquiry into what happens when the subjects of these documents disappear and new forms of subjectivity emerge through the process of redaction. Government documents are often stolid affairs, composed of the endless recounting of actions performed by dutiful subjects, which have predictable consequences. This section analyses what happens when the subjects are removed, and the actions hang: single sentences surrounded by black. In a roundabout way, this grammar is inspired by the American philosopher J. L. Austin and his book How To Do Things With Words.5 In this book, Austin analyses how words — like a priest saying, ‘I now pronounce you man and wife’ at a wedding — can do things. He explores the pragmatics of social utterances: how a person with a certain status, in a certain situation, defined institutionally and legally, can do things with words. Not anything, of course, but a range of circumscribed actions, which is given by the interaction between a person of a certain status (a priest) and a setting (a wedding, at the right moment) dictated by a series of formal and legal frameworks. The redacted documents I study are also full of people doing things with words. Lawyers write legal memos, politicians sign government edicts and military officers give commands. The redactions themselves are also a form of doing things. There are forms of intentionality behind these omissions that count — just as much as the priest at a wedding — as forms of locution; the redactions also speak, even if their language is unfamiliar to us. The way they speak, however, is rather different to the situations that Austin analyses. The redactions render the speech acts detailed in the documents precarious. Actions become disarticulated from both subject and situation. The speech acts of the redactions themselves are also unstable. Who redacted these documents? With what motivation? All we have to go on is the black. This grammar is a study of speech acts of omission and redaction, where the ‘person of a certain status’ (the interrogator, the lawyer, the politician) is redacted out of the picture, leaving only actions, and the barest suggestions

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of a situation. A black site. This is a study of what happens when words are taken away. It is a study of how to do things without words.

Subjects Without Objects Redactions occur throughout the redacted documents. Sometimes, it is a series of locatives that are suppressed from sentences, or else whole blocks of texts that refer to hidden spaces that vanish. Elsewhere, the redactions transform the grammar of the English sentence: finite verbs disappear, actions become open questions or else are inflicted on unknown objects, performed by unnamed subjects. Subjects often vanish from these documents. Just as often, though, new forms of subjectivity emerge within the redactions: subjects without objects. The simplest and most common form of redaction in these documents is the suppression of proper nouns. In theory, such redactions are done because revealing certain names poses a risk to national security, or else — the cynical interpretation — because of concerns about legal liability. However, regardless of the intentions underlying the redactions, the suppression of proper names in these documents has a series of very interesting consequences. Figure 2 is a page from the CIA’s Special Review: Counterterrorism Detention and Interrogation Activities.6 It details the beginning of the interrogations of Abu Zubaydah and Al Nashiri — another of the American government’s ‘high-value detainees’. The names of the team members, interrogators and psychologists (who worked hand in hand with the CIA) are redacted. These redactions mimic the horror of the black sites. Just like Al Nashiri and Abu Zubaydah, we do not know the names of the torturers. In the documents, only people’s roles — psychologist, interrogator — are visible, and not their names. I try to work out, on occasion, whether a psychologist is identifiable: I look at the word psychologist, and try to associate familiar verbs with the redacted text next to the word, or map out regularities in the length of the redactions around it; I try to infuse, through the form of the redactions, a sense of individuality into the role. Different psychologists, I hope, different redactions. It is useless. The redacted documents create their own forms of subjectivity: amorphous, replaceable, profligate. Both Al Nashiri and Abu Zubaydah have proper names in the documents. This is one of the odd inversions of these reports. It is the prisoners who have disappeared into secret black sites, but in the documents it is the CIA operatives who vanish. The extralegal process of rendition and confinement is mirrored by the interrogators’ disappearance into the bureaucratic machinery of the redactions, where they are free — as in figure 3 — to use pressure-point techniques to restrict detainees’ carotid arteries.7

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The redaction of subjects tends to proceed along predictable lines. Politicians, referred to by proper nouns, either disappear entirely, or are named and blamed; American moralism about politics, you will be happy to learn, continues in these documents. The supporting staff — the doctors who are present at the interrogations, the psychologists who assess the detainees beforehand and afterwards — are referred to only by their roles, and their proper names are redacted. It is an essentially journalistic trope. The talking heads are called in, and no one really remembers what they are called; their function is to provide authoritative discourse. ‘Abu Zubaydah was provided adequate and appropriate medical care.’ These statements exist in the same space as the words of experts on television, or in the courtroom, who say, ‘in my professional opinion …’ The criteria used to formulate professional opinions are unstated, and we have to simply take the redacted doctor’s words on trust. The redacted text, the word ‘doctor’ promises, is effectively empty: it is not a matter we are competent to judge. Secrecy here structures power relations according to who has possession of the secret, and who does not. The secret is an empty relational term. The doctors know, and what they know cannot be transmitted or evaluated by those outside their guild. There is no secret: just professionalism, and the doctor’s word.8 Soldiers, however, often have their rank left intact in the documents, even as their names vanish. There is a trace here of the doubling that Immanuel Kant describes in ‘What is Enlightenment?’9 He asks: Should a soldier be able to reflect and judge the adequacy of his orders, in his public use of reason, as a citizen? Of course! But not in his private use of reason, not when he is a soldier.10 Later, as a citizen, he can judge his orders all he wants, but as a soldier, he must obey. The documents follow Kant. A soldier must obey. All that remains visible is the rank of the soldier: neither his name, nor his thoughts. What makes this interesting is that frequently soldiers only emerge in the narrative of the redacted documents when they have acted at variance with their duty. Their rank only emerges precisely when it has been put into question by the individuality behind the rank — the erring consciousness that disobeys or exceeds the orders. What leaves a trace in the documents, however, is not the individual, but the blemished mark of duty. In figure 4, an officer assaults a teacher at a religious school during the course of an interview.11 Further down the page, someone who does not even have a rank ‘buttstroke[s]’ (using the butt stock of a rifle to strike someone; not a sexual act) a teacher in front of 200 students for smiling and laughing inappropriately. In the documents, we are generally given the rank of the soldier (officer, sergeant), but not their proper name. All we see is the rank, the action and the black.

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Sometimes these deviations from duty acquire their own proper names. Figure 5 is an excerpt from a military investigation into a detainee abuse incident (not an episode; not the everyday pattern of things; an incident — to be considered on its own terms).12 All the names are redacted. However, there are so many names in the document that individuation returns, this time as a series of codes. I initially thought these codes referred to US Army identification numbers, but I slowly realized that this is not the case (US Army IDs do not have this form, and, equally, the codes in the document are also used to refer to detainees). Instead, the numbers are internal to the document, and are designed for you, the reader of the redacted inquiry (the army has access to the original copy). The black spaces now take on proper names; they are marked by an identity that makes sense only relationally, within the document. Sometimes, however, the system does not work. We know Staff Sergeant b657c5 thought imposing physical size would intimidate detainee b647c4, but the redaction over the interrogator’s name is left blank, without a code attached. There is a short circuit in the documents, and the redactions again proliferate: the interrogator and many of the commanding officers — also not identified — become exchangeable within the economy of the text. Sometimes these blank spaces produce something like a desubjectivized space of discussion. Figure 6 is an email exchange contained within the same inquiry as figure 5.13 It reminds me of Michel Foucault’s anonymous interview as the ‘masked philosopher’, in which he notes that ‘names make everything too easy’, and dreams of a criticism in which names will no longer be known, and sentences no longer placed into an impoverished calculus of character analysis and the social world.14 Not characters, says Foucault, but thought, that is what we need: a year without names, and a mass of entirely anonymous books, to be read without Freudian interpretations and status games. Foucault’s dream here is of a world without characters. It is an interest that he pursues in the last two years of his life, as he lectures at the Collège de France. How can we speak in ways that exceed or disrupt the roles we play in life? Can we develop a different relationship to truth than one of correspondence to and confirmation of the subject positions we are ascribed? What the redacted documents bring us up against, again and again, is a closed bureaucratic legal world, in which, unlike in the situations Austin analysed, and that I described in the introduction, subjectivity and the identification of actors fall away. In figure 6, we face a nightmarish inversion of Foucault’s year without names: an anonymous world that still perpetuates the bureaucratic formulas he sought to escape. On reading the exchange, we again find identifying numbers, so we can trace these anonymous epistles, and there are admittedly appeals to experience (‘I sent [sic] several months in Afghanistan interrogating the Taliban and al Qaeda’), but all other identifying marks are redacted. You

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have to take the appeals to experience on trust; the subjects are not in relation to a world, but only to each other, within the terms of the document. The argument turns around who put the gloves on the American military. For the first two participants in the email exchange, the gloves are the American tendency to continue to think in terms of the Cold War. The techniques we used against the Russians are not adequate today. The first email closes: ‘[t]he gloves are coming off gentleman regarding these detainees, REDACTED has made it clear that we want these individuals broken.’ The last email, which is not included in figure 6, tells a different story: the gloves are international treaties that we signed, and that we partly created — we made our own gloves. That we take casualties, the email continues, is no reason to let our standards fall. The exchange is an almost clichéd argument about the relationship between revenge and responsibility, rendered in a space largely denuded of actual context. The position of the first two correspondents slips uncomfortably between violent anger: ‘Our interrogation doctrine is based on former Cold War and WWII enemies. Todays [sic] enemy, particularly those in SWA [South-West Afghanistan] understand force […] a litnany [sic] of harsher fear-up measures [are needed] […] fear of dogs and snakes appear to work nicely’, and efficacy: ‘Casualties are mounting and we need to start gathering info to help protect our fellow soldiers from any further attacks.’ Anger, retribution and efficiency are constantly slipping into each other, as they do throughout the whole period, from the invasion of Afghanistan onwards. It is as if the war on terror aimed to be efficient in gaining retribution, and to gain retribution through its efficiency, but the two terms collide, and the emotional excess underlying the efficiency consistently spills out into anger, dogs and violence. The redaction of proper nouns reaches its apotheosis in figure 7, an excerpt from the glossary of names attached to a report authored by the United States Department of Justice that traced the history of the torture memos — the legal opinions written by John Yoo (then-deputy assistant attorney general), amongst others — which prepared the ground for the CIA’s interrogation program.15 If Zero Dark Thirty (2012) had been a better film than it was, this might have been the list of credits that rolled at the end. It is composed of two columns: name and rank. Some of the actors are fully identified, such as John Ashcroft (attorney general, 2001–5). Others, whose ranks and titles form part of an exchangeable and unknowable class, vanish. REDACTED is a CIA attorney (page one), who should not be confused with REDACTED, who is also a CIA attorney (beginning of page two). Other names are redacted, but seemingly without purpose. REDACTED is the assistant US attorney, EDVA, whose name is REDACTED (about 20 minutes of googling allows you to work out who this is). Other characters have both their names and ranks redacted. It is important

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you do not confuse REDACTED (end of page one) with REDACTED (end of page two). One does, of course. After reading these documents for many months, I began to think I got to know Mr REDACTED (he is almost always a man). He is a central character in the story of the so-called Global War on Terror. Mr REDACTED provides, entreats and argues. He drafts documents, works long hours, gets waterboarded, administers waterboards, gets punished and is finally promoted. Because he is everywhere, even if one kills him, he quickly reappears. He is the space around the idea of law, and he couches its every clause in his blackness. Mr REDACTED reminds me somewhat of the Italian anarchist Luther Blissett: a ritualized nom de plume that levels differences (Chiunque può essere Luther Blissett, semplicemente adottando il nome Luther Blissett [Anyone can be Luther Blissett, simply by adopting the name Luther Blissett]). Except this time, the name is not open to British conceptual artists and Italian activists, but part of the closed economy of the redacted documents. Mr REDACTED is the inversion of the grammatical function of the words ‘Yoo’ and ‘Bybee’. These apparently proper nouns, placed amid the redactions of the OPR report, displace structures into subjects, and create narratives about individual responsibility and error. Mr REDACTED is quite the reverse. He is a subject formed by the structures of national security and legal anxiety that create these redacted documents. Mr REDACTED allows for a certain anonymous equality. Those whose names still appear in the documents are either culprits (Yoo, Bybee) or detainees, and thus doubly culprits (Abu Zubaydah, Al Nashiri). They may appear to be on opposing sides of the war on terror, but in the logic of the documents they are on the same side: they are the characters that drive the narrative. Everyone else — the redacted functionaries and redacted detainees alike — is flattened out, and effectively replaceable. As I noted earlier, these redactions have the effect of recreating within the documents something of the same sense of uncertainty that must have been experienced by Al Nashiri and Abu Zubaydah: we simply do not know who the torturers are. The possibilities are endless. Perhaps you could be the CIA attorney whose name is redacted; the space then would no longer be black, but simply an underline, ready for your name to be pencilled in, as with the choose-your-own-adventure books I read as a child. This is, after all, a story awaiting its hero. The other possibility, though, is that you could be the detainee. Mr REDACTED is both detainee and interrogator, and in his former role he is admirably Brechtian. There is little in the way of internal psychology. Sometimes the country he is from is not clear. In the interrogators’ assessment of what might cause Mr REDACTED severe pain, there is little sense of a subjectivity that might experience the pain. Who is Mr REDACTED? It is an open question.

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Reading these documents, these public secrets, one is viscerally reminded of why one might not ask too many questions. Why, ultimately, secrets can circulate as visible invisibles. For if there is no content to Mr REDACTED, then the possibility remains that he may be a piece of us all, and that we might all be the nameless friend of Abu Zubaydah, always about to be spirited away and detained.

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1. Other Document #131. This document was obtained following an American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) Freedom of Information Act request placed on 7 October 2003. It was released to the ACLU on 27 May 2008. 2. Meg Stalcup and Joshua Craze, ‘How We Train Our Cops to Fear Islam’, Washington Monthly, 3 March 2011. 3. This grammar, and the accompanying phrasebook that contains the documents to which the grammar refers, are available on the Ibraaz website.

9. See: Immanuel Kant, ‘An Answer to the Question: What is Enlightenment?’ (1784) in What is Enlightenment? Eighteenth Century Answers and Twentieth Century Questions, ed. James Schmidt (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1996), 58–64. 10. Kant’s utilization of public and private is rather different than the significance the two terms have in America today. 11. CIA special review, op cit., 79.

4. Michael Taussig, Defacement: Public Secrecy and the Labor of the Negative (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999), 50–1.

12. Memorandum, 104th Military Intelligence Battalion. Detainee Abuse Incident. AR 15-6 Investigation Legal Review (6 October 2003), 3.

5. J. L. Austin, How To Do Things With Words, 2nd edition (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1975).

13. The email chain appears in the same memorandum as the proceeding foonote, 31–2. The whole exchange is contained in the phrasebook available on the Ibraaz website. Figure 6 is one of the earlier pages in the exchange.

6. Central Intelligence Agency, Office of the Inspector General, Special Review: Counterterrorism Detention and Interrogation Activities (September 2001–October 2003) (2003-7123-IG) (7 May 2004), 35. Henceforth referred to as ‘CIA special review’. 7. Ibid., 69. 8. I am indebted here to Georg Simmel’s classic essay: ‘The Sociology of Secrecy and of Secret Societies’, American Journal of Sociology, no. 11 (1906): 441–98.

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14. Michel Foucault, ‘The Masked Philosopher’ in Ethics: Subjectivity and Truth. The Essential Works of Michel Foucault 1954–1984, ed. Paul Rabinow, Vol. 1 (Harmondsworth, Middlesex: Penguin, Allen Lane, 1997), 321–8. 15. Department of Justice, Office of Professional Responsibility, Investigation into the Office of Legal Counsel’s Memoranda Concerning Issues Relating to the Central Intelligence Agency’s Use of ‘Enhanced Interrogation Techniques’ on Suspected Terrorists, 260 (29 July 2009), 128.

Dissonant Archives: Contemporary Visual Culture and Contested Narratives in the Middle East

The Black Market Archive The Velocity, Intensity and Spread of Pakistani Film Piracy Timothy P.A. Cooper

A Pakistani film history has yet to appear, and before it does it is apposite to discuss another ignoble honour: that Pakistan is the last nation without a film archive. Emblematic of a wider cultural-heritage crisis in Pakistan, especially concerning the visual arts, this essay emerges from a fascination with the narratological organ grinder of ‘golden age’ Pakistani cinema. Through a series of ongoing interviews with a number of key stakeholders in the preservation of Pakistani cinematic heritage, it has become clear that the public availability and continued existence of films made between Partition with India in 1947 and the 1977 martial rule of Zia-al-Huq is heavily reliant on the pirate-film industry. Standing in for a state archive, what I term the ‘Black Market Archive’, has become a product of the class hierarchization of images, with film restoration laboratories and their preservation premieres at the top and pirated VCDs at the bottom. As such, this essay responds to an absence and an urge, a non-archive and an archival impulse. Hito Steyerl, although addressing herself to the maligned histories of the essay film and video art, and acknowledging only briefly images of urgency or poverty, writes similarly, ‘Poor images are poor because they are not assigned any value within the class society of images — their status as illicit or degraded grants them exemption from its criteria. Their lack of resolution attests to their appropriation and displacement.’1 Unrelated to modesty or to a deficiency of quality, Steyerl’s ‘poor image’ is a victim of enforced destitution, having become a casualty of cultural austerity. By exploring the watermarks of pirate-VCD producers rather than the artistic imprint of the auteur, this essay will expose two utterly distinct compulsions to archive, operating from two geographically distinct command centres — from the struggling government departments in Islamabad to the flourishing Rainbow Centre in Karachi, the heartland of media piracy in Asia.

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Rainbow Centre, Karachi. Courtesy of Jonathan of www.buildingmybento.com.

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Punjabi movie banner at the Capital Cinema Lahore, 2013. Courtesy of the author.

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The Indian Embargo In front of the Regent Cinema on McLeod Road, the leading directors, producers and film personalities of the Lollywood industry were gathered for the premiere of an Indian film, Jaal. It was July 1952 and the area was still known as Charing Cross. Only the previous year had the bronze statue of Queen Victoria been removed. But this was no gala premiere, the glitterati having assembled there to protest the breaking of the import quota on Indian films, via a loophole in national commercial trade policy by shipping the film from East Pakistan, where it had already received permission to run, to West Pakistan. After an angry flurry of excitement, many of the stars of the Lahore film industry were arrested and imprisoned for ten days. United in cultural xenophobia, the mob collective picketed the government for cross-border isolationism in the vain hope of fostering and protecting domestic film production. What became known at the ‘Jaal Agitation’ resulted in a film-for-film agreement with India that ended with the Indo-Pakistan war of 1965. What followed was over four decades of embargo on Indian films, eased only in 2008 by Pervez Musharraf whose government returned in part to the pre-1965 like-for-like exchange.2 Pakistan’s archival crisis is a rare manifestation in an era of media migration, transcoding and digitization. In neighbouring countries such as Afghanistan, the destruction of film archives has been witnessed, and in Peshawar filmgoers are regularly attacked and their cinemas destroyed. If a Pakistani film archive is to be established, the danger it seeks to avert is no longer atrophy, the assumed degradation of a finite number of produced films, but the threat of secession, mob violence and radicalism. Until 2011 it was assumed that the Philippines was the last nation without a national archive, until a centralized holding was established in connection with UNESCO’s World Day for Audiovisual Heritage. In this light there are a great number of comparisons between the two nations, the Philippines having suffered military coups, debt, caustic corruption and repeated attempts at insurgency and Islamic radicalism. Most importantly, the Philippines is a decentralized archipelago of over 150 Malayo-Polynesian languages, making any prior efforts to consolidate a national film archive even more costly and potentially divisive. Pakistan too is made up of diverse tongues; Urdu, Punjabi, Sindhi, Pashto, Balochi and Saraiki, as well as 57 lesser-spoken languages, each with their own regional, tribal and ethnic allegiances. Beneath the jurisdiction of Urdu as a national language, English remains the official language of commerce, law, industry and the liberal press. With the vast majority of television programming presented in Urdu, an ongoing process of media archaeology is required to unearth examples of moving-image media reflective of regional or linguistic identities. The rarity of catching glimpses of linguistic sovereignty, whether taking the form of a decades-old television series, or a token musical interlude — such as the first Saraiki-language song to appear on film in C.L. Rawal’s The Black Market Archive

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1968 Aabroo — has resulted in a base of media consumers accustomed to looking beyond the primary broadcast schedule for their identity fix. From the early days of film production in the Indian subcontinent, censorship became an authorial proxy for diverse regional production. The Britishera Indian Cinematograph Act of 1918 demanded every film be certified first by the local state authority before screening, a rule that acted merely as a pretext for ensuring that themes reflective of the emerging independence movement did not appear on screens. Along with Bombay and Calcutta, the city of Lahore formed a triangular monopoly of studio production, and became the temporary power base of the Mohajirs, the refugees newly arrived from India. By the time the seat of government shifted from the southern Sindh capital of Karachi to the north-western city of Islamabad on the border of the Punjab, Lahore had increasingly become an avatar of the Urdu political and linguistic hegemony. The illusory and illusive concept of a united Pakistani nation — a distinct entity from the shared community of the English-language Pakistani state — has been undermined at every turn by the repeated ‘Urduization’ of the education, media and political spectrum. The Bengali Language Movement, which sought to achieve the shared recognition of Bengali as one of the national language of the Dominion of Pakistan, particularly in East Pakistan, led to the 1971 Liberation War and the second partition of the fledgling nation.3 Urdu, a dictated national tongue that was positioned as such to play the role of a cohesive agent to bind disparate Muslim identities, became a divisive influence hindering any hope of a shared Hindustani identity. In an attempt to postpone independence, the British colonial powers did their part to provoke the fragmentation of the common tongue into divergent scripts to fuel the divide between Muslims and Hindus.4 Language and regional identity are key to understanding the nonexistence of a national film archive in Pakistan and, as the selection criteria would no doubt be drawn along linguistic lines, distribution and dissemination — both legitimate and pirated — have remained the responsibility of the local state authorities in line with the 1918 Indian Cinematograph Act. By the beginning of the embargo on Indian films in 1965, the National Film Archive of India had already been founded, helped in large part by the work of a number of dedicated cineastes. Initially, the personal collection and campaigning of Harish S. Booch gave the archive movement momentum by lobbying the relevant authorities to allow the early Dadasaheb Phalke films to be reprocessed.5 Just months before the formal establishment of the National Film Archive of India, the Director of the BFI donated two silent films shot in India in 1898 and 1901 to Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru, thus signalling the formal handover of the subcontinent’s colonial film heritage to India, not Pakistan.6 Pakistan today is not short of figures like Harish S. Booch, yet the personal collections they boast consist almost entirely of memorabilia — photographs,

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lobby-cards and records — the detritus and debris of a film heritage most likely lost to the humidity of the region.7 If the ‘Jaal Agitation’ was the formative moment in the nascent Pakistani film industry’s relation with its estranged sibling, it was also the moment the two nations took separate paths in regard to the preservation of their own cinematic heritage. Taking the place of curators, programmers, archivists and film societies, Pakistani regional censorship boards operated through an isolated media monopoly along linguistic grounds. Yet with a public hungry for quality and diversity, and the absence of a cohesive shared cinematic output, the advent of film piracy once again allowed for the mass consumption of Bollywood films. Through the availability of video technology and satellite television, one repercussion of the ‘Jaal Agitation’ was to turn a national public towards alternative distribution channels along local lines rather than onto legitimate domestic products. Mostafa Rejai and Cynthia H. Enloe’s influential study on the role of nationalism in political stabilization and ethnic integration is integral for examining the ways that post-colonial states asserted political control over their newly formed dominions. Written in 1969 at the height of Pakistan’s cinematic golden age, before the brain drain suffered by the exodus to the newly formed Bangladesh in 1971, ‘Nation-States and State-Nations’ examines the evolution of national identity in developing nations, many of which form identity constructs long before the structures of political rule are in place. We have already seen how the studio centre of cinematic control in Lahore played — and continues to play — the role of capital over a micro-nation, with its jingoistic shock troops, the Jaal agitators, in the heartland of Urdu-language hegemony. We have also seen a dual censorship-distribution channel inherited from the British system that supplanted suppression for authorship. In contrast to the spontaneous nationalism of Bangladesh, and the archival impulse of Indian cinema under Nehru, there emerges a distinction for describing the insecurities of Pakistani Urdu- and Punjabi-language cinema at this phase in governmental efforts to archive. Rejai and Enloe designate the process of nation building as ‘formative nationalism’, and the process of nation aggrandizing as ‘prestige nationalism’.8 I would argue that it is possible to extend this model to describe ‘formative’ and ‘prestige’ cinemas, in the regional identities and provinces of state-nations. ‘Formative’ cinema is aptly expressed in the cinema of East Pakistan, riding the trajectory from the Bengali Language Movement to the foundation of Bangladesh, wherein a linguistic identity, subjugated by and alienated from the command centre, finds agency in the construction of alterity. Conversely, ‘prestige’ cinema, of which Urdu and Punjabi cinema from 1947 to 1977 can be seen as a prime example, slogs through a cycle of repetition and modification from which cinematic products emerge as charged with a throwaway immediacy designed to placate an imagined mass and pursuing only oblivion.

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The Indestructible Archive When the topic inevitably turns to the death of Pakistani cinema, piracy is often listed as one of the contributory factors. Before anyone was talking about a ‘failed state’ the then-director of the NAFDEC (National Film Development Corporation), Aijaz Gul, was decrying another such ‘crisis’ in the Pakistani Film industry (1988–9): As if inflation and stagnation in the cinema network weren’t enough, the final stroke came from illegal, smuggled and uncensored video films in the early eighties. Foreign films were soon followed by pirated prints of new local films. […] With no video regulating act in order […] producers and distributors are left with little choice but to take the law into their own hands, and wreck video shops which sell or rent their films without payment of any royalties.9 While advocating the same kind of vigilantism that fuelled the ‘Jaal Agitation’, Gul pursued a pure experience of cinema, untainted by television, video or satellite technology. Instead, could it be that piracy has acted as a surrogate archive in the absence of a national film library? The attempt at weakening the Indian film industry and strengthening domestic production led only to a climate of self-sabotage and a culture of piracy. While detracting from any public drive for film preservation, the proxy archive is at the same time a pure expression of a decentralized archival impulse, allowing the spread of Pakistani cinematic heritage in the face of government malaise and tribal alterity. Through this unconventional form of distribution, the piracy and spread of ‘golden age’ Pakistani cinema provides an alternative archive and preservation model for the digital era. In a major study on the Nigerian pirate-video trade, Brian Larkin explores how media piracy has become part of the infrastructure of globalization. His study focuses on the notion of technological breakdown, particularly the cycle of ‘repair as a cultural mode of existence’, which the author finds to be ‘a consequence of both poverty and innovation’.10 Like Pakistan, Nigeria’s particular technological situation and public yearning for media products provides ample employment for a vast array of resourceful individuals who specialize in restoring, preserving and repairing faulty goods. While touching upon the embedded trauma of a post-colonial situation in which technology is still linked to the structures of power and subjugation, Larkin’s essay quickly becomes a material exploration of the tactile surfaces of the palimpsest of film piracy. The scrolling adverts for local branches of pirate stores in the form of telephone numbers, emails and faxes are redoubled by Babel-like dubbing scores, and multi-lingual subtitles superimposed on older subtitles,

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giving the pirated film product what Larkin calls ‘a visible inscription of the routes of media piracy’.11 What emerges from the viewing experience are the tactile visual surfaces and haptic visuality usually associated with what Laura U. Marks calls the experience of ‘touching, not mastering’.12 More aptly described as reinscriptions, the watermarks of many of the pirate distributors appear at the point in each film that features the most notable song, or the segment most likely to be clipped and put on YouTube. Often the imprint even playfully matches or compliments the content of the scene, as in Nagin (1959), which witnesses the watermark curl around the body of the actress, coiling around her face and propelling her forward on her swing as she mimes to the playback singer Iqbal Bano Begum singing ‘Ambuwa Ki Dariyon’. Likewise, in Anwara (1970), Noor Jehan sings in playback the sublime song ‘Mera Pyar Na Diloon’ — having recorded the song in the studio for the actress to mime. With its pendulum-like mobile camera, the watermark heightens the melancholy insistence of Tafoo’s hypnotic tabla rhythm, as the address and contact details of the OK CD Company appropriate the screen in a similar act of ventriloquism to that of the visually absent Noor Jehan. The stylistic evolution of pirate watermarks also reflects the changing media modes, demands and norms of viewer reception. Pre-YouTube transfers tend to bare fixed watermarks in the style of a television-channel imprint, while later copies scroll across with the information flow of rolling news. For many in Pakistan, access to basic amenities requires existing on the margins of technological legality. Media piracy in Pakistan is an extension of the same spirit of self-determination that has seen the CD and DVD wholesale market in Peshawar’s Nishtarabad area set up its own trade unions. In such cases the lines between legitimate and pirate products can differ from one seller to another, or even within the same store. Boasting over 180 shops, certain of the more lucrative businesses are beginning to finance the production of their own films dealing with the culture of the Khyber Pakhtunkhwa. Made for direct VCD release, they are sold to the public for around 40 Pakistani rupees ($0.40). With locals along the border of the frontier province being kept away from cinemas in fear of attacks such as a spate of recent grenade assaults on Peshawar cinemas, ‘CD films’ or ‘minifilms’ are doing a bustling trade.13 It was another film that was never intended for the cinema, The Innocence of Muslims, that was responsible for the 2012 wave of anti-film violence, which has since led to a government crackdown on film distribution and cultural expression that includes the notorious national YouTube ban. Costing countless jobs, the street violence and vandalism that followed has stripped bare any outlets for legitimate secular discourse in Pakistan. Karachi’s Rainbow Centre is repeatedly the target of fundamentalist attacks due to its dissemination of western images, pornography and cinema artefacts made at a time when Pakistani values on the surface looked somewhat different. The Rainbow Centre deals in the dissemination of faulty The Black Market Archive

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Nagin, 1959. Dir. Khalil Qaiser. Screenshot from pirated VCD. Courtesy of the author.

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Various Shalimar CDs Peshawar watermarks. Screenshot from pirated VCD. Courtesy of the author.

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images, repairing and preserving them not by altering the quality but by bringing them into the marketplace for public consumption. The arrival of VCR technology in the 1970s also saw the most recent attempt at media migration, transferring the country’s cinematic heritage from extant 35 mm reels onto VHS. As it stands, almost every example of Pakistani cinema created before the age of video now only exists in the form of the carrier created sometime in the early 1980s for public distribution.14 Under the authoritarian rule of Ziaal-Huq, the national cultural agenda was to ensure that public entertainment was suppressed at all cost. Short of changing the very nature of its citizens’ desires, VHS became a good way of ensuring public pleasures became private ones. The film holdings of the National Archive of Pakistan appear to be almost entirely composed of low-resolution VHS transfers. The original carriers (VHS, rather than 35 mm) from which quality restorations could be made must be assumed to be in the hands of the leading pirate distributors. For Ravi Sundaram, spaces like the Rainbow Centre are revelatory of a complex post-colonial urbanism. In his 1999 book Pirate Modernity: Delhi’s Media Urbanism, Sundaram writes about India’s own hub of media piracy in Delhi, Palika Bazaar, which has also enjoyed a period of prosperity since the video era, burgeoning into a major operations centre by the time cable television became ubiquitous in the 1990s.15 Elaborate, intricate and informal, Palika became a hub of violent crime, a no man’s land of illegitimate products and services. Reflective of an attitude of ambivalence and characterized by a labyrinthine organizational structure, Sundaram’s ‘pirate modernity’ succinctly captures the apolitical ecology of Pakistan’s illicit media distribution channels. A recent RAND report traces the much-trodden path linking media piracy with global terrorism and organized crime. Centring in part on one of the world’s most wanted men, Dawood Ibrahim, whose D-Company has terrorized India for over two decades, RAND’s study reveals that Ibrahim has since moved operations to Karachi, establishing connections to al-Qaeda and Lakshar-e-Tabiyiba.16 The RAND study remarks upon the funding capabilities drawn from such activities, the quick leap from crime to piracy in the philosophical underpinnings of D-Company and its acquisition of the SADAF trading company based in Karachi, allowing them the facilities and infrastructure to manufacture pirated VHS and VCDs.17 Indeed, the trajectory of D-Company seems not dissimilar to that of any other production company: ‘Over a decade and a half, D-Company vertically integrated into every part of the Indian filmmaking industry. It began with loan-sharking in film production, then progressed into film distribution, home-video manufacturing, and — a natural culmination of its rackets — film piracy.’18 Etymologically denoting an act of daring, piracy heralds from the Greek peira, ‘an attempt’, and could, in the case of Ibrahim’s D-Company, be more aptly described in an era of techno-capitalism as a ‘parallel attempt’, operating upon channels analogous to traditional production, distribution and financial systems. The Black Market Archive

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The archival impulse at the core of Pakistani film piracy seems to have pre-emptively upheld many of the Pad.ma platform’s indispensable ‘10 Theses on the Archive’, such as: The archive that results may not have common terms of measurement or value. It will include and reveal conflicts, and it will exacerbate the crises around property and authorship. It will remain radically incomplete, both in content and form. But it is nevertheless something that an interested observer will be able to traverse: riding on the linking ability of the sentence, the disruptive leaps of images, and the distributive capacity that is native to technology.19 The indestructible archive of pirated Pakistani film is an archive without an acquisition policy, a museum without curatorship, a digital marketplace that challenges the hegemony of the traditional model whose only trump card is its own perceived legitimacy. Within this framework the preservation of film becomes the end product, stripped of any philosophical, ethical or ideological underpinnings. The purpose of pirate preservation becomes threefold: to ensure that the debris of the image-product serves as a vehicle for future sales in the short term; refusing to impede the ongoing data migration of the image-product by becoming concerned with surface or resolution quality; to ensure it remains available in case consumer or market forces demand sales in the long term.

The Poor and Lossy Image of Media Migration Pakistan’s ‘Black Market Archive’ is the product of a series of haptic migrations, which reveals in the deterioration of image resolution the inscriptions of public use and dissemination.20 It is big data in a small torrent, the debris of a ‘prestige’ cinema stripped of its aggrandizing function. Hito Steyerl’s ‘poor image’ framework turns Pakistani films in the ‘Black Market Archive’ into undeciphered hieroglyphs that lend uncertainty to the rest of the decoded writing system. In early Scribal culture, the earliest arbiters of the written word, Egyptian and Mesopotamian scribes would work together on the creation of the same document. Often one scribe would litter the document with misspellings or mathematical errors that would only be equalized by the consistency of his cohorts’ style. Whether this was down to a lack of consensus over the correct symbol or the arrangement of script, such errors often led to problems in the initial deciphering of early writing as to which of the multiple scribal handwritings or scripts should be taken as the source model. The same phenomenon can be seen in the uncodified transliterations of written Urdu

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The palimpsest of appropriation in Khog Dushman, 1984. Dir. Aziz Tabassum. Courtesy of the author.

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Hito Steyerl, video still from How Not To Be Seen: A Fucking Didactic Educational .Mov File, 2013. HD video file, single screen, 14 min. Courtesy of the artist.

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and open-source subtitling, which both facilitate the wide spread of global cinematic culture and textual migration. The ‘Black Market Archive’, rather than attempting to decode the Scribal errors, becomes a participant scribe in the process, transcoding the image data, masking the source and further shattering the techno-capitalist illusion of lossless-ness. The ‘poor images’ of the ‘Black Market Archive’ are not intended to challenge the hierarchization of images in a classed society, rather they are the cracked avatars of an alternative mode of production and distribution that can only be deciphered by casting off the fetishes of resolution, completism and the tradition of (surface) quality. What must emerge through a study of the migratory surfaces of these ravaged former films is what Steyerl imagines as ‘another form of value defined by velocity, intensity, and spread, on impression rather than immersion, on intensity rather than contemplation, on previews rather than screenings.’21

Velocity, Intensity, Spread Although many pirate-film suppliers boast of their ability to ensure that new releases appear in their shops at the same time as a film is released in the cinemas, the visual characteristics of much of the detritus of Pakistani cinema heritage appears not as a consequence of velocity or speed, but of an inter-media evolution that has been constantly evolving since India’s partition. Transcoding usually applies to data files being encoded from analogue to analogue or from digital to digital. As common formats are discarded and a new standard of compatibility takes hold, often differing from country to country, or from platform to platform, it becomes necessary to promote a promise of lossless transfer to proffer a seamless trajectory of media evolution. While this might be possible at the high end of the hierarchy of image resolutions, the process of lossy-to-lossy transcoding results in a further reduction in image and sound quality, known as generation loss. The wider the original copy of a classic Pakistani film is spread — for example, between retailers that may or may not hold the earliest VHS carrier — the more the entropy of the visual increases. If we imagine a revised standard of value defined by velocity and spread, it becomes necessary to embrace the aesthetics of piracy as an informal archive that wears the scars of its self-proliferation. Hito Steyerl’s recent exhibition at the ICA in London offered a choice selection of the Berlin-based artist’s recent video work, comprised of five pedagogic pieces that explore the passage of capital evidenced in the flow of digital data. Her 2014 film Liquidity Inc. — the title of which denotes the promise of virtuality and fluidity in the form of an accountable company — articulates itself through multiple media surfaces, wherein the corporeal fluidity of the subject matter, Mixed Martial Arts, is matched by the rapid fluctuation

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of screens. The result is not the sense of permanence or simultaneity promised by the era of virtuality, but an alien environment of soft power in which cloud storage is linked to the meteorological movement of geopolitical trade winds. Likewise, How Not To Be Seen: A Fucking Didactic Educational .MOV File (2013) does what it says on the tin. In this case, the definition of ‘being seen’ is reliant on the resolution test chart made by the US Air Force in 1951 to perfect aerial photography, and is still used in various forms to gage the optical resolution of various imaging systems. Steyerl tells us in the film that it ‘measures the visibility of a picture, measures the resolution of the world as a picture […] whatever is not captured by resolution is invisible.’ With one visitor to the Venice Biennale truly getting into the spirit of the thing, the film is available to watch online, under the title How Not to be Seen: A Fucking Didactic Educational .HACK File.22 Occurring almost too frequently to be mere impoliteness, one particular viewer repeatedly walks back and forth in front of the projection. Both the silhouette and the illicit cameraperson launch a pre-emptive strike on the all-seeing resolution scale through their respective presence as a public and a vessel of alternate distribution. With each new transfer and transcode offering a new embodiment of the original work, the producers of pirated copies of Pakistani cinema think nothing of scrolling their own watermarks — including their phone number and company name — across the entire length of the film. This reclamation of a ‘prestige’ cinematic heritage by a parallel distribution chain operates in the same spirit as Steyerl’s lessons on invisibility, by allowing the process of entropy to corrupt the resolution to such a degree that on the resolution scale, the pirated film barely qualifies as an image at all.

Impression, Intensity, Preview Many of the Pakistani films for which we strive for the preservation and repair are social or folk films, a mixture of melodrama and realism that often look better as stills than as moving images. In an attempt to salvage a pure experience of Pakistan’s cinematic heritage that circumvents the visible traces of the palimpsest and pirate watermarks, many individuals and non-profit organizations have been set up to collect the debris of film production in the accepted absence of 35 mm prints. Founded with little hope that the producers’ families, government holdings or pirate producers will give up the films themselves, many turn to artefacts and collectibles. The certainty of films lost to inertia or repossessed by defunct television networks and pirate vendors gives way to a focus on memorabilia, as if the debris of the films’ original releases are interchangeable with an experience of them as a whole, before they were received by a public.

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Nikolai Blau, How Not to be Seen: A Fucking Didactic Educational .HACK File , 2013. A hack of Hito Steyerl’s How Not To Be Seen: A Fucking Didactic Educational .MOV File, 2013.

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Khog Dushman, 1984. Dir. Aziz Tabassum. Screenshots from pirated VCD. Courtesy of the author.

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In Khog Dushman, a Pashto-language Pakistani film directed by Aziz Tabassum in 1984, the unifying respectability of the fundamentalist village mawlawi [an honorific title for an esteemed Islamic scholar] is expressed through a large devotional image of his head and shoulders that hangs prominently in the houses of the protagonists. The portrait appears as if imposed from another spatial plane, like the mock-weather reports in Steyerl’s Liquidity Inc., or the gated communities in her How Not To Be Seen … This recurring portrait is an internal piece of memorabilia, a preview, a thumbnail of the central theme, which allows the viewer to salvage some sense of the story from both the poor script in the first instance and the copied and recopied images as they come to us today. The devotional portrait sidelines both the lack of linear narrative logic and the weak cohesive force of the character. So much so that once the corrupt son of the mawlawi takes over, the portrait hanging in every living room and dominating every interior shot of the film, is simply exchanged for that of the antagonist. The redemptive punishment for the loose morals of the villagers is a routine humiliation by travelling Sufi mystics. It is at this early point in the film that a second watermark vies for the viewer’s attention, with the static permanence of the SABAH CD company challenged by the scrolling advert for Jawed Enterprises, followed by their Rainbow Centre address and phone number. As with the original public reception of the film, whose weak script and poor characterization is nulled by the avatar of the mawlawi and his son, whose portraits provide cues for the casual viewer, the inscriptions of the competing generations of pirate-film retailers collide to reveal the impermanence and vulnerability of the construction of the image as history, as connective tissue. Foucault’s description of genealogy as that which ‘operates on a field of entangled and confused parchments, on documents that have been scratched over and recopied many times’,23 could just as easily be a description of the concerns of video artists around the time in which Jean-Luc Godard began his Histoire(s) Du Cinema in the late 1980s. A product of entropy rather than design, Pakistan’s ‘Black Market Archive’ achieves its palimpsest-like surface through a constant muddying of the same image, a depthless migration — rather than the explicit image layering and reinscriptions that followed the advent of video art.

The Promise of Lossless-ness When film critics bemoan the poisonous influence of film piracy, they project onto it their own expression of Pakistani cultural inertia. The perception of a golden age of Pakistani cinema becomes a state of liberality and innocence, or what Walter Benjamin would term ‘a process of empathy whose origin is the indolence of the heart, acedia, which despairs of grasping and holding the The Black Market Archive

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genuine historical image as it flares up briefly’. This sadness, Benjamin notes, is caused by the awareness that history is, was and will always be written by the victors. In this procession of victorious rulers, the spoils are paraded too:‘They are called cultural treasures […] And just as such a document is not free of barbarism, barbarism taints also the manner in which it was transmitted from one owner to another.’24 But this kind of archival violence makes the corrupted memorabilia of historic film accessible to a populace that suffer from both a total lack of cinema spaces and a brutal gulf between rich and poor. However much the dissemination of low-resolution and poorly transferred VCD copies damage public interest in any potential archival project, having consolidated a tradition of poor quality, many have already come to associate western and Indian films with (surface) quality in the form of high resolution. The impotent aggrandizing continues unabated, as a brief discussion with those in charge of the National Archive of Pakistan reveal what could be construed as a complete lack of interest — even contempt — for preserving Pashto-, Sindhi-, Saraiki- and Balochi-language films in favour of the old hegemony of Urdu and Punjabi. The victors of Pakistan’s twentieth century are the gangsters whose products — particularly those pirated examples of their own national film heritage — challenge the promise of pristine resolution and lossless replication. Consequently, with the nation in the depths of widespread institutional corruption, caustic conservatism and public cynicism, few leaders possess the strength to take ownership of their multi-lingual national film history and place it under the care of their contested state. The world’s major economies have continued to reassert their dominance over global culture through the high-spec preservation and dissemination of historic and archival film. With the dawn of cartography, colonial expansion and subjugation was achieved in part through the demarcation of space that, once documented and known, was considered owned. In the present day, resolution and image enhancement are the key determiners of quality that establish a global class hierarchy of images. With neither the funds nor the skilled specialists to sustain an archival or preservation drive, Pakistan’s failure to provide its citizens with a film archive has been outsourced to its parallel command centre: the Rainbow Centre in Karachi and its regional doubles. Founded spontaneously, without the values of a film collective, a co-operative or a film society, the ‘Black Market Archive’ is a manifestation of cinema as a social phenomenon. Equally, when Larkin explains, ‘Piracy is non-ideological in that it does not represent a self-conscious political opposition to capitalism’,25 so too is piracy stripped of the ideology of the peer-to-peer network, disseminating film transfers — for profit — that in many cases were first pirated before the invention of the internet, and before the advent of digital. Globalization and its media vessels promise velocity, spread and high resolution, yet have remained restricted in their legitimate forms to high-income regions. With no low-cost models for digital distribution

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that aim to provide access for developing and emerging economies, the importance of local ownership has become paramount. Just as the issues of pricing and access are absent from discussions about media piracy, so too are ‘poor images’ ignored by material-film connoisseurs who institutionalize in the archive an illusion of pristine visuality.

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1. Hito Steyerl, ‘In Defense of the Poor Image’, e-flux journal, no. 10 (November 2009), http://www.e-flux. com/journal/in-defense-of-the-poor-image/ (accessed 8 February 2014). 2. For a more sustained discussion of this issue see: Jacquelyn Chi, ‘Report 4: Film Policy — Pakistan’, Culture and Communication Consulting, http:// www.southasiacommunication.wordpress. com/report-4-film-policy-pakistan/ (accessed 8 February 2014). 3. My original interest in the topic was based around the exuberant and sexualized films of the late 1960s and early 1970s (the golden age of Lollywood film production). Approaching Pakistani cinema from a purely thematic point of view, I envisioned exploring this liminal space between two partitions; following the creation of Pakistan in 1947 and the Bangladesh Liberation War of 1971, which led to the loss of East Pakistan. 4. See: Vashuda Dalmia, The Nationalization of Hindu Traditions: Bharatendu Harischandra and NineteenthCentury Banaras (Mumbai: Oxford University Press, 1997). 5. B.V. Dharap cites the reasons for the late establishment of an archive in India as a product of the attitude held up by the disinterested foreign occupying force, who did not wish to preserve national creative works, as well as what the author describes as ‘traditional apathy towards preservation or documentation’. B.V. Dharap, ‘National Film Archive of India’ in 70 Years of Indian Cinema (1913–1983), eds T.M Ramachandran and S. Rukmini (Bombay: Cinema India-International, 1985), 528. 6. Ibid., 530. 7. See: Guddu’s Film Archive, http://www.guddufilmarchive.blogspot.com/ (accessed 17 August 2014), the Citizens Archive of Pakistan (CAP) and The Motion Picture Archive of Pakistan, http://www.mpaop.org/ (accessed 17 August 2014). 8. Mostafa Rejai and Cynthia H. Enloe, ‘Nation-States and State-Nations’, International Studies Quarterly, Vol. 13, no. 2 (June 1969): 142. 9. Aijaz Gul, ‘Crisis In The Pakistani Film Industry’, CINEMAYA, no. 2 (Winter 1988–9): 43. 10. Brian Larkin, ‘Degraded Images, Distorted Sounds: Nigerian Video and the Infrastructure of Piracy’, Public Culture, Vol. 16, no. 2 (Spring 2004): 306. 11. Ibid., 296. 12. Laura U. Marks, Touch: Sensuous Theory and Multisensory Media (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2002), xii. 13. Saba Imtiaz, ‘A new form of films emerges’, The Express Tribune (Pakistan), 23 June 2010, http://www. tribune.com.pk/story/23001/a-new-form-of-filmsemerges/ (accessed 18 February 2014).

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14. With most VHS to VCD to .vob transfers of Pakistani cinema available on YouTube, the country’s national heritage is available more widely to members of the diaspora than those staying put. At the time of writing Pakistan continues to block YouTube, although due to the scant percentage of the popularity enjoying access to the internet, the unblocking of the site would most likely not dent pirate VCD sales. Indeed, pricing is a fundamental issue to the question of film piracy, with web access indicative of higher purchasing power than we are discussing here. The digital diaspora is a dense yet impotent body of consumers of national film heritage: ‘Over 20% of the DesiTorrents user base is in the United States and the United Kingdom. Fan-based subtitling communities have also played a role in the circumvention of slow — or sometimes nonexistent — exportation and localization of media products.’ Joe Karaganis, ‘Rethinking Piracy’ in Media Piracy in Emerging Economies, ed. Joe Karaganis (New York: Social Science Research Council, 2011), 48. 15. Ravi Sundaram, Pirate Modernity: Delhi’s Media Urbanism (New York: Routledge, 2010), 97. 16. Ibrahim’s mafia-like network is said to have been responsible for logistical planning in the execution of the 1993 and 2008 attacks in Mumbai. 17. Lawrence Liang and Ravi Sundaram, ‘India’ in Media Piracy in Emerging Economies, ed. Joe Karaganis (New York: Social Science Research Council, 2011), 380. 18. Joe Karaganis and Sean Flynn, ‘Networked Governance and the USTR’ in Film Piracy, Organized Crime, and Terrorism (Santa Monica: RAND Corporation, Social Science Research Council), 93–4. 19. Pad.ma, ‘10 Theses on the Archive’ (April 2010), https://www.pad.ma/texts/padma:10_Theses_on_the_ Archive/100/ (accessed 18 February 2014). 20. I use the term migration from the glossary section of Film Curatorship: Archives, Museums, and the Digital Marketplace, defining it as the act of ‘transferring data en masse onto a new system capable of carrying the same data, in a similar but not necessarily identical form’. Film Curatorship: Archives, Museums, and the Digital Marketplace, eds Paolo Cherchi Usai, David Francis, Alexander Horwath and Michael Loebenstein (Vienna: Synema Publikationen, 2008), 235. 21. Steyerl, op cit. 22. w, How Not to be Seen: A Fucking Didactic Educational .HACK File (2013), http://www.vimeo. com/70446674/ (accessed 6 July 2014). 23. Michel Foucault, ‘Nietzsche, Genealogy, History’ in The Foucault Reader, ed. Paul Rabinow (London: Penguin, 1984), 76. 24. Walter Benjamin, ‘Theses on the Philosophy of History’ in Illuminations (New York: Schocken Books, 1968), 256. 25. Larkin, op cit., 298.

Dissonant Archives: Contemporary Visual Culture and Contested Narratives in the Middle East

Locating the Archive The Search for ‘Nurafkan’ Mariam Motamedi Fraser

In 2009, by chance, I came upon an archive in the Bodleian Library in Oxford. It turned out that I was to be involved with this archive, in different ways, over a period of approximately four years. The archive is named after an unpublished manuscript, Nurafkan, which lies at its heart. Nurafkan, or Irradiant in translation, was written by Ali Mirdrakvandi during the 1940s, while Iran was occupied by British and American forces. It is conspicuous that Nurafkan — which runs to 15 volumes and is perhaps 500,000 words long — should be written in English, for Ali came from a nomadic family from Lorestan. Ali’s choice of language has raised suspicions in both Britain and Iran: what events must have unfolded for a book like this to be written? And what role, in particular, might the British have played in its creation? While the story of the manuscript is certainly compelling, it should not eclipse the story itself — Nurafkan is an epic not only in length but also in content and narrative, and it is crowded with lavish characters (including, for instance, the memorably named Western Bawl). As Ali himself put it in a letter to his sometime English teacher, Major John Hemming: I will not believe if millions of millions of peoples do say that my story is not a good book. Because I have read thousands and thousands of various books of Persian stories, of English stories, of Arabian stories, Turkish stories and American stories. No one of the stories was more interesting than my own story was.1 It is noteworthy too that John, who apparently only knew Ali briefly (during the 1940s), should try for nearly 50 years to ensure posthumous recognition of Ali’s life and work, and that it should be he who eventually bequeathed the original manuscript, which was in his possession at the time of his death, to the Bodleian Library in 1996. In 2003, Gholamreza Nematpour, a documentary filmmaker who lives in Khorramabad (Lorestan), ‘ran into’ a book called Famous People in Lorestan.

‘I remember very clearly what it said,’ he told me: ‘An illiterate labourer wrote a book in English which was praised in Europe and the West.’2 This brief and intriguing reference provided enough of an incentive for Gholamreza and Laleh Roozgard, his wife, to begin to investigate Ali’s biography in anticipation of making a film. During the course of this research, Gholamreza and Laleh became increasingly committed to making Ali’s stories — his life stories, as well as the stories he had written — as widely available as possible. These stories are folded into the histories of Reza Shah’s brutal policies of nomadic ‘sedentarization’ and ‘resettlement’, of the Trans-Iranian Railway and of hunger and devastation during the World War II. They speak of rural poverty, of lawyerly corruption, of inequality and addiction. However, Gholamreza and Laleh’s first task, as it turned out, would be to prove that Ali existed at all, and then, secondly, to prove that it was he (and not the British) who authored Nurafkan.3 In 2012, Gholamreza, Laleh and I met in Borujerd, where Ali is buried. The following year, Gholamreza finished his film, No Heaven for Gunga Din, and I finished a book, Yeki Nabud (One There Wasn’t), which is inspired by the Nurafkan archive.4 The title, Yeki Nabud, reflects my preoccupation with ‘wheres’ and ‘nowheres’, absences and presences, visibilities and invisibilities. Although these preoccupations are borne of my encounters with the stories that are told (and not told) in the Nurafkan archive, it strikes me now that they are also relevant to my experience of the archive, particularly since I met Gholamreza and Laleh. It is — in part — through my relationship with Gholamreza and Laleh that I have been prompted to ask after the location of the archive (where is it?) and to ask in what way it acquires visibility (how is its ‘see-ability’ achieved, and under what conditions?).5 It seems to me that the different ways these questions are answered will potentially transform the kind of object the archive is understood to be. In one sense, the answer to these questions is obvious. The Nurafkan archive has a physical presence, as one intuitively (and perhaps somewhat conventionally) imagines that most historical archives have. Indeed, it is precisely the physicality of documents and objects, the smell and feel of the ‘originals’, the sheer here-ness of what-once-happened — of holding ‘the past’ in one’s hands — that explains in part the fever that grips so many people who work with archival materials. By ‘archive fever’ I mean both the ‘homesickness’ that Jacques Derrida describes, the ‘nostalgic desire for the archive, an irrepressible desire to return to the origin’,6 as well as the physical sickness, which, as the historian Carolyn Steedman more prosaically points out, is caused by:  [T]he dust of the workers who made the papers and parchments; the dust of the animals who provided the skins for their leather bindings. […] [By] all the filthy trades that have, by circuitous routes, deposited their end products in the archives.7

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Silhouette of mobile phone and face in front of projector screen, Tahrir Cinema. Photograph by Cressida Trew.

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Ali Mirdrakvandi’s grave, Borujerd, 2012. Photograph courtesy of the author.

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Ali Mirdrakvandi’s grave, Borujerd, 2012. Photograph courtesy of the author.

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Gholamreza and Laleh would be able to experience the first of these fevers (and, as it happens, they did), but not the second. For, ‘[a]s you know,’ Gholamreza writes, ‘making a trip to England to gather information and to see Ali’s manuscript is impossible for me.’ A physical presence implies, by definition, a physical location. This physicality — the physicality of the archive — is one of the key themes of Alain Resnais’ short film Toute la Mémoire du Monde (1956), in which he draws attention to the archive as a formidable, indubitable, even foreboding presence.8 Shots from the air of the dome of the Bibliothèque Nationale — France’s national library and site of a substantive part of France’s national documentary heritage — show the archive to be ‘a fortress in the midst of both the city and the envisioned sea of history’.9 Resnais’ camera finds ‘locked doors, books behind bars and shelving staff that look like guards’.10 Toute la Mémoire du Monde conveys, in short, as the multimedia artist Uriel Orlow describes, a ‘visual vocabulary of the archive as prison’.11 And certainly, just as ‘words are imprisoned in the Bibliothèque Nationale’, so they are imprisoned in the Bodleian Library in Oxford.12 It is the physical location of the Nurafkan archive that renders it inaccessible and invisible, for all intents and purposes, to Gholamreza and Laleh. The Nurafkan archive is ‘arrested’, as Derrida puts it, by more than the boundaries or borders that mark the edge of its physical territory (the boundaries of the library building, of the Special Collections’ temporary reading rooms, of the acid-free boxes in which the documents are stored and protected).13 Although the arched silence and muted light of the Bodleian interior encourages its readers to think of the library as a ‘smooth’ and uninterrupted environment, this space is in fact roughened by many different kinds of barriers. To take just one example: the Bodleian Library requires payment for scanned materials (for costs, for permissions and for copyright where this is relevant). However, the current deathly embargo on Iran means that Gholamreza and Laleh do not have access to international credit cards, and are not, therefore, in a position to pay for the reproduction of archival — or indeed any other — documents.14 This is especially frustrating for them, since the archival documents are indispensible to ‘proving’ the contested authorship of Nurafkan. Thus it was that I became, for a while, something of an archival ‘mule’ — crossing and recrossing the borders between the Bodleian Library in Oxford and Gholamreza and Laleh in Lorestan. The physical component of this task (visiting Oxford and marking up documents for the library to copy) was just one small part of it. I also crossed linguistic borders (translating some of the Bodleian’s more esoterically worded policies into a more recognizable English), economic borders (I used my credit cards to pay for scanned documents) and political borders (I used my email address to receive the images).15 These procedures — visiting, selecting, requesting, paying and receiving — are routine, even banal. Yet they are the means through which the Nurafkan archive is made visible to me, but not to Gholamreza and Laleh. The Locating the Archive

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space of the Bodleian Library is heterogeneous and complex: it is creased on the ‘inside’ by borders that appear, at least initially, to be on the ‘outside’. Paying attention to these borders, accounting for and reacting to them, engaging in the ‘multifarious battles and negotiations’ that they compel, is part of what Sandro Mezzadra and Brett Neilson describe as ‘border as method’.16 The border, for them, is a way of doing research. For us, the research process itself was bordered, and much of our energy was dedicated to managing the practices of ‘border reinforcing’ that shaped how we, as researchers, were differentially included (me) or excluded (Gholamreza and Laleh) from access to archival resources.17 Although the spatial location of the archive defines, in some way, the scope of the archive’s visibility, it does not entirely determine it. The commitment and achievements of Gholamreza and Laleh have ensured that at least some part of the manuscript is ‘in’ Iran. As it turns out, this has not in itself resolved the problem of the archive’s ‘see-ability’. On the contrary, Gholamreza tells me that the archival images can only be ‘introduced cautiously’. The very fact that the scanned pages of the manuscript, written by a ‘famous person of Lorestan’ (as the title of a book that Gholamreza chanced upon described the author of Nurafkan), cannot be enjoyed locally suggests that the visibility/ invisibility of Nurafkan cannot be accounted for solely with reference to its physical presence in Britain, or by its absence in Iran. It is for this reason that I am prompted to turn to the relations between these two nations in order to look for an alternative explanation. ––– One version of the genesis of Nurafkan, and of the relations between Ali Mirdrakvandi and John Hemming, goes like this: John and Ali met while John was serving as a Pioneer Labour control officer for the British forces in occupied Iran during the World War II.18 Ali applied to John for work, and at the same time asked John to help him improve his English. John encouraged Ali to write stories, and so began Nurafkan. While working in the American officers’ mess in Tehran, Ali also wrote a short fable called No Heaven for Gunga Din: Consisting of the British and American Officers’ Book. Although John managed to get No Heaven published by Victor Gollancz in 1965, he had no similar success with Nurafkan.19 In one of his accounts of Nurafkan, the late Robert Zaehner, professor of eastern religions and ethics at Oxford University, explains that it was quite common, following the withdrawal of the British and American armies from Iran at the end of the World War II, for remaining British and American personnel to take on staff who had been left without work. Zaehner himself was in Iran at that time, ‘and although I did not really have any employment to offer, so remarkable was he [Ali] that I took him on as an extra houseboy’.20 Zaehner

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Silhouette of mobile phone and face in front of projector screen, Tahrir Cinema. Photograph by Cressida Trew.

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Cover of Nurafkan, Volume 3, by Ali Mirdrakvandi. Owned by the Bodleian Libraries, Oxford. MS. Ind. Inst. Misc. 35/1 (3). Photograph courtesy of the author.

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claims that Ali sometimes spoke of a story that he was writing during this period of employment and, on occasion, consulted Zaehner about it. It was on the basis of these discussions that Zaehner surmised that the story was folkloric, and perhaps of Zoroastrian origins. After six weeks, Ali Midrakvandi ‘disappeared, taking the unfinished manuscript with him’, and Zaehner did not hear of either him or the story again until he was contacted, in his capacity as a scholar of eastern religions, by John Hemming in 1963.21 On reading both the manuscripts, Zaehner appears to have used his contacts to help John to find a publisher for No Heaven, and to have written several academic papers on Nurafkan, which he believed paralleled and illuminated the Zoroastrian cosmogony of Bundahishn.22 During his next trip to Iran, Zaehner delivered two lectures on Nurafkan to the British Institute of Persian Studies in Tehran, and at the same time initiated a search for Ali. Although this search gave rise to some considerable press coverage, Ali was not to be found. The story of Ali, and of his relations with the British, continues to resonate in the present. For example, when I ask Gholamreza and Laleh how Ali is remembered in Borujerd (Lorestan), they tell me that their plans for an annual award for young writers — which they had intended to give in Ali’s name — cannot go ahead on account of the government’s suspicions that the ‘real’ author of No Heaven for Gunga Din was either John Hemming or Robert Zaehner. Suspicions like these appear to have endured since at least the 1970s, when Professor A.D.H. Bivar, another British academic with an interest in both Ali Mirdrakvandi and Robert Zaehner, picked up the story. ‘I often heard the opinion expressed [by Persian literary scholars],’ Bivar wrote, ‘that no such person as Mirdrakvandi ever existed, and that writings allegedly his were the compositions of Zaehner or Hemming, concocted by British officials for propaganda reasons! Several readers in the UK, impressed by a well-known hoax in Persian studies, even speculated that the story of Mirdrakvandi was similarly an elaborate hoax.’23 The enduring potency of these stories suggests that, while the ‘unsee-ability’ of the Nurafkan archive in Lorestan is most obviously due to its physical location in Oxford, it is more fundamentally explained by its ‘location’ in the relations of suspicion and rumour that so often connect Iran and Britain. While this suggestion displaces — perhaps problematically — the significance of the archive in space, it foregrounds its location in time. For it is in time, or rather with time, that the power of rumour lies. Rumour, Veena Das argues, has the power ‘to actualize certain regions of the past and create a sense of continuity between events that might otherwise seem unconnected’.24 It does this by animating what Das calls ‘unfinished stories’, and by bringing them to life in the present. Importantly — and this is as true of the relations between Iran and Britain as it is of the relations between Sikhs and Hindus that Das discusses — rumour does not ‘make […] grievous events out of nothing’.25 It is

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not language that creates scenes of devastating violence; instead, rumours are enmeshed in histories of conflict.26 In Iran, such histories of conflict are often tied up with foreign powers. Indeed, the view that alien influences, nofouz-e biganeh, or foreign dangers, khatar-e kharajeh, or foreign hands, ummal-e kharajeh, are lurking behind the curtain, posht-e pardeh, or behind the scenes, posht-e sahneh, is a common one.27 And why should it be otherwise, given the country’s long experience of imperial interference by Russia, Britain and the USA? In all this long experience, it is perhaps the 1953 coup against Mohammad Mossadegh, following Mossadegh’s attempts to nationalize Iranian oil, which stands out as the most abominable of the foreign powers’ offences. No matter how distant in chronological time, the events of 1953 remain painfully alive in the present. It was to that unfinished story, for instance, that a relatively unknown mollah, Ali Khamenei, referred on the fourteenth anniversary of Mohammad Mossadegh’s death in 1981, just two years after the Iranian Revolution. Khamenei — today the leader of the Islamic Republic of Iran — furnished the story with a triumphant ending, which also doubled as a warning: ‘We are not liberals like Allende and Musaddiq,’ he exhorted, ‘to be snuffed out by the CIA.’28 Earlier, I used the concept of ‘border as method’ to draw attention to the sinuous complexity of space, and to the processes by which space is differentially ‘filtered’. The concept of rumour can be similarly deployed to illuminate the complexity of time — not of time laid out, in a smooth straight line, but rather of time as rucked up and creasing. ‘In the folding and refolding dough of history, Steven Connor writes, ‘what matters is not the spreading out of points in time along a temporal continuum, but the contractions and attenuations that […] bring distant points in proximity with each other’.29 Connor is describing Michel Serres’ topological conception of history in which time is likened to ‘a crumpled handkerchief, in which apparently widely separated points may be drawn together into adjacency’.30 This, as I have noted, is how rumour operates — not by establishing relations of cause and effect, but by mobilizing chains of connections.31 Rumour, one might argue, is one of the techniques by which time is folded in upon itself, by which it is gathered and regathered and released — often with violent consequences. When rumour sets to work, atrocities of the past often end up lending ‘veracity’ to what is heard and said in the present. Gholamreza, Laleh and I, amongst others, consider Ali Mirdrakvandi to be the author of Nurafkan and No Heaven. Yet the images of Ali’s manuscript, as I have already noted, are often prohibited because, Gholamreza tells me, while the Iranian authorities believe that Ali existed, they are also convinced ‘that they [the British and the Americans] used him for their own special purposes’. Ali could have been a spy, without his even being aware of it. Such routine distrust has repercussions. It can make it hard to build relationships — in politics, in friendship. It justifies censorship. It can have tragic consequences: ‘One does Locating the Archive

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Interior of Indian Institute, Oxford. © Nick Cistone. Photograph courtesy of Nick Cistone.

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The old Special Collections Reading Room, Oxford. © Nick Cistone. Photograph courtesy of Nick Cistone.

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Silhouette of mobile phone and face in front of projector screen, Tahrir Cinema. Photograph by Cressida Trew.

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Radcliffe Camera. © Nick Cistone. Photograph courtesy of Nick Cistone.

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not compromise and negotiate with spies and traitors,’ Ervand Abrahamian writes, ‘one locks them up or else shoots them.’32 Abrahamian’s broader point is that, while the coup against Mossadegh had many severe implications for Iran’s relations with America and Britain, it also had implications within Iran. It contributed, for example, to what Abrahamian, following Richard Hofstadter, calls ‘the paranoid style in Iranian politics’, a style that includes ‘the conviction that only force could forestall repetition of 1953’.33 In the end, is it surprising that it is easier to imagine a world in which the constraints that prevent Gholamreza and Laleh from visiting the archive in Oxford are lifted, than it is to imagine that the relations between Iran and Britain could be different? ‘[S]tructures of feeling,’ as Ann Stoler puts it, are nearly always joined to, if not inseparable from, ‘fields of force […] of a longer durée.’34 Doubt, mistrust and suspicion are ‘politicized cognitions’, shaped by experiences of acts of hostility and aggression. Who, after all, was Robert Zaehner? A giggly, gin-drinking Oxford professor. But Robin Zaehner (as he was also more commonly called) was a central figure in the British strategy to overthrow the democratically elected prime minister, Mohammad Mossadegh. As a press attaché in Tehran during the mid-1940s, which was the period of Ali’s employment, Zaehner successfully cultivated an extensive set of networks that cut across the court, the bazaar, the press and the majles (the Iranian parliament). Robin Zaehner knew all the important people, and other people too. Which is why, in the early 1950s, he was despatched back to Iran by MI6 to exploit his connections and to help to execute a planned coup d’état. Rumour was chief amongst his venal resources. Where is the archive? I have located the Nurafkan archive multiply, and understood it to be differently constituted in each case: as a physical object, as border activity, as sets of relations that stretch and squeeze different times and spaces, histories and nations. Yet, it is with regard to the archive’s ‘location’ in the temporality of rumour, suspicion and paranoia that I feel the most despair. For if it is here that the Nurafkan archive is most firmly situated, then its ‘visibility’ seemingly impossibly requires that time itself be unstitched and refolded.

Acknowledgments My deepest thanks to Haedeh Mortazavi, who helped make possible so much of the work that I describe in this article. Thanks also to Masserat Amir-Ebrahimi, and especially to Gholamreza Nematpour and Laleh Roozgard for their help and support. All the views expressed here, and any errors, are entirely my own. My thanks to Gillian Grant (Oriental archivist) and Nick Cistone (photographer) at the Bodleian Libraries, Oxford, for their enormous generosity with their time and images.

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1. Undated letter from Ali Mirdrakvandi to Major John Hemming, probably written between 1947 and 1949 (Collection of the Bodleian Libraries, University of Oxford, MS Ind. Inst. Misc. 42).

17. It is worth noting that staff members at the Bodleian Library were themselves uncomfortable with these distinctions, and that I was often thanked for acting as Gholamreza’s proxy.

2. This and all subsequent references to Gholamreza Nematpour’s account of Nurafkan are cited, with his permission, from our personal correspondence.

18. This version is largely drawn from: A.D.H. Bivar, ‘Reassessing Mirdrakvandi: Mithraic echoes in the 20th Century’ in Proceedings of the Third European Conference of Iranian Studies, ed. Nicholas SimsWilliams (Weisbaden: Dr Ludwig Reichert Verlag, 1998).

3. For readers interested in Gholamreza Nematpour and Laleh Roozgard’s research on Ali Mirdrakvandi and Nurafkan in Iran, they can be contacted at: [email protected]. 4. No Heaven for Gunga Din (Baraye Gunga Din Behesht Neest), dir. Gholamreza Nematpour (Iran: Lorestan’s H.O.C.I.G., 2012). 5. I am following Gilles Deleuze here, who argues that ‘[v]isibilities are not to be confused with elements that are visible or more generally perceptible, such as qualities, things, objects, compounds of objects’ (Gilles Deleuze, Foucault (London and New York: Continuum, 1999), 45). Instead, visibilities are ‘first and foremost forms of light that distribute light and dark, opaque and transparent, seen and non-seen, etc.’ (49). Visibilities organize, in other words, what it is possible to see or not see, including the subject, ‘who is himself [sic] a place within visibility’ (49). See Mieke Bal for a discussion of the practical, methodological and disciplinary/ interdisciplinary implications of this conception of visibility, in which the organization of seeing precedes the visuality of the object: Mieke Bal, ‘Visual Essentialism and the Object of Visual Culture’, Journal of Visual Culture, Vol. 2, no. 1 (April 2003): 5–32.

19. Ali Mirkdrakvandi, No Heaven for Gunga Din: Consisting of the British and American Officers’ Book (London: Gollancz, 1965). 20. Robert C. Zaehner, ‘Zoroastrian Survivals in Iranian Folklore’, Iran: Journal of the British Institute of Persian Studies, Vol. III (1965): 88. 21. Ibid.: 89. 22. Zaehner’s interest in Nurafkan — which Hemming (rightly in my view) exploited — probably goes some way to explain how the manuscript came to be considered for inclusion in the Bodleian archives at all. 23. Bivar, op cit., 61. 24. Veena Das, Life and Words: Violence and the Descent into the Ordinary (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006), 108. 25. Ibid., 209. 26. Ibid.

6. Jacques Derrida, Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression, trans. E. Prenowitz (Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 1998), 91.

27. Ervand Abrahamian, Khomeinism: Essays on the Islamic Republic of Iran (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993), 111.

7. Carolyn Steedman, Dust (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2001), 27.

28. Ervand Abrahamian, ‘The 1953 Coup in Iran’, Science and Society, Vol. 65, no. 2 (2001): 214.

8. Toute la Mémoire du Monde, dir. Alain Resnais (France: Films de la Pleiade, 1956).

29. Steven Connor, ‘Topologies: Michel Serres and the Shapes of Thought’ in Cultural Theory: Economy, Technology and Knowledge, Vol. 4, ed. D. Oswell (London: SAGE Publications Ltd, 2010), 404.

9. Uriel Orlow, ‘Latent Archives, Roving Lens’ in Ghosting: The Role of the Archive within Contemporary Artists’ Film and Video, eds J. Connarty and J. Lanyon (Bristol: Picture This Moving Image, 2006), 37. 10. Ibid. 11. Ibid. 12. Ibid. 13. Derrida, op cit., 2. 14. This also serves to restrict their access to other archives, including, and especially, newspaper archives. 15. All of which suggests that the ‘solution’ to cracking open borders is not always or solely digital.

30. Ibid., 402. 31. Das, op cit., 108. 32. Abrahamian Khomeinism, op cit., 131. 33. Abrahamian is careful to distinguish between a paranoid style and mode of expression in Iranian politics, and a national clinical psychological disorder. See: Abrahamian ‘The 1953 Coup in Iran’, op cit.: 213. 34. Ann L. Stoler, Along the Archival Grain: Epistemic Anxieties and Colonial Common Sense (Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2009), 252.

16. Sandro Mezzadra and Brett Neilson, ‘Border as Method, or, the Multiplication of Labor’, transversal (March 2008), http://www.eipcp.net/transversal/0608/ mezzadraneilson/en/ (accessed 11 July 2014).

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The Spectre (of Knowledge) The Recordings of the Cosmopolitan Shaheen Merali

Introduction Recently, a couple of friends commented on the use of titles in my essays, which they felt remained specific, if not distinct. I thanked them for their observation. Titles are similar to book covers — like portals that lead to and reveal the destination. A good title is like a short précis, suggesting the subject matter and, more importantly, its emphasis. Titles remain creatively significant as they help foreshorten the vast territory of an essay or a work of fiction. Like a poetic sketch, a good title can create the necessary liminal space whereon and wherein one starts to explain ideas, concepts and notions that remain implicit in the text. It took a long time to arrive at the particular choice of words for the title of this essay, ‘The Spectre (of Knowledge)’, as it needed to aspire both to the artistic as well as the informative objective of the text. In thinking about the title, I wondered how to give the listener and the reader a lyrical, as well as speculative, introduction to the importance of the topic. In contemplation, one word kept recurring: the spectre. Initially, the word suggested that which appears and can easily be forgotten, or that which appears and remains with us for a longer while but does not necessarily remain visible. It was this notion of the spectre that led me to start thinking about the archive as a post-event, a return — but in a different guise  — and, in certain cases, as a masquerade (a false show, or pretence). When I started to apply the notion of the spectre to the subject of this essay, it suggested two simultaneous readings: the first was of a roaming spirit — of a visible but disembodied entity (which is the state of the archive’s discourse) — a motif that would provide a final resting place for my research, which is the sum of many parts. The second, with its distinguishing as well poetic connotations, is of something that haunts or disturbs our mind, like a ghost. It is about a supernatural relationship to the past. Here, I am suggesting

how tricks of the mind and memories play a specific role in revisiting that which was once real and now remains with us internally and somewhat intransigently. The archive, it seems, has many possibilities and many permeable points of entry, from its resoundingly scientific definition, imbued with a sense of objectivity, to what remains of the subjective elements of the archive, which facilitate a shifting relationship to its contents. On thinking further on these ideas, the archive does suggest a rescue from abandonment, which resonates well with a literal interpretation of the haunted place. Strangely, archives are haunted places — haunted by material that resonates and vibrates with a past that had been occupied — for archives, like good horror films, manage to make us feel disturbed and unsettled. One such example of a haunting archive could well be the Ringelblum Archives in Warsaw, which is listed in UNESCO’s Memory of the World register as a heritage monument. Housed in the Jewish Historical Institute, it is a unique collection of documents that are one of the world’s most significant testimonies about the extermination of Polish Jewry. As the story goes, most of the archive’s creators, including its initiator Emanuel Ringelblum, did not live to see the end of the World War II, but those who survived made the effort to find the three separate archives which were buried in and around the walls of the Warsaw Ghetto. The first part of the archive was unearthed in September 1946, whilst the second part was discovered by chance in December 1950. The third part of the archive, reputedly hidden on 19 April 1943 (the night before the outbreak of the uprising in the ghetto) near a former brush-making workshop at 34 Świętojerska Street (today the grounds of the Chinese Embassy), remains undiscovered. Yet, its memory, indeed its absence, lingers like a ghost. The second part of this essay’s title, ‘(of Knowledge)’, puts forth the idea of a spectre bound — one that is held together by knowledge, which, to a large extent, is what we have to arrive at when it comes to the archive and how we relate to it. But what constitutes knowledge and whose knowledge are we foregrounding? Why is something considered knowledge and, most importantly, how, in times that have become both culturally hardened and information-based, does a specific archive remain accessible in the mess we have created with the flow of rapid information that permeates our networks? When it comes to dealing with the assemblage of information at our grasp, we must be selective, and yet also remain open, especially when it comes to how and why archives are made accessible to the public. But in this quagmire of information, why should any type of emphasis — and a great deal of energy — be made to opening the archive to the public? These questions, of course, cannot be answered easily, nor can they be answered in any one session, let alone in a brief rumination such as this. These questions touch on seminal aspects of any archive, especially those that have tough traditional policies and remain on a permanent quest for resources. These are very long-term and expensive undertakings. Also, the initiation of any The Spectre (of Knowledge)

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The marked line of the Ghetto Wall, Warsaw. Image courtesy of the author.

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The Chinese Embassy on 34 Swi~tojerska Street, the alleged site near to where the third part of the Ringelblum Archive is located. Image courtesy of the author.

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dialogue towards the formation of an archive, which normally entails access for the public, has immense repercussions, including major political ramifications caused by the issue of monetary management, as well as the necessity for a defined contingency plan required for an archive’s survival in perpetuity. Again, we have to be careful here, as traditional archives were born out of fame and fortune and from the grandees and the acknowledged who redeemed the greater public by providing access to their life’s accumulations. Today, the traditional place of the archive has remained within the institutional framework of study and research — which itself has changed in the late twentieth century. Yet now, both the notions of study and research have become much more expansive and virtual. With the proliferation of images, there has been a quantifiable rise in image-based archives, which have fulfilled a desire that has arisen from the increased pace at which our accelerated urbanizing societies want to view themselves in what can only be described as narcissistic abundance. In these times of smart and nano technologies, the historic models for the constant management of the archive — which focus on conservation and limited access while viewing the archive as a time capsule — have been superseded by twenty-first century requests of nanosecond appeasement and attention. These instant facilities are are indeed in high demand today. These instant combinations of information and misinformation constitute a knowledge pool, often gathered using lens-based digital media, which do not guarantee any agreed or agreeable perspective or standard that pertains to the proper use of information or images. Here, key questions of knowledge — knowledge as a form and a structure to expropriate, and, more dangerously, types of knowledge that are often unconstructed or unverifiable — impact on investigations or explorations based on ethical standards and histories of inquiry-based journalism or investigative reporting. In a recent lecture to a group from the black community in North London, the sociologist Paul Gilroy addressed the issue of reportage in their vicinity, which was also the epicentre of the 2012 summer riots in the UK. In his talk, Gilroy suggested the idea of the media coalescing around a ‘Golden Hour’, the hour that follows any act that is to be reported by a conglomerate of 24-hour news agencies, a volume of gathered ‘facts’, a hasty culmination of agreed positions on what has just happened, pooling to create a newsworthy narrative. In the case of Tottenham in North London, there was widespread agreement by the press corps about a lone black man with a gun, Mark Duggan, who supposedly fired two rounds at an arresting policeman, who returned fire and killed him. This became, within the first hour — the ‘Golden Hour’ — the main issue reported, after his family were rebuked at the neighbourhood police station for requesting any further explanation of his death. The family’s and the community’s frustration was reported, but the lingering story of

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his shooting, which eventually turned out to be a case of the shooting of an innocent black male in London, was proven to be untrue. Yet, if one looked at the television coverage as archival material, at what was reported every few minutes — blaming the civilian uprising, the spark of the riot, the grand narrative that the media sensibly organized for its public of the ensuing few days of riots all over Britain — it was based on an unproven but also false narrative of the shooting. It took more than a week of heavy coverage to unravel the real facts of his murder by two policemen — but what remains for the archive is the instant reportage and not the real facts. Returning to Gilroy’s notion of ‘The Golden Hour’, the twenty-first century’s instant archive creates a karmic footprint for its audience. If, once upon a time, the archive was a set of archived documentation allowing for a factual base of images, thinking, life histories and a management of records within a particular bias, it was still an organized genealogy, a record that could be used to create an interface between preserved information. What happened recently in Britain identifies the notion of an archive as institutions falling into disarray, the urgency with which facts are collected and the rush for dissemination often imparts the unknown or evolving as the factual and in a sense creates instant chaos. Who is responsible for condemning the misinformation generated in the heat of the moment and in the style of news media, which is to feed the public what it can, as fast as possible, in an unsubstantiated manner? And in the case of Tottenham, what was gained in this fiery momentum produced by one narrative of a battle between race and institutional force? How can the reversal of fortune that all parties suffered be recorrected? To end this account of Gilroy’s talk, it took many intellectuals, and many more articulations from the angry margins, to open the debate on this lone, focused narrative of a shooting incident and go beyond this spectral reading of the event so as to allow a much less biased understanding of the riotous reaction that took place on the streets of Britain in 2012. In a world getting used to fast, often pernicious headlines, it is understandable that a lone gunman is a much easier narrative to comprehend than the actual states of alienation and mass unemployment that remained the real basis of the ensuing riot and mayhem. In conclusion, it brings to our attention the culture of fear or blame as it enters with ease into our potentially universal archives. How can we be aware of society’s diverse and perpetually changing perspectives? Somehow, we have to remain the guardians of society’s very narratives — alert to the editorial work undertaken by mass media under stress while feeding the insatiable appetite of a ravenous public, encased, as it has been shown, by certain kinds of bias? Of course, for another example of ‘The Golden Hour’ syndrome, one can study the mysterious killing of Osama bin Laden in Abbottabad. Similar misinformation surrounded his death, with initial reports portraying Bin Laden hiding behind his wife and involved in other acts of cowardice, before his body was unceremoniously dumped into the Indian Ocean. These ‘Golden Hours’ The Spectre (of Knowledge)

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Installation shot of the temporary exhibition, Polish art and the Holocaust, 2013, which includes photographs and filmed records of the Warsaw Ghetto recovered by Emanuel Ringelblum and most of the Archive’s creators who did not live to see the end of the war. Image courtesy of the author.

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Installation shots of the temporary exhibition, Polish art and the Holocaust, 2013, which includes photographs and filmed records of the Warsaw Ghetto recovered by Emanuel Ringelblum and most of the Archive’s creators who did not live to see the end of the war. Image courtesy of the author.

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have become mini-archives that fold into the larger archives of history — a sordid ground on which to search for untainted facts amidst the quagmire — which raises further questions in terms of how we collate and what data is collated, not to mention how we represent facts back to the public. In an era of mass media, messy reporting and grandiose narratives that are constantly recontextualized for their emotive, misleading context, how we deal with the real-time and predominately digital unfolding of archives that will inevitably narrate the contemporary moment also has vast repercussions for the training of archivists. At once historians, they must also consider how their approaches might benefit future researchers, students and interested communities. In an age of ‘Golden Hours’ on prime-time TV — from cable and satellite to internet TV — when the average North American is spending more than five hours daily in front of the television (which is not only portable but also weatherproof and soon to be 3D), home theatres and interactive games — not to mention the countless recent ways to log in and drop out using live streaming, online reporting, blogs, twitter and voracious social networks — the plural and multitude approach to a globalized reality is already a technical actuality. Predominantly still in the first and second worlds, this availability has determined an appetite for the range of ideas, as well as the formations of ‘alien’ identifications, that infer a surge in the desire to be within and part of as many termini (cybernetic destination as the consumption of difference and part of a lifestyle). Herein, identity can be construed or partially constructed as of great importance and, simultaneously, the least significant, for we are propagating a culture — or cultural values — that have been described as ‘lite’, as in: a bonsai culture with roots and branches trimmed to further tame and attain a full likeness of form and coherence, but which remains a manicured and dwarfed spatiality.1 Writers and artists alike influence this understanding in their work, often through their interpositions and by weaving narratives that both acknowledge the traditional virtues of love, kindness, justice and service — virtues that have seemingly given us the very meaning and purpose of our lives — while also acknowledging the fictional realities that are developing as a candid difference, replacing the virtuous with virtuality at a rate unknown in human history. This change in integrity is wholly based on the pressures exerted by the profusion and profuse use of online archives, which have far superseded ‘actual’ material archives, and here we need to reconsider the notion of time in a rapidly exploding mass culture in a domestic space, which was initially tied to the process of industrialization. Here, it might be useful to recount one of the main ideas that made Walter Benjamin so important for his time and ours: the idea of the montage. And herein lies the biggest asset and secret of the archive. It is, by its nature, a random collation — an experience of distance and proximity, balance and inertia: a montage of experiences, sources, situations, posits and an environment of

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inertia, since within the archive much is at rest, apart from the restless minds that seek knowledge from it. Benjamin’s queries were always about ‘the heightened presence of the mind’ — and, in his search for this state, he talked about the ‘regard, i.e., to montage the ability to capture the infinite, sudden or subterranean connections of dissimilars as a major constitutive principle of the artistic imagination in the age of technology’.2 If archives are the watersheds of human experience, draining from various sources, draining from specific sources, a system of thinking or knowledge represented, then the notion of multiplicity — a greater regard for diverse possibilities and probabilities in pursuit of and accounting for a globalized, cosmopolitan world — is surely one of its greatest assets. The formation of such assets is surely the way the world is in a montage, compulsively undermining the miscellaneous rather than the historical franchise of the famed, the wealthy, the landed or the over-represented — the archive’s traditional keepers.

A Fundament — Access Today, both artists and archives provide an interesting pairing in terms of examining both the recent and historical past — a relationship that navigates and contributes to an understanding of the global upheaval and crisis in values, models and infrastructures. Is it possible then, that, by intervening in the institution of the archive, the artist may turn our attention to other directions, even outside the Eurocentric zone?3  It is with this question in mind that I would like to consider how artists find themselves within the contemporary context of the constellation of information, documentation and data. Indeed, in their active, creative lives, artists often open doors within and between things; they describe the nameless and the named in what could be seen as an activity or endeavour dedicated to a poetic nurturing of a conversation between the known, the visible and the inferred. The poet Pablo Neruda describes this constant conversation as such: I don’t know of how and when, no, they were not voices, they were not words, nor silences4 It is an apt description of an artistic deciphering of faint lines and questionable facts. The artist’s circumstances of thinking, making and unfolding present methods to mediate the world and express in some way its unfolding narratives: its emerging historical archives. This is finely described by Bertolt Brecht as ‘an attempt to make gestures quotable’; to perform a task within The Spectre (of Knowledge)

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the varied and intemperate languages available to us; of estimating principles and presenting convictions from worldly motions while attempting innovations from within (the interior).5 The artist, the poet, the musician or the actor are all masters of composing forms from new and found situations; of producing archives of their own, that express or communicate a certain story. Previously, I mentioned the idea of a roaming spirit, of a visible but disembodied entity, in terms of thinking about the notion of the archive. If we are to convey this idea to artistic expression, where it is often described as a journey from a point of inspiration to a point of articulation, what emerges is a relationship between the artistic state and the state of the archive. Both artistic production and archives are based on a discourse — a word that in its Latin root, discursus, implies ‘running to and from’ — an allowance for research to be made comprehensive. Ultimately, it could be argued that this is the desire of an artist or an archive: to create a discursive formation wherein the analysis of a large body of knowledge based on research finds a final resting place in its assumed form and the consequent ability to communicate its form while receiving feedback. For an artist, the work remains incomplete without the audience while for an archive, the sum of many parts that constitutes it can only be made comprehensible through a public’s relation to its subjects and objects. Artists’ studios, similar to an archive, remain a fertile ground within which the world is silently mediated. This process of mediation allows the distinguishing and poetic connotations to emerge. What is at stake is how human knowledge can keep on haunting us or disturbing our mindset. This can posit new interpretations, make facts further known, alter positions and, by the nature of transient knowledge, address our thinking and actions, leading us to develop expanded relationships with our past while moving, potentially, towards a more inclusive future.

The Recordings of the Cosmopolitan Consider Foucault’s description of the museum as an expression of: [T]he idea of accumulating everything, of establishing a sort of general archive, the will to enclose in one place all times, all epochs, all forms, all tastes, the idea of constituting a place of all times that is itself outside of time and inaccessible to its ravages, the project of organizing in this way a sort of perpetual and indefinite accumulation of time in an immobile place.6 This sounds very much like the idea architect and critic Adolf Loos proposed in his 1910 essay ‘Architektur’, whereby he distinguished between buildings

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that are for everyday/practical use and buildings made for contemplation. The latter type, he asserts, may be considered as both architecture and works of art.7 He refers to only two types of contemplative architecture, namely the tomb and the monument; a suggestion perhaps that buildings need not be completely assimilated by the daily, practical and functional needs of an inhabitant.8 I would hasten to add to Loos’ list the archive, for it tends to be, as a construct, part-monument, part-tomb and part-historical. Or, as Benjamin calls it, a Konstruktion, ‘which is not located in empty time but is constituted in a specific epoch, in a specific life, in a specific work’.9 Foucault and Benjamin differ greatly in how they contemplate time in regard to the collection or the museum. Foucault’s notion is attractive, for it suggests an indefinite accumulation of time whilst Benjamin’s concern remains somewhat academic, in that the location of materials is to be valued within its time. The specificity of Benjamin reading materials within their own epoch and their perpetual and indefinite accumulation as suggested by Foucault produce differing results of mediation in the sanctuary of an archive preserving the dispersal of its comprehension. It might be interesting here to cite a more cynical model provided by Guy Debord, in his series of 221 short theses called The Society of the Spectacle.10 In this, Debord binds time to society in total consumption; time as an invention that creates false cycles but, in reality, remains the same.11 For Debord, time that is broken outside the agrarian cycles and made to feel ‘irreversible’ is a disguise. In this last model therefore, time is a construct tied to an economic paradigm of new products and services including seasonal vacations and seasons dedicated to fashion, food and parties. Here, for instance, work, shopping and play render ‘time as a commodity, disguised as a pseudo-cyclical time made of homogenous and exchangeable units’.12 Through all the above, one thought remains constant in my mind, and that is Benjamin’s use of the idea of montage, a model of discordance, with many unanswered questions; it provides, in this age of multiplicities and globalization, a necessary attitude and an alignment for our intellect with a plurality of identities and subjectivities. In turn, when thinking about the archive, we need to evaluate time and its place in our heritage, our memory and our resources so as to position ourselves alongside the many contrasting concepts in these uneven and shape-shifting times: to cultivate concise thinking and communication in this context is an absolute necessity.

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1. Spatiality combines all conditions and practices of individual and social life that are linked to the relative position of individuals and groups with regard to one another. One fundamental postulate of geography is that those relative positions (or geographical situations) determine, probably or partly, the intensity of social interactions. 2. Stanley Mitchell, introduction to: Walter Benjamin, Understanding Brecht (London: Verso, 1998), xiii. 3. Unpublished letter of invitation to the author from the advisors of the conference: ‘Regional vis-à-vis Global Art Discourses: Contemporary Art from the Middle East’ (London: SOAS, University of London, 5–6 July 2013). This essay was part of the panel discussion: ‘Problem of Archival Sources’. 4. Pablo Neruda, I Like for You to be Still in Twenty Love Poems and a Song of Despair (London, New York: Penguin Books, 1993), 39. 5. Brecht quoted in: Walter Benjamin, Understanding Brecht, trans. Anna Bostock (London: Verso, 1998), 28.

6. Michel Foucault, ‘Of Other Spaces: Heterotopias’, trans. Jay Miskowiec (1967), http://www.foucault.info/ documents/heterotopia/foucault.heterotopia.en.html/ (accessed 10 July 2014). 7. Adolf Loos, ‘Architektur’, The Architecture of Adolf Loos: An Arts Council Exhibition, eds Yehuda Safran and Wilfried Wang (London: Arts Council, 1985). First published in Der Sturm (December 1910). 8. Mark A. Runco and Steven R. Pritzker, eds, Encyclopedia of Creativity, Vol. II (San Diego: Academic Press, 1999), 81. 9. Walter Benjamin, ‘Edward Fuchs: Collector and Historian’ in The Essential Frankfurt School Reader, eds A. Arato and E. Gebhardt (New York: Continuum, 2005), 227. 10. Guy Debord, The Society of the Spectacle, trans. Fredy Perlman and Jon Supak (Detroit: Black & Red, 1970; rev. ed. 1977). 11. Ibid., 148. 12. Guy Debord, The Society of the Spectacle, trans. Donald Nicholson Smith (New York: Zone Books, 1997).

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Appendix Lucien Samaha interview with Walid Raad

In this conversation between Walid Raad and Lucien Samaha, Samaha reveals the range of equipment and programs he has used and mastered as part of his life’s work, not to mention techniques he has used to document and collate the plethora of images he has produced. Samaha’s career as a photographer spans some 40 years, passing through a number of phases and personal life moments, including life as a DJ, a flight attendant and as a staff member at Eastman Kodak Company, some of which he touches upon as he talks about how he approaches photography, his influences and inspirations (or not) and the way his images are perceived by those who view them.1 Walid Raad: How, when and why did you start keyword indexing your photographs? Lucien Samaha: In the early 1970s I cut my few very first rolls of self-processed Tri-X film into strips of six frames and lumped them together into one glassine sleeve. On the sleeve I wrote the date and place, and if people were on the roll, I often wrote the names of the important ones. After perhaps a dozen of those, I discovered the clear plastic holder sheets for individual strips. Once in the files, the sheet could be used to make contact sheets. I transferred my then-collection into the new sleeves, along with the information. I was extremely diligent about this process well into the late 1980s when I started my photographic studies at the Rochester Institute of Technology. For a period of about seven years, for a variety of reasons including procrastination, I was less organized about labelling my negatives. Another reason was my new career at Eastman Kodak Company, which started around 1990, where I began to use a Day-Timer to log all my appointments, phone calls and activities. But the real serious cataloguing and keywording began in earnest when I left the company around 1995. This is when I felt that pursuing photographic interests was no longer the conflict of interest it was while I was

in the employment of Kodak. (By the way, this concern was self-imposed.) Armed with the knowledge I had gathered while in the thick of the industry, both from the source (the tech companies I had the privilege of working with) and the users (namely my clients in several industries, but mainly the major newspapers and magazines and photo stock agencies), I began sorting, scanning and cataloguing every single negative and slide in my archive. Although this process started 18 years ago and has resulted in a very comprehensive database, it is far from complete. WR: Can you speak about seeing, reading or thinking about a photograph or an artwork that affected you deeply and that, in some way, shaped the way you make images? LS: I can’t really think of a singular photograph that has affected me deeply but rather the oeuvre of certain photographers that continue to this day to delight and intrigue me. Foremost is the work of Jacques-Henri Lartigue. His photographs immediately conjured up images I had regularly seen and devoured in our family archive; the work of Robert Mitri, the husband of my Aunt Loulou and the man who raised me, who took photographs exclusively at family occasions and parties in Lebanon in the 1950s and 1960s. I have not found any evidence of anything taken later than that. His equipment was rudimentary and his technique a bit naive, but there are images in his work that are astounding and beautiful. So when I first saw Lartigue’s photographs, I immediately connected. Historical, yet both classic and modern in so many ways, there was almost always laughter and joy in them. He seemed to live in a world oblivious of the big wars of their time, an elegant world almost nostalgic of its own self, which he captured so well. With an immediate reaction to a fashionable lady walking her dog, or a woman halfway up her climb onto the back of a donkey, he seemed to be always ready and alert and, as I appreciate so much, not so concerned about everything being sharp and clear and free of movement. I am really fond of his ability to capture that in-between moment. Other photographers who have also had great influence on me are Robert Frank and Garry Winogrand. However, and curious enough, the one artist whose work has had the most impact, visually, socially and intellectually is Federico Fellini. Curious, because Fellini was a meticulous metteur en scène, a master composer of his images, to the degree where he even created water out of plastic sheets in Casanova. It is extremely rare for me to set up a stage, even for portraits. I prefer to find a setting or make do with the one I am in. And yet somehow, Fellini defines creativity for me, perhaps because he does so well something I am either not capable of doing or have not dedicated enough of myself to achieve.

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If I were to name just one, not for influence but for inspiration, it would be Federico. WR: What are the central themes in your works? Are there certain concerns that you find yourself drawn to time and again? LS: The more conceptual aspects of my work deal a lot with chronology, synchronicity and obsolescence, on both a personal as well as a global level. I am often hounded by the major philosophical question of whether what I am doing in my life is indeed a contribution to a better world. What is the role of art in general, and mine specifically, in a world so full of art and images? Are the photographers who are documenting wars and crime really making a difference? Are those who are conceptualizing another kind of world really having an effect? Or is it all a choice for passing our time while we’re here and not having to grow our own food? When I was barely a teenager, a friend’s older brother who was into spiritualism told me an anecdote about an Ethiopian woman who would leave her children and her tent in the village to go and fetch water. She would find a spot in the desert and dig one foot deep and wait for the water to come up. Sometimes it would take hours for this to happen, at which point she would fill her vessel and go back home. Had she dug only a few inches more, she could have gotten the water right away, but she chose the wait. It was her intention to spend this time alone, perhaps reflecting, perhaps doing something else, but this is the quality of time she had decided for herself. Ever since I took my first photographs I was hooked, and decided this had to be a major part of my life. And the way I decided to do it was by having photography as my companion rather than my occupation. I can still do whatever else I want and, most of the time, take pictures while I am doing it. Not that I haven’t sought out short-term curiosities to approach and document, but in the end, it’s all of those curiosities, short and long term combined, that have ended up being the different chapters in my life, and the sets of assets in my archive.

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1. This text is extracted from a longer conversation which has been published in two parts, see: Walid Raad, ‘Chapters, Records, Keywords’, Ibraaz (6 November 2013), http://www.ibraaz.org/interviews/102/ and ‘Influence, Passion, Process’, Ibraaz (6 November 2013), http://www.ibraaz.org/interviews/103/ (both accessed 9 December 2014).

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Contributors

Basel Abbas and Ruanne Abou-Rahme (both b. 1983) work together across a range of sound, image, installation and performance practices. Their work explores the politics of desire and disaster, spatial politics, subjectivity and the absurdities of contemporary practices of power, and they often find themselves investigating spatio-temporal resonances in the relation between the actual, imagined and remembered. The result is a practice that investigates the experiential, material possibilities of sound, image and environment, taking on the form of interdisciplinary installations and live sound and image performances. They have exhibited and performed internationally including: Insert 2014, curated by Raqs Media Collective (New Delhi); 13th Istanbul Biennial (2013); Institute of Contemporary Art (London, 2013); Serpentine Pavilion (London, 2013); Tanzquartier (Vienna, 2013); HKW (Berlin, 2013); 6th Jerusalem Show (2012); 4th Guangzhou Triennial (2012); TBA 21 Vienna (2012); Future Movements — Jerusalem at the Liverpool Biennial (2010); and Bluecoat Art Centre (Liverpool, 2010). Lawrence Abu Hamdan’s work frequently deals with the relationships between listening and borders, human rights, testimony, truth and law, through the production of audio-visual installations, graphic design, sculpture, photography, workshops and performance. His work with the intersection of sound politics originates from his background in DIY music. His solo exhibitions include: The Freedom Of Speech Itself, Showroom, London (2012); The Whole Truth, Casco, Utrecht (2012); and, most recently, Tape Echo, Beirut, Cairo (2013). His works have been part of group exhibitions at: Tate Modern, London; M HKA, Antwerp; Van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven; Beirut Art Center; and the 2012 Taipei Biennial. Abu Hamdan’s writing can be found in Forensis: The Architecture of Public Truth, Manifesta Journal and Cabinet Magazine. Abu Hamdan has curated events at the Reitveld Academie, Amsterdam, and at Batroun Projects, Lebanon. He is

part of the Forensic Architecture team at Goldsmiths College, London, where he is a PhD candidate and lecturer. John Akomfrah became an avid fan of the art-house cinemas of postwar Europe, India and Japan and the photography of Rodchenko, Brassai and Cartier- Bresson during the late 1970s. In the early 1980s, he began to explore the militant cinemas of Africa and Latin America and, from the mid-1980s, influences of these multiple cinematic strands begun to appear in his work. With a body of work produced in Britain over the last 25 years, Akomfrah’s gallery installations, documentaries and feature films have won him prizes and critical acclaim across the world. In 1982, Akomfrah was a founding member of the Black Audio Film Collective, where he produced a broad range of work within this critically acclaimed group. His work has been presented in the artist sections of over 100 official film festivals, including: Cannes, Berlin, Venice, Toronto, Sundance, Mumbai, Amsterdam and New York. Jananne Al-Ani is a London-based Iraqi-born artist. She studied fine art at the Byam Shaw School of Art and graduated with an MA in photography from the Royal College of Art. She is currently senior research fellow at the University of the Arts London. She has had solo exhibitions at: Hayward Gallery Project Space, London (2014); Beirut Art Center (2013); Arthur M. Sackler Gallery, Washington, DC (2012); Darat al Funun, Amman (2010); and Tate Britain (2005). Group exhibitions include: Mom, am I Barbarian?, 13th Istanbul Biennial (2013); all our relations, 18th Biennale of Sydney (2012); The Future of a Promise, 54th Venice Biennale (2011); and Without Boundary, MoMA, New York (2006). Recipient of the 2011 Abraaj Capital Art Prize, her work is in collections including: the Imperial War Museum, London; Centre Pompidou, Paris; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; Mori Art Museum, Tokyo; and Darat al Funun, Amman. Meriç Algün Ringborg was born in 1983 in Istanbul and currently lives and works in Stockholm. The contrasting differences between the make-up of both cities, particularly socially and politically, as well as her movement between the two, play a key role in her practice. Her work concentrates on issues of identity, borders, bureaucracy, language and translation through appropriated and ‘ready-made’ texts, dictionaries and archives. She has had solo exhibitions at Moderna Museet, Stockholm (2014), Art in General, New York (2013) and Witte de With Center for Contemporary Art, Rotterdam (2012), as well as participated in group exhibitions such as the 12th Cuenca Biennial (2014), When Attitudes Become Form Become Attitudes, CCA Wattis, San Francisco (2012) and the 12th Istanbul Biennial (2011).

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Born in 1969 in Tunis (Tunisia), Héla Ammar is a visual artist, PhD graduate in law and a feminist activist. Ammar’s work combines art and commitment. Co-author of Siliana Syndrome (2013), a survey on death row in Tunisian prisons, she recently developed a whole artwork around the prison environment. Moreover, her photographs and installations question the notion of identity by challenging conventional social, political and religious references. Since 2003, she has taken part in numerous solo and group shows in Tunisia and abroad. Her work has been showcased in various international art fairs including: Dak’art OFF, Sénégal (2014); World Nomads 2013, New York; Les rencontres photographiques d’Arles (2013); Dream City, Tunis (2010 and 2012); Les rencontres photographiques de Bamako 2012; Marrakech Art Fair (2010); Art Dubai (2008); and ArtParis — Abu Dhabi (2007). Burak Arıkan is an Istanbul- and New York-based artist working with complex networks. He takes obvious social, economical and political issues as input and runs them through abstract machinery, which generates network maps and algorithmic interfaces and results in performances, procreating predictions to render inherent power relationships visible and discussable. Arıkan’s software, prints, installations and performances have been featured at numerous institutions internationally; most recent appearances include: 31st Sao Paulo Biennial (2014); 13th Istanbul Biennial (2013); Home Works 6, Beirut (2013); 11th Sharjah Biennial (2013); 7th Berlin Biennale (2012); Nam June Paik Award Exhibition, Kunstmuseum Bochum (2012); and Truth is Concrete, Graz (2012). Arıkan is the founder of the Graph Commons collaborative ‘network mapping’ platform, www.graphcommons.com. Vahap Avşar (b. 1965, Malatya, Turkey) attended Dokuz Eylül University Faculty of Fine Arts from 1985 to 1989 and Bilkent University Fine Arts Department from 1989 to 1995 where he earned a master’s degree and completed the coursework for his PhD. Avşar’s solo exhibitions include: AND Museum, SALT Beyoğlu, Istanbul (2015); Black Album, Rampa, Istanbul (2013); iBerlin, TANAS, Berlin (2012); Noneisafe, Charles Bank Gallery, New York (2011); Vahap Avşar, Rampa, Istanbul (2010); Come Who Ever You Are, W139, Amsterdam (1993); and Myths, Galeri Zon, Ankara (1991). His group exhibitions include: Artists’ Film International, Whitechapel Gallery, London, and Istanbul Modern, Istanbul (2015); Too Early, Too late., Pinacoteca, Bologna (2015); Zwölf im Zwölften, TANAS, Berlin (2011); Second Exhibition, ARTER, Istanbul (2010); I’m Too Sad to Kill You!, Proje 4L, Istanbul (2003); 5th International Istanbul Biennial (1997); Gar, TCDD Art Gallery and Ankara Central Train Station, Ankara (1995); 5th Havana Biennial Art Exhibition (1994); Elli Numara — Anı Bellek II, Akaretler 50, Istanbul (1993); and An Another Art: For the Memory of Joseph Beuys, German Cultural Center, İzmir (1986). Avşar lives and works in New York and Istanbul.

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Ariella Azoulay is a curator and documentary filmmaker who works in the Department of Modern Culture and Media and the Department of Comparative Literature at Brown University. Her recent books include: From Palestine to Israel: A Photographic Record of Destruction and State Formation, 1947–1950 (Pluto Press, 2011); Civil Imagination: The Political Ontology of Photography (Verso, 2012); and The Civil Contract of Photography (Zone Books, 2008). With Adi Ophir she co-authored The One State Condition: Occupation and Democracy between the Sea and the River (Stanford University Press, 2012). Her recent projects include, amongst others, the exhibition Potential History (Stuk / Artefact, Louven, 2012) and the film Civil Alliances, Palestine, 47–48 (2012). Sussan Babaie teaches at the Courtauld Institute of Art in London. Her research explores the arts of Iran and Islam with an emphasis on early modern urbanity, visual culture and sexuality, and she has a particular interest in the historiographic lacunae in the study of contemporary arts of Iran and the Middle East. She is the author of the award-winning Isfahan and Its Palaces: Statecraft, Shi‘ism and the Architecture of Conviviality in Early Modern Iran (2008), and the co-author of: Persian Drawings in the Metropolitan Museum of Art (1989); Slaves of the Shah: New Elites of Safavid Iran (2004); Shirin Neshat (2013); and Persian Kingship and Architecture: Strategies of Power in Iran from the Achaemenids to the Pahlavis (2014). Her research has been supported by grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities (United States), Fulbright (for Egypt and Syria) and the Getty Research Institute (Los Angeles). Since the mid-1990s, Alessandro Balteo Yazbeck has developed a hybrid practice that incorporates the activities of a researcher, archivist, historian and curator. Working across various mediums, his productions formally resemble or incorporate the works of others, stressing notions of authorship and cultural authority. His entangled narratives are motivated by sociopolitical questions involving gaps in collective knowledge or misrepresentations in the public record. In his works, he aims to reveal the political strategies and motives at work in the world by analysing the dynamics of power and propaganda in modern history and aesthetics. Born in 1972, Balteo Yazbeck graduated with a degree in fine arts in his native city — Caracas, Venezuela, where he extensively exhibited his work before moving his practice to New York, where he lived from 2000 to 2010. He is now based in Berlin. Timothy P.A. Cooper is an independent programmer, journalist and researcher, exploring notions of immersion, assimilation and citizenship, especially in the context of moving-image media, transnational communication and the role of cultural heritage in post-conflict societies. By applying an anthropology of pre-cinema as a critical framework, Timothy P.A. Cooper’s writings examine

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parallel distribution networks, the migratory surfaces of media piracy and the class system of images in post-colonial visual economies. Joshua Craze is a Harper-Schmidt fellow at the University of Chicago and a 2014 UNESCO-Aschberg artist laureate in creative writing. A longer version of his essay ‘Excerpts from a Grammar of Redaction’, published here in Dissonant Archives, was on display at the New Museum’s Temporary Center for Translation, and can be viewed online at: www.joshuacraze.com/exhibitions. Laura Cugusi was born in Sardinia and has lived in and outside of Cairo since 2008. She studied media and social science at the University of Bologna and Santiago de Compostela. Her research focuses on irregular migration via the Mediterranean Sea and on informal urban practices in Cairo, both of which she has worked on in collaboration with the American University in Cairo and the Cairo Lab for Urban Studies, Training and Environmental Research, respectively. She has collaborated with Ibraaz, Mada Masr, Egypt Independent, Articolo21, FortressEurope, The Exorcist (Van Abbemuseum) and the PhotoCairo5 catalogue as a writer and photographer. Together with Lina Attalah and Nida Ghouse, she is the co-founder of the research-based art collective Take to the Sea. They have exhibited in: Manifesta 8, Murcia (2010); Hydrarchy, Contemporary Image Collective, Cairo (2012); Yogyakarta Biennale (2013); and had their first solo show in Cairo at Nile Sunset Annex in 2013. Ania Dabrowska (b. 1973, Poland, lives in London) is an artist working in the mediums of photography, video, text and installation. Her projects often involve public engagement and participatory processes. She is interested in the role of archives in the construction and reconfiguration of personal and collective memory, specifically in a context of cultural and temporal displacement, the shifting nature of cultural, political and personal borders, the social relationship with the photographic medium and its role in the construction of collective and personal memory and identity. Dabrowska has exhibited, published and participated in public engagements since 2001, and her work is held in public and private collections. She is a lecturer in fine art and photography at The CASS, London Metropolitan University, The Ruskin School of Drawing and Fine Art, University of Oxford, Goldsmiths College, UCL, London, and Notre Dame University, Beirut. She has participated in artist’s residencies at Arlington / SPACE Studios, London, Khoj International Artists’ Association, India and Ashkal Alwan, Beirut. Nick Denes is a sociologist and film curator. With Khaled Ziada, he co-founded the London-based Palestine Film Foundation in 2004, a research and exhibition body the two have since co-directed. He is a senior teaching fellow in the Centre for Media and Film Studies at SOAS, University of London. His writing on film Contributors

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has appeared in publications including: Vertigo; The Film Festival Yearbook; The Arab Studies Journal; and the Middle East Journal of Culture and Communication. Anthony Downey is an academic, editor and writer. Recent and upcoming publications include Art and Politics Now (Thames and Hudson, 2014); Uncommon Grounds: New Media and Critical Practice in North Africa and the Middle East (I.B. Tauris, 2014); and Mirrors for Princes: Both Sides of the Tongue (JRP Ringier, 2015). He holds a PhD from Goldsmiths College, London; is the Director of the Master’s Programme in Contemporary Art at Sotheby’s Institute of Art, London; and the Editor-in-Chief of Ibraaz. He is an Advisor to the Kamel Lazaar Foundation and sits on the Editorial Advisory Board for Third Text. Downey is currently editing Future Imperfect: Building Institutions Through Art Practices Across the Middle East (forthcoming, I.B. Tauris, 2016), and researching Zones of Indistinction: Visual Cultures, Global Media and Late Modernity (forthcoming, 2016). Chad Elias is a lecturer in art history at the University of York. His research focuses on contemporary art practices and visual cultures of the Arab world, with particular interest in the self-reflexive modes of documentary video, photography and performance that have emerged in Lebanon over the last two decades. Media Farzin is a New York-based art historian and critic, and a doctoral candidate in art history at the City University of New York. Her writings have appeared in Art in America, Art-Agenda, Artforum, Afterimage, Bidoun and Canvas, amongst others, and she has authored numerous catalogue essays. Her curatorial work includes Turning Points (Neiman Gallery, 2004), and Fluxus Scores and Instructions (Museum of Contemporary Art Roskilde, 2008). She is an instructor at the School of Visual Arts and the Sotheby’s Institute of Art New York, and co-editor of the forthcoming 13 Most Wanted Men: Andy Warhol and the 1964 World’s Fair—Conversations (Queens Museum, 2014). An ongoing collaborative project with artist Alessandro Balteo Yazbeck, on cultural diplomacy and its modernist artefacts, has been exhibited at various venues since 2007. Mariam Ghani is an artist, writer, filmmaker, curator and teacher. Her exhibitions and screenings have been presented at: the transmediale and CPH:DOX film festivals, Rotterdam; dOCUMENTA (13), Kabul and Kassel; MoMA, New York; the CCCB, Barcelona; and the Sharjah Biennials 9 and 10. Recent texts have been published by Creative Time Reports, Foreign Policy, Ibraaz and Triple Canopy. Ghani collaborates with: artist Chitra Ganesh as the experimental archive Index of the Disappeared, which organized the recent ‘Radical Archives’ conference; choreographer Erin Kelly on the video series Performed Places; and media archive collective Pad.ma on the Afghan Films online archive. Ghani

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holds a BA in comparative literature from NYU and an MFA from SVA. She is currently the Freund fellow at Washington University in St Louis and a visiting scholar at the Asian/Pacific/American Institute at NYU. Gulf Labor is a coalition of artists and activists working to ensure that migrant worker rights are protected during the construction and maintenance of museums on Saadiyat Island in Abu Dhabi, UAE. Their campaign focuses on the workers who are building the Guggenheim Abu Dhabi, Louvre Abu Dhabi and the Sheikh Zayed National Museum (in collaboration with the British Museum). Tom Holert is an art historian, critic and artist. A former editor of Texte zur Kunst and Spex and a co-founder of the Institute for Studies in Visual Culture (isvc) in Cologne, he has a PhD in art history from Johann Wolfgang Goethe University in Frankfurt. Holert is honorary professor of art theory and cultural studies at the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna and a founding member of the Academy of the Arts of the World, Cologne. Alongside his writings on contemporary and late modernist art, Holert has (co-)authored books on visual culture and politics, amongst other topics. Recent publications include: Das Erziehungsbild. Zur visuellen Kultur des Pädagogischen (co-edited with Marion von Osten, Vienna, 2010); Distributed Agency, Design’s Potentiality [Civic City Cahier 3] (London, 2011); Deadwood (Zurich and Berlin, 2013); Übergriffe. Zustände und Zuständigkeiten der Gegenwartskunst (Hamburg, 2014); and Troubling Research. Performing Knowledge in the Arts (co-edited with Johanna Schaffer et. al., Berlin, 2014). Adelita Husni-Bey is an artist and writer whose practice involves the analysis and (counter)-representation of hegemonic ideologies in contemporary western societies. Recent projects have focused on unearthing and rethinking radical pedagogical models within the framework of anarcho-collectivist studies. Solo shows include: The Green Mountain, ViaFarini/DOCVA, Milan (2010); Clays Lane Live Archive, Supplement Gallery, London (2012); and Playing Truant, Gasworks, London (2012). She has participated in: Right to Refusal, Bregenz Kunstverein (2012); 338 Hour Cineclub, Fondazione S. Re Rebaudengo, Torino (2013); Jens, Hordaland Kunstsenter, Bergen (2013); Meeting Points 7, M HKA, Antwerp (2013); 0 Performance, Moscow Biennial (2013); What is an Institution?, Beirut, Cairo (2013); Mental Furniture Industry, Flat Time House, London (2013); and Utopia for Sale?, Maxxi, Rome (2014). She recently completed the Whitney Independent Study Program in New York and is currently working with Italian schools to foster a critical understanding of the economic crisis by teenage students. Maryam Jafri is an artist working in video, performance and photography. Informed by a research-based, interdisciplinary process, her artworks are often Contributors

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marked by a visual language poised between film and theatre and a series of narrative experiments oscillating between script and document, fragment and whole. She holds a BA in English and American literature from Brown University, an MA from NYU/Tisch School of The Arts and is a graduate of the Whitney Museum Independent Study Program. She lives and works in New York and Copenhagen. Guy Mannes-Abbott is a writer who lives and works in London, UK. He is the author of a singular series of texts, poems, stories and aphorisms called e.things, which have been exhibited, published and performed alongside the work of leading British and international artists. His highly acclaimed In Ramallah, Running (2012) is the longest and latest in this series. MannesAbbott participated in Moderation(s) at Witte de With Center for Contemporary Art (Rotterdam, 2013–14) and collaborated with the Bombay-based collective CAMP on a film, The Country of the Blind, and Other Stories for the Folkestone Triennial (2011). He has written catalogue essays on visual art and lectured in architectural theory at the Architectural Association School of Architecture, London. His critical journalism has appeared in The Independent, The Guardian, New Statesman, Harpers & Queen, TANK and Bidoun. Recent publications include: Drone Fiction (2013) and an introduction to Mourid Barghouti’s Midnight and Other Poems (2008). Amina Menia creates artworks that combine sculpture and installation, questioning the relation to architectural and historical spaces, and challenging conventional notions around the exhibition space. Grounded in the post-colonial history of her native Algiers, her work stands as an invitation to re-evaluate our understanding of heritage, and deconstruct conceptions of beauty. Menia’s recent exhibitions include: Museum of Modern Art of Algiers (MAMA); Carthage National Museum, Tunisia; the Museum of Contemporary Art, Marseilles; Royal Hibernian Academy, Dublin; and the Museum of African Design, Johannesburg. She participated in the 11th Sharjah Biennial, the 2014 Dakar Biennial and the 2014 Folkestone Triennial. Shaheen Merali is a curator and writer, based in London, UK. Previously, he was head of exhibitions, film and new media at the Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Berlin (2003–8) where he curated several exhibitions accompanied by publications, including: The Black Atlantic; Dreams and Trauma — Moving images and the Promised Lands; and Re-Imagining Asia, One Thousand years of Separation. Merali was the co-curator of the 6th Gwangju Biennale (2006) and curator of Berlin Heist or the enduring fascination of walled cities for the 4th Mediations Biennale, Posnan, Poland (2014). His recent exhibitions include: Refractions, Moving Images on Palestine, P21 Gallery, London; When Violence becomes Decadent, ACC Galerie, Weimar; Speaking from the Heart, Castrum Peregrini,

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Amsterdam; and Fragile Hands, University of Applied Arts, Vienna. Merali’s monograph essays include writings on Agathe de Bailliencourt, Jitish Kallat, Sara Rahbar, TV Santhosh, Cai Yuan and JJ Xi (Madforeal), amongst others. Naeem Mohaiemen works in Dhaka and New York. He uses essays, photography, film and mixed media to research histories of the global left, shifting borders, and many partitions. His project themes have been described as being ‘not yet disillusioned fully with the capacity of human society’ (Vijay Prashad, ‘Take on Art’). Kunsthalle Basel recently presented Prisoners of Shothik Itihash (Correct History), curated by Adam Szymczyk, a survey show of Mohaiemen’s projects spanning the years 1929–79. A smaller sub-set of this work is The Young Man Was …, an ongoing history of the 1970s ultra-left. His work has been published in various anthologies, including Sun Never Sets: South Asian Americans in an Age of US Imperial Power (NYU Press, 2013). Naeem is a 2014 Guggenheim fellow, and a PhD student in anthropology at Columbia University. His work is in the collections of the British Museum and the Tate Modern. Mariam Motamedi Fraser is a reader in sociology at Goldsmiths, University of London. She teaches in the areas of visuality, archives, stories and the philosophy and methodology of the social sciences. She is co-director, with Nirmal Puwar, of the Methods Lab, which recently curated an extensive programme of events organized around an exhibition of text and images from Edward Said and Jean Mohr’s After the Last Sky. Mariam’s research addresses, in broad terms, the relations between disciplinary materials, methods and experiences. Her current research focuses specifically on Islams in the Middle East, words and different modes of sense-making. Her book, Word, is forthcoming with Rowman and Littlefield (April 2015). Pad.ma — short for Public Access Digital Media Archive — is an online archive of densely text-annotated video material, primarily footage and not-finished films. The entire collection is searchable and viewable online, and is free to download for non-commercial use. Pad.ma is a way of opening up a set of images, intentions and effects present in video footage, resources that conventions of video-making, editing and spectatorship have tended to suppress, or leave behind. The design of the archive makes possible various types of ‘viewing’ and contextualization: from an overview of themes and timelines to much closer readings of transcribed dialogue and geographical locations. Descriptions, keywords and other annotations have been placed on timelines by both archive contributors and users. The Pad.ma project was initiated by a group consisting of CAMP, from Mumbai, 0x2620 from Berlin and the Alternative Law Forum from Bangalore. ‘10 Theses on the Archive’ was authored by Lawrence Liang (Alternative Law Forum), Sebastian Lutgert (0x2620) and Ashok Sukumaran (CAMP). Contributors

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Lucie Ryzova teaches modern Middle Eastern history at the University of Birmingham. She is a social and cultural historian of twentieth-century Egypt. Her research focuses on Egyptian middle-class culture and local modernity with particular attention to popular culture, vernacular photography, and reading and writing. She also works on contemporary topics, especially the production of heritage in contemporary Egypt and spatial practices in contemporary Cairo. She is the author of The Age of the Efendiyya: Passages to Modernity in National-Colonial Egypt (Oxford University Press, 2014), editor of a double issue of the Middle East Journal of Culture and Communication titled Critical Histories of Photography in the Middle East (2015) and the author of a number of articles published in Comparative Studies in Society and History, Middle East Journal of Culture and Communication and Arab Studies Journal. She is the co-editor (with Michelle Woodward) of the Jadaliyya Photography Page. Lucien Samaha (b. 1958, Beirut) is a New York-based photographer whose work has been shown internationally, including in exhibitions at the Museum für Moderne Kunst, Frankfurt and at the Cooley Gallery, Reed College, Portland. He was a finalist in the 2004 Nam June Paik Award. After his time at Trans World Airlines, Samaha worked for Eastman Kodak Company and then as a DJ on the 107th floor of the World Trade Center, where he continued to document his hours at work and his personal life. Rona Sela is a curator, art historian and lecturer at the Tel-Aviv University, focusing on the social, political and ideological aspects of Israeli and Palestinian photography and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Her work deals with different aspects of photography and colonialism, and exposes the way establishment systems in Israel dominate the visual sphere for ideological purposes. Her recent work deals with the development of Palestinian civil society in Israel, artists and activists who fight to replace the old guards and challenge democracy. She has curated numerous exhibitions and published books, catalogues and articles, including: Photography in Palestine in the 30s and 40s (2000); Six Days and Forty Years (2007); ‘The Absent-Present Palestinian Villages’ (2006, 2009); Chalil Raad, Photographs 1891–1948 (2010); Made Public — Palestinian Photographs in Military Archives in Israel (2009); and Effervescence (Unrest) — A New Generation in Jewish-Arab Cities (2013). Laila Shereen Sakr is known online as VJ Um Amel. She is the founder of the media lab R-Shief, an Annenberg fellow and a PhD candidate in media arts and practice in the School of Cinematic Arts at the University of Southern California. She recently won the 2012 Future Leadership Award from the Egyptian American Organization, a MacArthur Foundation HASTAC Scholar Award and the Jack Shaheen Media Award granted by the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee. She has exhibited solo and in larger exhibitions

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at galleries and museums across North and South America, Europe and the Middle East, and has also published extensively. She holds an MFA in digital arts and new media from UC Santa Cruz and an MA in Arab studies from Georgetown University. Reviews appear in The Wall Street Journal, Science, Fast Company, Voice of America, Art Territories, Digital Media and Learning, Egypt Independent and The Creators Project.

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Acknowledgements

The production of this volume has been a collective, ongoing effort that has involved numerous people and organizations at different times. However, I would like to particularly thank Hydar Dewachi, Jumanah Younis, Aimee Dawson, Khajag Apelian, Liz Allan and Lara Balaa for their day-to-day input and hands on expertise in preparing this volume. In addition, I would like to extend our thanks to Basel Abbas, Ruanne Abou-Rahme, Lawrence Abu Hamdan, Babak Afrassiabi (PAGES), John Akomfrah, Jananne Al-Ani, Alexander & Bonin, New York, Meriç Algün Ringborg, Héla Ammar, Shaina Anand, Arab Digital Expression Foundation, Burak Arıkan, Vahap Avşar, Ariella Azoulay, Sussan Babaie, Stephanie Bailey, Lara Balaa, Claire Bell, Scott Berzofsky, Andris Brinkmanis, Sheyma Buali, Tony Chakar, Nick Cistone, Anna Coatman, Timothy P.A Cooper, Joshua Craze, Laura Cugusi, Ania Dabrowska, Nick Denes, Hydar Dewachi, Chad Elias, Media Farzin, Helen Gale, Mariam Ghani, Kathryn Gile, Jim Goldberg, Matt Greco, Gulf Labor, Joana Hadjithomas, Rawi Hage, David Hawkins, David Heald, Michal Heiman, Tom Holert, Ajay Hothi, Adelita HusniBey, Emily Jacir, Maryam Jafri, Khalil Joreige, Amal Khalaf, Omar Kholeif, Janet Koenig, Miki Kratsman, Pedro Lasch, David Lawson, Pnina Lviny, Guy MannesAbbott, Roman M.rz, Susan Meiselas, Amina Menia, Kamel Mennour, Shaheen Merali, Naeem Mohaiemen, Mariam Motamedi Fraser, Bill Orcutt, pad.ma, Palestine Poster Project Archives, Nick Pici, Pamela Quick, Walid Raad, Lucie Ryzova, Nour K Sacranie, Marco Scotini, Galerie Sfeir-Semler, Laila Shereen Sakr (VJ Um Amel), Lucien Samaha, Zineb Sedira, Rona Sela, Greg Sholette, Andreas Siekmann, Nida Sinnokrot, Marnie Slater, Slavs and Tatars, Anna Stump, John Suleiman Jurayj, Nasrin Tabatabai (PAGES), Thomas Dane Gallery, Greg Weight, Mabel O. Wilson and Akram Zaatari. Ibraaz and this new series of books would not be possible without the generous support of the Kamel Lazaar Foundation, to whom we owe a special debt of gratitude.

Image Credits

[Cover] Courtesy of the artist. © Akram Zaatari [18] Courtesy of the artist and Galerie Kamel Mennour, Paris [19] Courtesy of the artist and Galerie Kamel Mennour, Paris [21] Courtesy of the artists, Galerie In Situ Fabienne Leclerc (Paris), The Third Line (Dubai), and CRG (New York) © Joana Hadjthomas and Khalil Joreige [22] Courtesy of the artists, Galerie In Situ Fabienne Leclerc (Paris), The Third Line (Dubai), and CRG (New York) © Joana Hadjthomas and Khalil Joreige [24] Courtesy of the artist and Sfeir-Semler Gallery, Beirut/Hamburg [25] Courtesy of the artist and Sfeir-Semler Gallery, Beirut/Hamburg [26] Courtesy of the artist and Sfeir-Semler Gallery, Beirut/Hamburg [28] Courtesy of the artist and Thomas Dane Gallery [29] Courtesy of the artist and Thomas Dane Gallery [32] Courtesy of the artist [36] Courtesy of the Estate of the Artist and Rampa Istanbul [44] Courtesy of the artist, Afghan Films and Ryan Lee Gallery [46] Courtesy of the author [47] Courtesy of the author [50] Courtesy of the author [51] Courtesy of the author [55] Courtesy of the author [56] Courtesy of the author [59] Courtesy of the author [61] Courtesy of the author [65] Courtesy of the Palestine Poster Project Archives [67] Courtesy of the Palestine Poster Project Archives [70] Courtesy of the Palestine Poster Project Archives [71] Courtesy of the Palestine Poster Project Archives [81] Courtesy of the Keren Kayemeth LeIsrael Jewish National Fund Archive

[93] Courtesy of the artist, Beirut, Mada Masr and Galleria Laveronica [104] Courtesy of the artist [114] Photo Roman März. Courtesy Alexander and Bonin, New York. © Emily Jacir 2012 [115] Photo Roman März. Courtesy Alexander and Bonin, New York. © Emily Jacir 2012 [117] Photo Bill Orcutt. Courtesy Alexander and Bonin, New York. [117] Photo David Heald © The Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation, New York. © Emily Jacir. Courtesy Alexander and Bonin, New York [120] Photo Greg Weight. © Emily Jacir. Courtesy Alexander and Bonin, New York [121] Photo Greg Weight. © Emily Jacir. Courtesy Alexander and Bonin, New York [122] Photo Joerg Lohse. © Emily Jacir. Courtesy Alexander and Bonin, New York [123] © Emily Jacir, 2012. Courtesy of Alexander and Bonin, New York [140] Courtesy of the artists [141] Courtesy of the artists [142] Courtesy of the artists [143] Courtesy of the artists [144] Courtesy of the artists [145] Courtesy of the artists [146] Courtesy of the artists [147] Courtesy of the artists [148] Courtesy of the artists [149] Courtesy of the artists [150] Courtesy of the artists [151] Courtesy of the artists [152] Courtesy of the artists [153] Courtesy of the artists [154] Courtesy of the artists [155] Courtesy of the artists [156] Courtesy of the artists [157] Courtesy of the artists [158] Courtesy of the artists [159] Courtesy of the artists [160] Courtesy of the artists [161] Courtesy of the artists [164] Courtesy of the artist © Héla Ammar [165] Courtesy of the artist © Héla Ammar [166] Courtesy of the artist © Héla Ammar

[167] Courtesy of the artist © Héla Ammar [168] Courtesy of the artist © Héla Ammar [169] Courtesy of the artist © Héla Ammar [172] Courtesy of the artist [173] Courtesy of the artist [174] Courtesy of the artist [175] Courtesy of the artist [178] Courtesy –the artist [179] Courtesy of the artist [180] Courtesy of the artist [181] Courtesy of the artist [184] Courtesy Smoking Dogs Films [185] Courtesy Smoking Dogs Films [186] Courtesy Smoking Dogs Films [187] Courtesy Smoking Dogs Films [190] Courtesy of the artist [191] Courtesy of the artist [192] Courtesy of the artist [193] Courtesy of the artist [200] Courtesy of the artist and the International Centre for Photography, New York [201] Photo Michal Heiman [203] Courtesy of the author [207] Courtesy of the IDF and Defense Archive [211] Courtesy of the artist [216] Courtesy of the artist and Sfeir Semler Gallery, Beirut/Hamburg [220] Courtesy Paula Cooper Gallery, New York. © Walid Raad [224] Courtesy Paula Cooper Gallery, New York. © Walid Raad [226] Courtesy Paula Cooper Gallery, New York. © Walid Raad [227] Courtesy Paula Cooper Gallery, New York. © Walid Raad [229] Courtesy Paula Cooper Gallery, New York. © Walid Raad [254] Courtesy of the artists [255] Courtesy of the artists [256] Courtesy of the artists. © Nasrin Tabatabai and Babak Afrassiabi (PAGES) [262] Courtesy of the Arab Digital Expression Foundation [265] Courtesy of the Arab Digital Expression Foundation [266] Courtesy of the Arab Digital Expression Foundation [274] © 2012 ARTMargins and the Massachussetts Institute of Technology. Reprinted courtesy of MIT Press Journals [275] © 2012 ARTMargins and the Massachussetts Institute of Technology. Reprinted courtesy of MIT Press Journals [276] © 2012 ARTMargins and the Massachussetts Institute of Technology. Reprinted courtesy of MIT Press Journals [277] © 2012 ARTMargins and the Massachussetts Institute of Technology. Reprinted courtesy of MIT Press Journals [278] © 2012 ARTMargins and the Massachussetts Institute of Technology. Reprinted courtesy of MIT Press Journals [279] © 2012 ARTMargins and the Massachussetts Institute of Technology. Reprinted courtesy of MIT Press Journals [280] © 2012 ARTMargins and the Massachussetts Institute of Technology. Reprinted courtesy of MIT Press Journals

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[281] © 2012 ARTMargins and the Massachussetts Institute of Technology. Reprinted courtesy of MIT Press Journals [282] © 2012 ARTMargins and the Massachussetts Institute of Technology. Reprinted courtesy of MIT Press Journals [283] © 2012 ARTMargins and the Massachussetts Institute of Technology. Reprinted courtesy of MIT Press Journals [284] © 2012 ARTMargins and the Massachussetts Institute of Technology. Reprinted courtesy of MIT Press Journals [285] © 2012 ARTMargins and the Massachussetts Institute of Technology. Reprinted courtesy of MIT Press Journals [286] © 2012 ARTMargins and the Massachussetts Institute of Technology. Reprinted courtesy of MIT Press Journals [287] © 2012 ARTMargins and the Massachussetts Institute of Technology. Reprinted courtesy of MIT Press Journals [288] © 2012 ARTMargins and the Massachussetts Institute of Technology. Reprinted courtesy of MIT Press Journals [289] © 2012 ARTMargins and the Massachussetts Institute of Technology. Reprinted courtesy of MIT Press Journals [292] Courtesy of the artist [293] Courtesy of the artist [294] Courtesy of the artist [295] Courtesy of the artist [296] Courtesy of the artist [297] Courtesy of the artist [300] Courtesy of the artist and Pace / MacGill Gallery, New York. [300] Courtesy of the artist [301] Courtesy of the artists [302] Courtesy Gulf Labor [303] Courtesy of the artist. [303] Image and text conception by Rawi Hage. All rights reserved © 2014 [304] Courtesy of the artist [305] Courtesy of the artist [306] Courtesy of the artist [307] Images courtesy of the Trustees of the British Museum. Courtesy of the artist [310] Courtesy of the artist [311] Courtesy of the artist [312] Courtesy of the artist [313] Courtesy of the artist [314] Courtesy of the artist [315] Courtesy of the artist [316] Courtesy of the artist [317] Courtesy of the artist [320] Courtesy of the artist [321] Courtesy of the artist [322] Courtesy of the artist [323] Courtesy of the artist [326] Photos Jean-Baptiste Béranger. Courtesy of the artist, Galeri NON, Istanbul and Galerie Nordenhake, Stockholm [327] Photos Jean-Baptiste Béranger. Courtesy of the artist, Galeri NON, Istanbul and Galerie Nordenhake, Stockholm [328] Photo Art in General. Courtesy of the artist, Galeri NON, Istanbul and Galerie Nordenhake, Stockholm

Dissonant Archives: Contemporary Visual Culture and Contested Narratives in the Middle East

[328] Photo Gunther Hang. Courtesy of the artist, Galeri NON, Istanbul and Galerie Nordenhake, Stockholm [329] Photo Cuenca Biennial. Courtesy of the artist, Galeri NON, Istanbul and Galerie Nordenhake, Stockholm [329] Photo Neon Foundation. Courtesy of the artist, Galeri NON, Istanbul and Galerie Nordenhake, Stockholm [332] Courtesy of the artist [333] Courtesy of the artist [334] Courtesy of the artist [335] Courtesy of the artist [336] Courtesy of the artist [337] Courtesy of the artist [338] Courtesy of the artist [339] Courtesy of the artist [342] Courtesy of the artist and Abraaj Capital Art Prize. Photo Adrian Warren [343] Courtesy of the artist and Abraaj Capital Art Prize. Photo Adrian Warren [344] Courtesy of the artist and Abraaj Capital Art Prize. Photo Adrian Warren

Image Credits

[345] Courtesy of the artist and Abraaj Capital Art Prize. Photo Adrian Warren [348] Courtesy of the artist and Rampa Istanbul [349] Courtesy of the artist and Rampa Istanbul [350] Courtesy of the artist and Rampa Istanbul [351] Courtesy of the artist and Rampa Istanbul [402] Courtesy Jonathan of www.buildingmybento. com [402] Courtesy of the author [408] Courtesy of the author [411] Courtesy of the author [411] Courtesy of the artist [414] Courtesy of the author [421] Courtesy of the author [422] Courtesy of the author [425] Courtesy of the author [428] © Nick Cistone. Photo Nick Cistone [429] © Nick Cistone. Photo Nick Cistone [434] Courtesy of the author [435] Courtesy of the author [438] Courtesy of the author [439] Courtesy of the author

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Index

References to images are in italics; reference to notes is indicated by n. 9/11 attacks 58, 223 10 Thesis on the Archive (Pad.ma) 35, 53, 252–62 18daysinEgypt 365 52 Weeks (Gulf Labor) 35, 299, 300–7 Abbas, Basel 14, 31, 139, 140–61, 449 Abdulhaq, Maysara 267, 268 Abou-Rahme, Ruanne 14, 31, 139, 140–61, 449 Abu Ali, Mustafa 68, 72 Abu Dhabi 35, 215, 217, 230, 299, 300–7 Abu Ghanimeh, Hassan 72 Abu Ghraib prison 84 Abu Hamdan, Lawrence 34, 171, 172–5, 449–50 Abu Zubaydah 35, 37, 385, 387–9, 391, 393, 398 Act of State 1967–2007 (Azoulay) 212 activism 99 Adachi, Masao 75 Adan, Etel 219 Adef see Arab Digital Expression Foundation Aesthetics of Disappearance, The: A Land Without People (Al-Ani) 16–17, 341 Afghan Films 30, 44, 45–52, 56, 59, 61 and copyright 53 and digitizing 54 and radicalism 58 Afghanistan 14, 27, 30, 43, 48, 52, 396 and film 403 and turbulence 49, 58 Afghanistan: Land of Hospitality and Beauty (film) 52, 55 Afrassiabi, Babak 257 Agamben, Giorgio 96 AIF see Arab Image Foundation Akomfrah, John 38, 183, 184–7, 450 Al-Ani, Jananne 14, 15, 16–17, 35, 257, 341, 450 Al-Fatah: Palestine (film) 72, 73, 75 Algeria 14, 15–16, 33, 41n.5, 331, 332–9 Alkarssifi, Diab 37, 309 Amit, Gish 110 Ammar, Héla 14, 31, 163, 164–9, 451 Anand, Shaina 60 Anglo-Iranian Oil Company (AIOC) 257, 258 anthropology 17 Anwara (film) 407

Arab Digital Expression Foundation (Adef) 35, 261, 263–4, 267, 268 Arab Image Foundation (AIF) 16–17, 23, 27, 41n.7, 199, 200, 365 and Egypt 236, 238 Arab spring 30, 94, 95–6, 98, 101 and technology 370–1, 379 Arabic language 95, 96, 97, 103, 105 and social media 370–3, 376 Arafat, Yasser 73, 75 archaeology 16–17, 257, 341 architecture 199, 202, 218, 442–3 Archive Fever: Uses of the Document in Contemporary Art (exhibition) 252 Archive, The (book) 252 archives 13–16, 38, 52, 194–5, 252–62, 433 and Afghanistan 43, 48 and archaeology 16–17 and art 34–5, 251–2, 253, 441–2 and destruction 27, 30 and Egypt 237–8. 248, 267–9 and ethics 52–3 and film 403, 404–5 and history 54 and Israel 79–80, 82–9, 196–7 and knowledge 30–1, 39–40 and Palestine 109–11 and photography 204–6, 208–10, 212–13, 234–5 and politics 33–4, 82 and posters 76, 78n.12 and radicalism 57–8, 60, 62 and redaction 35, 37 and war 20, 23, 33 see also digital archiving Arıkan, Burak 35, 177, 178–81, 451 art 217–18, 252–3, 441–2 and knowledge 14–15, 39, 101–3 see also Islamic art Asfan’s Long Day (The Young Man War, Part 2) (Mohaiemen) 31, 319, 320–3 Atatürk, Mustafa Kemal 37–8, 347, 348–51 Atlas (Richter) 204 Atlas Group 20, 112, 199, 218, 253, 365 Audiovisual Archive of Workers’ and Democratic Movements (AAMOD) 119

Aural Contract Audio Archive (Abu Hamdan) 34, 171, 172–5 Austin, J. L. 390 Avşar, Vahap 14, 37–8, 347, 451 Azimi, Negar 217 Azoulay, Ariella 33, 452 Babaie, Sussan 34–5, 452 Baghdad 66 Baladi, Lara 60 Balteo Yazbeck, Alessandro 38, 273, 452 bandits 31, 139 Bangladesh 31, 405 Bassiouney, Reem 95, 96 Baudelaire, Eric 14 Bayat, Asef 98, 99 Beirut 17, 20, 23, 42n.14, 111–12, 219 Beirut (research platform) 92, 94, 98, 103 Benin 33 Benjamin, Walter 54, 84, 124, 440–1, 443 and history 355, 416 Bidoun (magazine) 365 Bin Laden, Osama 437, 440 Bivar, A. D. H. 426 black market 37 ‘Black Market Archive’ 410, 412, 415, 416 Black September 68 black sites 385, 388, 389 Bodleian Library 419, 423–4, 428–9, 430 Bolaño, Roberto 31, 139 Booch, Harish S. 404 books 119, 325, 326–9 borders 31, 423–4 Boyadgian, Benji 14, 41n.4 Brecht, Bertolt 204, 441–2 British India 404 Burkina Faso 33 burnings 27, 30, 43, 45 Canonica, Pietro 38, 347 capitalism 98 Catalogue of Destruction (Samaha) 129, 131–7 cataloguing 48–9, 445–6 censorship 37, 85, 90n.14, 221–2, 404, 405 Centre for Cultural and Natural Heritage (CULTNAT) 241 Chakar, Tony 103, 105, 106 Chebab, Emir Maurice 23 Chief Commander (Avşar) 37–8, 347, 348–51 Choucair, Saloua Rouda 219 Chronoscope, 1951, 11pm (Yazbeck) 38, 273, 274–89 CIA 35, 37, 385, 387, 389, 391, 396 cinema see film Cinema Tahrir 60 citizenship 34 civil society 98–100 Cold War 273, 274–89, 396 Colectivo de Cine del Tercer Mundo 75 colonialism 82, 110, 257, 331 and Egypt 238, 245, 247 Comaroff, John 199 Communism 75 conflict 82–3, 88, 99, 218 Constituent Violence 1947–1950 (Azoulay) 33, 203, 208, 212 Cooper, Timothy P.A. 37, 452–3 copyright 53, 106, 267, 354, 360–1 counterterrorism 387–8 Cox, Margaret 17, 341

Index

Craze, Joshua 37, 453 crime 409 Cugusi, Laura 35, 453 culture 98, 99, 102, 238–9 Cvetkovich, Ann 60 D-Company 409–10 Dabrowska, Ania 37, 309, 453 Damaged Negatives: Scratched Portrait of Mrs. Baqari (Zaatari) 32 Das, Veena 426–7 David, Catherine 102 Davis, Ossie 183 Dean, Tacita 111 Debord, Guy 443 Deir Yassin massacre 202 Demos, T. J. 112 Denes, Nick 30, 453–4 Denmark 75 Derrida, Jacques 13, 15, 16, 33–4, 38, 80, 82, 252 and history 355 and sentries 195, 199 and violence 88 destruction 27, 30 digital archiving 53–4, 59, 76, 198, 354–5 and Egypt 239–41, 243–5 see also Arab Digital Expression Foundation; R-Shief, Inc Digital Expression Community Area (DECA) 264, 267 dissonance 20, 23 Djeflat, Abdelkader 101 documentary 52 Downey, Anthony 102, 454 Drift/Resolution (from A Lebanese Archive) (Dabrowska) 37, 309, 310–17 Dubois, Hugh 228 Duggan, Mark 436–7 Dupree, Louis 52, 55 Durant, Sam 111 economics 101 education 100, 101, 367 Egypt 14, 30, 35 and digital content 263–4, 267, 268 and photography 34, 232–8, 239–41, 243–5, 247–8 and social media 373, 377 and translation 92, 94–6, 97 and uprising 261, 263, 365 Elahyani, Zvi 202 Elias, Chad 34, 454 embroidery 31, 163 English language 95–6, 97, 103, 105, 419–20 Enwezor, Okwui 41n.2, 98, 252 ex libris (Jacir) 33, 110, 114–15, 119, 120–3, 124, 202 ‘Excavations’ (Al-Ani) 257 Exile from Haifa, The (Chasnick) 81 Facebook 365, 366–7, 372 and Egypt 235, 238, 240, 241, 243–5, 248 Farah, Abdallah 17, 20 Farzin, Media 38, 273, 454 Fatah movement 64, 65, 67, 68, 72, 75 Fellini, Federico 446–7 fiction 52, 112, 113 filing 196, 205

465

film 53–4, 119, 361–2 and Afghanistan 45, 48–9, 52 and India 403, 404, 405 and Palestine 64, 68, 69–71, 72, 75–6, 77 and revolution 66, 68 see also video film piracy 37, 401 and Pakistan 405, 406–7, 409–10, 412, 413, 415–17 film posters 30, 64, 68, 70–1, 72, 75–7 Filming Revolution 365 Flickr 198, 377 Foster, Hal 43, 110, 111, 124 Foucault, Michel 40, 82, 96, 252, 394 and museums 442, 443 France 82, 217 Frank, Robert 446 Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) 385, 387 Freud, Sigmund 252, 331 Friendship of Nations: Polish Shi’ite Showbiz (Slavs and Tatars) 254–5, 258–9 future, the 20, 40

Holert, Tom 30, 455 How Not To Be Seen: A Fucking Didactic Educational .MOV File (Steyerl) 411, 413, 414, 415 human rights 84–5, 208 Husni-Bey, Adelita 14, 30, 33, 92, 94–7, 291, 455

Ibraaz 39 Ibrahim, Dawood 409–10 iconization 205–6, 209–10, 212 Image Keepers (Sedira) 15–16, 27 imperialism 75 In This House (Zaatari) 23, 32 Incidental Insurgents, The (Abbas/Abou-Rahme) 31, 139, 140–61 Independence Day 1936–1967 (Jafri) 31, 33, 189, 190–3 independence movements 31, 33, 52 Index of the Disappeared (Ganesh/Ghani) 58 Index XXVI: Artists (Raad) 216, 219, 221 indexing 31, 45, 48, 445–6 India 33, 110, 126n.1 and film 403, 404, 405, 409 Innocence of Muslims, The (film) 407 Instagram 366, 367 Gaddafi, Muammar 370 institutions 30, 35, 79–80, 233 Ganesh, Chitra 58 insurgency 31 Gardiennes d’images (Sedira) 18–19 intelligence gathering 84, 87–8, 91n.30 Gaza 368–9, 379, 382 internet 42n.24, 365–8 #Gaza Audio-Visual Narrative by a Cyborg: Images Introduction Plate 13 (Raad) 226 Tweeted by Hashtag (VJ Um Amel) 379, 380–1, Ipdal (Avşar) 36, 37 382 Iran 34–5, 37, 257–8, 259, 426–7, 430 Germany 31, 94, 103 and Nurafkan 419–20, 423, 424, 426 Ghandi, Leela 199 Iraq 14, 17, 66 Ghani, Mariam 14, 27, 30, 454–5 Islamic art 34, 218, 222, 223, 225, 228, 230 Gharbeia, Ahmad 263 Israel 33, 41n.4, 116, 119, 120–3, 202 Gilroy, Paul 436, 437 and Kam 196–7 Giving Contours (Husni-Bey) 92 and Palestine 68 Golden Age, The (Menia) 33, 331, 332–9 and photography 79–80, 82–9, 212–13 ‘Golden Hour’ 436–7, 440 and Um Rashrash flag 209–10 Graph Commons 177 Istanbul 37 Great Britain 426, 430, 436–7 Italy 75, 119 Guggenheim Museum 215, 217 Guiragossian, Paul 219 Jaal (film) 403, 405 Gul, Aijaz 406 Jacir, Emily 14, 33, 109–11, 113, 116, 118–19, 124–5, Gulf Labor 35, 217, 299, 455 202 Gulf States 14 Jadallah, Sulafa 68 Jafri, Maryam 14, 31, 33, 189, 190–3, 455–6 Haddad, Bassam 367 Jawhariyyeh, Hany 68, 71, 72, 73 Hadjithomas, Joana 14, 15, 17, 20, 111 Jewish Historical Institute (Warsaw) 433 Haifa, Looting (Chasnick) 81 Jewish Museum (NYC) 222 Hall, Stuart 38, 183 Jewish National and University Library (Jerusalem) 110 al-Hallaj, Mustafa 68 Jewish National Fund 85, 86 Hanieh, Adam 98, 99 Jordan 14, 33 Hashem el-Madani: Studio Practices (Zaatari) 23 Joreige, Khalil 14, 15, 17, 20, 111 Hassan, Kinda 264 Joreige, Lamia 14, 111, 112 Hawas, Sarah 95 journalism 30, 95, 97–8, 101, 387–8, 436–7 Heiman, Michal 199 Hemming, John 419, 424, 426 Kam, Anat 194, 196–7, 199, 212 Here and Perhaps Elsewhere (L. Joreige) 112 Kanafani, Ghassan 116 Hezbollah 388 Kant, Immanuel 393 Hirschhorn, Thomas 111 Al-Karameh Exhibition (1969) 64, 65 history 33, 54, 355, 356–7 Karimi, Azim 46 and Afghanistan 49 Khamenei, Ali 427 and archives 15, 16, 17, 30–1 Khog Dushman (film) 411, 414, 415 and art 257–9 knowledge 14–15, 30, 39–40, 433, 436 and Egypt 236–7, 238–9, 241 and art 101–3, 106 and photography 83, 86–7 and circulation 268 History of Contemporary and Modern Art in the Arab and Middle East 98, 99–102 World (Raad) 34, 217, 219, 222–3 Kosovo 17, 341 Höch, Hannah 204 Kouaci, Mohamed 15–16, 41n.5

466

Dissonant Archives: Contemporary Visual Culture and Contested Narratives in the Middle East

Kouaci, Safia 15–16 Kratzman, Miki 212 Krippel, Heinrich 38, 347 Kurdistan (Meiselas) 199, 200 Lakshar-e-Tabiyiba 409 language 95–7, 103, 105, 365 and Pakistan 403–4, 405, 416 see also Arabic language Larkin, Brian 406–7, 416 Lartigue, Jacques-Henri 446 Lebanon 14, 113, 218, 253 and Civil War 17, 20, 23, 37, 111–12 and Samaha 129, 131–7 see also Beirut libraries 38–9 Library of Alexandria 236, 238, 241 Library of Unborrowed Books (Ringborg) 38–9, 325, 326–9 Libya 33, 291, 292–7, 370 Liquidity Inc. (Steyerl) 412–13, 415 London riots 436–7 Longines Chronoscope (TV show) 38 Loos, Adolf 442–3 Louvre Museum 215, 217, 218, 223, 225, 228, 230 Maalouf, Lynn 367 Mada Masr (newspaper) 30, 92, 94–5, 96, 97–8, 101 Malcolm X 183 Manand Waqob (Like the Eagle) (film) 52 Mannes-Abbott, Guy 33, 456 Mansour, Mortada 373 martyrs 72 Material for a Film (Jacir) 33, 113, 116, 117, 118–19, 124–5 Mathaf: Arab Museum of Modern Art 219 Maurer, Monica 119 Mbembe, Achille 99, 199 McEvan, Cheryl 82, 88 Meir, Golda 116 Meiselas, Susan 199 memory 38, 86, 87, 112 MENASA region 110, 111 Menia, Amina 14, 33, 331, 456 Merali, Shaheen 38, 456–7 Middle East 98–102, 103, 365–6 and museums 215, 217 and photography 232, 235–6, 309, 310–17 Middle East Studies Association (MESA) 368 Mignolo, Walter D. 99 migrants 34, 35 military materials 84–5, 87–8 Miraculous Beginnings (Raad) 112 Mirdrakvandi, Ali 37, 419, 420, 424, 426, 427 misinformation 436–7, 440 Misrata 291, 292–7 Mnémosyne Atlas (Warburg) 204 Mohaiemen, Naeem 31, 319, 457 Morocco 14 Morris, Benny 86 Mosireen Collective 365 Mossadegh, Mohammad 427, 430 Motamedi Fraser, Mariam 37, 457 Moulin, Raoul-Jean 30, 66, 76 movement 64, 66, 68, 75–6, 213 Mubarak, Hosni 94, 238–9 Munich Olympics (1972) 33, 113, 118 Mursi, Mohammed 92

Index

museums 215, 217, 359–60, 442, 443; see also Louvre Museum Nagin (film) 407, 408 Al Nashiri 391, 398 National Film Archive of India 404 National Foundation Fund 85 National Museum of Beirut 23, 42n.14 National Museum of Modern Art (Iraq) 66 nationalism 405 Nehru, Jawaharlal 404 Nematpour, Gholamreza 37, 419–20, 423, 424, 426, 427 neo-liberalism 99–101, 103 Newman, Marcy 367 news reporting 72, 436–7, 440 Nigeria 406–7 No Heaven for Gunga Din: Consisting of the British and American Officers’ Book (Mirdrakvandi) 424, 426, 427 North Africa 100 nostalgia 33, 238, 241, 331 Nurafkan (Mirdrakvandi) 37, 419–20, 423–4, 425, 426, 427, 430 Occupy 366 (On) Difficult Terms (Husni-Bey) 30, 92, 93, 94–6, 97 On Higher Education Industrial Complex (Arıkan) 35, 177, 178–81 On Networks of Dispossession (Arıkan) 35, 177, 178–81 On Photography, People and Modern Times (Zaatari) 23 Onsi, Omar 219 orientalism 245, 247, 331 Orlow, Uriel 14 Other Document #131 (Craze) 35, 37, 385, 386, 387, 389 Other Primary Structures (2014 exhibition) 222 Ouruj (Ascension) (film) 52 Pad.ma 35, 53, 60, 62, 267–9, 457 Pages 257, 258 Pakistan 401, 403–6, 407, 409–10, 412, 413, 415–17 Palestine 14, 30, 33, 113, 139, 202 and archives 208–9, 213 and ethnic cleansing 109–10 and film 75 and Gaza 368–9, 379, 382 and photography 81, 82–9 see also Zuaiter, Wael Palestine Another Vietnam (film) 75 Palestine Film Unit (PFU) 68, 72 Palestine in the Eye (film) 72, 73 Palestine–Denmark, Same Struggle (film) 74, 75 Palestinian Cinema Institution 70–1, 76 Perelli, Luigi 72, 75 Philippines, the 33, 403 Photographer Unknown (Heiman) 199, 201 photography 15–16, 17, 27, 341, 361–2 and archives 204–6, 208–10, 212–13 and Egypt 34, 232–8, 239–41, 243–5, 247–8 and Israel 33, 79–80, 82–9 and Lebanon 37, 129, 131–7 and Samaha 31, 445–7 and war 20, 23 “plastic process” 20 Poidebard, Antoine 17 Poland 258–9, 433 Polish art and the Holocaust (exhibition) 438–9

467

politics 31, 33–4, 39, 98–100, 213 and Afghanistan 49 and Egypt 263–4 and posters 66, 68, 75 postcards 331, 347 posters 65, 66, 77, 78n.12; see also film posters Preface to the First Edition (Raad) 223 Preface to the Seventh Edition II (Raad) 220, 221–2 Preface to the Third Edition (Raad) 218, 227, 228, 229, 230 private collections 233, 234, 235, 236–8, 247, 248 Prologue I (Raad) 224 propanganda 52, 79, 85, 86, 87 Pugliese, Joseph 84 al-Qaeda 385, 409 R-Shief, Inc. 35, 365–70, 372–3, 376, 377, 382, 383 Raad, Walid 14, 15, 20, 31, 34, 35, 199 and art history 217–19, 221–3 and Atlas Group 253 and fiction 112 and Islamic art 225, 228, 230 and Samaha 445–7 Rabah, Khalil 14 radicalism 57–8, 60, 62 Rainbow Centre (Karachi) 401, 402, 407, 409, 416 Ranciere, Jacques 358–9 Rashad, Jonathan 377 Red Army, The / PFLP Declaration of World War (film) 74, 75 redaction 35, 37, 42n.25, 385, 387–91, 393–4, 396, 398–9 Residents on Tripoli Street Archive War (Husni-Bey) 33, 291, 292–7 resistance 31 Resnais, Alain 423 revolution 30, 31, 33, 60, 366 and Egypt 95 and film 66, 68, 72, 75–7 and Palestine 64, 67, 68 Richter, Gerhard 204 Rifky, Sarah 94 Ringborg, Meriç Algün 38–9, 325, 450 Ringelblum Archives (Warsaw) 433, 435, 438–9 Riot Smoke (VJ Um Amel) 374–5, 377, 379 Roozgard, Laleh 420, 423, 424, 426 Rosetta Stones from Cyberspace (VJ Um Amel) 377 rumour 426–7, 430 Ryzova, Lucie 34, 458 Saadiyat Island 35, 215, 217, 299, 300–7 Saddam Hussein 17 Samaha, Lucien 14, 31, 129, 131–7, 445–7, 458 Samaha, Roy 14 Scrapbook (Höch) 204 Scratching on Things I Could Disavow: A History of Art in the Arab World (Raad) 20, 24–6, 218 sculpture 37–8, 347, 348–51 Sedira, Zineb 14, 15–16, 18–19 Sekula, Allan 80, 82, 84 Sela, Rona 33, 458 sentries 195–6, 198, 199 Serge, Victor 31, 139 Shadow Sites II (Al-Ani) 341, 342–5 Shereen Sakr, Laila 35, 458–9 Shoshani, Neta 202 Sivan, Eyal 202 Six Day War 80

468

Six Days and Forty Years (book/film) 80 Slavs and Tatars 35, 258–9 Smithsonian Institution 257 social media 35, 241; see also Facebook; Twitter sociology 17 soldiers 393–4 South Africa 82, 88 South Asia 31 Speak Mouthless (Chakar) 103, 104, 105–6 Special Review: Counterterrorism Detention and Interrogation Activities (CIA) 391, 392 spectre 432–3 state, the 30, 34, 35, 353 and Afghanistan 49, 52 and archives 202, 204, 205–6 and Egypt 238–9, 247, 263 and photography 79–80, 82–3 Steyerl, Hito 401, 410, 412–13 stillness 66, 68, 75–6 Stoler, Ann Laura 82, 99, 199 Stuart Hall Project, The (Akomfrah) 38, 183, 184–7 Sundaram, Ravi 409 surveillance 356, 364, 368 Syria 14, 17, 33, 105–6 Tabatabai, Nasrin 257 Tahhan, Johnny 221 Tahrir square 94 Taliban, the 45, 49 Tarz (Ammar) 31, 163 Tate Modern 219 technology 365, 406 Tehran Museum of Contemporary Art 257 Tel al Zaatar refugee camp 113, 119 television 38, 403, 440 Temporary Archive, The (Boyadgian) 41n.4 terrorism 33, 113, 409 Time Capsule (Zaatari) 23, 28–9 torture 84, 387, 391 Toufic, Jalal 20, 112, 218, 219 Toute la Mémoire du Monde (film) 423 Traboulsi, Suha 222 translation 94–6, 103, 219, 368 Tunisia 14, 31, 33, 163, 164–9 Turkey 14, 35, 37–8, 177, 347 Twitter 365, 366–7, 369, 370, 377 and Arabic 371, 372–3, 376 and Gaza 379, 382 Two Archives (Tabatabai/Afrassiabi) 256, 257 United Arab Emirates (UAE) 215 United Red Army (The Young Man Was, Part 1) (Mohaiemen) 31 United States of America (USA) 38, 387–8, 389, 393–4, 396 Venn-Brown, Janet 116 Vest, Nils 75 video 103, 105–6 Vietnam War 75 violence 84, 85, 86, 88, 112–13, 202 and photography 210, 212 Wakamatsu, Koji 75 Walk Like An Egyptian (VJ Um Amel) 378, 379 war 17, 20, 23, 31, 33, 341 and Israel 80, 209–10 see also conflict war on terror 387, 388

Dissonant Archives: Contemporary Visual Culture and Contested Narratives in the Middle East

Warburg, Aby 204 Warsaw Ghetto 433, 434–5, 438–9 waterboarding 385, 387, 388, 389 watermarks 243, 401, 407, 408, 413, 415 What we left unfinished (Ghani) 44, 49, 58 Wikileaks 198 Wilson-Goldie, Kaelen 111, 112 Winogrand, Garry 446 With Soul, With Blood (film) 68, 69, 72, 74 Wonder Beirut (History of a Pyromaniac Photographer) (Hadjithomas/Joreige) 17, 20, 21, 22, 37 Woven Archive, The (Ammar) 163, 164–9 Yehia, Ranwa 263, 264, 267, 268, 269 YouTube 263, 365, 368, 379, 407, 418n.14 Zaatari, Akram 14, 15, 23, 27, 199 Zacharia Zveidi (Kratsman) 211, 212 Zaehner, Robert 424, 426, 430 Zewail, Ahmed 100 Zia-al-Huq, General 401, 409 Zionism 33, 75, 85, 86 and photography 79–80, 83 Zionist Aggression, A (film) 68, 69 Zuaiter, Wael 33, 113, 116, 118–19, 124–5

Index

469