By Kaelen Wilson-Goldie
Youssef Safieddine, Self-portrait, Dakar, Senegal, 1966, photograph. Courtesy: AIF/Youssef Safieddine © Arab Image Foundation
Let me tell you three short stories.
In the first, it’s fifteen years ago, and Yto Barrada is a young artist – born in Paris, based in Tangier – who studied at the International Center of Photography, in New York, and has just become a member of the recently formed Arab Image Foundation, in Beirut.
Van Leo, Self-portrait, Cairo, Egypt, 1944, photograph. Courtesy: AIF/Van Leo © Arab Image Foundation
One of a number of independent young arts organizations formed in the mid- to late 1990s, the foundation is, at this moment, hyperactively building an archive and dispatching its member-artists on research trips all over the world to acquire plates, prints, stereoscopes, lantern slides, negatives, camera equipment, studio ephemera and more, related to the art and work of photography in North Africa, the Middle East and the Arab Diaspora. Akram Zaatari has already gone to Egypt (to meet Van Leo in Cairo). Lara Baladi will soon go to Senegal (to find Studio Safieddine in Dakar). Fouad Elkoury will eventually make his way to Mexico (to see the crazy advertising imagery of the Yazbek brothers in Mexico City). Barrada, for her part, heads to Iraq. This is before 9/11, before the US-led invasion, before the country begins the slow and painful process of violently pulling apart. It’s the twilight of Saddam Hussein’s rule, and the sanctions regime is faltering. Barrada finds a group of photographers who meet every day for tea and a little camaraderie.
Tufic Yazbek, General Motors model: Urraza, Mexico City, Mexico, 1964, advertisement. Courtesy: AIF/Zaida Fuentes de Yazbek © Arab Image Foundation
One of them, Latif al-Ani, carries a 6 × 6 Rolleiflex camera with him everywhere he goes, but he swears he hasn’t taken a professional picture since 1977. Thirty years earlier, when Ani was a teenager, he used to tag along with a Jewish photographer named Nissan, who ran a studio on Mutanabbi Street. Ani’s brother had a shop next door and when he saw how interested his brother was in photography, he bought Latif a Kodak box camera, which, after much experimentation and messing around, landed him a job as a trainee for a magazine published by the British-owned Iraq Petroleum Company. Ani took pictures of the oil industry, the working classes, tourist attractions, mosques, ruins, monuments, the process of modernization, and the social lives of the Baghdad bourgeoisie. He travelled throughout the region on assignment. He worked in the ministry of culture and the ministry of information. He started a national news agency. He became known as the founding father of Iraqi photography and, in the 1960s, was feted with a solo exhibition that toured eight cities in the United States. By the time Barrada turned up, however, Ani had been worn down by years of censorship, repression, the Iran-Iraq war, dictatorship and corruption. He had never been a Baathist, was no longer working, and he was skeptical of depositing his work in any kind of well-intentioned cultural repository. But Barrada persisted, and kept on returning for tea. Eventually, Ani brought along a box of negatives, which became the core of a small collection she assembled for the foundation in Iraq, safekeeping of a kind that neither she nor Ani could have possibly imagined at the time.
Latif al-Ani, Construction work on the Darbandikhan water pipeline project, Iraq, 1961, photograph. Courtesy: AIF/Latif al-Ani © Arab Image Foundation
In the second story, it’s the late 1980s and Fouad Elkoury is retracing the steps of Gustave Flaubert and Maxime Du Camp in Egypt. Funnily enough, Elkoury, a photographer who was born and raised in Paris and returned to Beirut to live and work during the worst early days of Lebanon’s fifteen-year-long civil war, doesn’t think much of Du Camp or his contribution to the history of photography. It’s Flaubert, the novelist, who interests him. In the fall of 1849, Flaubert and Du Camp had set off on an adventure. They lugged more than a thousand pounds of baggage from Paris to Marseille, where they boarded a ship bound for Alexandria. From there, they travelled south to Cairo and on to the city of Esna, on the west bank of the Nile. They continued to Karnak, Jerusalem and Beirut before heading back home. Du Camp, who had learned the ups and downs of the calotype from Gustave Le Gray, took more than two hundred pictures during the trip, many of which were later bound into the book Egypte, Nubie, Palestine et Syrie, published in 1852. Flaubert, meanwhile, found the will to write (‘What can I say? How can I write?’ he asked in his letters to virtually everyone) and, while bounding around on a jagged hill at the southernmost point of their journey, the name of a character (Emma Bovary) who had been banging around in his brain. A hundred and forty years later, Elkoury tries to recreate their journey. By 1989, much has changed not only in Egypt but also in the way people, artists especially, speak of the east. Elkoury is self-consciously working on the other side of an orientalist fantasy that dates back to Chateaubriand and Lamartine. And he is also able to query the critique of that tradition, coming in the wake of Edward Said, whose groundbreaking book Orientalism, published in 1978, had cited Flaubert in Egypt as a most obvious example of European arrogance speaking for, and over, a silent, subjugated image of the Arab world. But for all his intentions to follow, study, and perhaps skewer a pre-existing script, Elkoury abandons it almost immediately, as the story of Flaubert and Du Camp’s friendship fades into a lover’s discourse between the photographer and his wife, between a ghostly figure and the landscape, between ruins and time.
Fouad Elkoury, ‘Untitled, Sinai Desert’, from the ‘Suite Egyptienne’ 1980–1990, photographic print, 241 × 300 cm. Courtesy: Fouad Elkoury / Galerie Tanit
In the third story, it’s 1965 and the great Moroccan writer Abdellatif Laâbi is starting a magazine with two poets and three painters, who will come to be known as the Casablanca Group: Mohamed Melehi, Fouad Belkahia, and Mohamed Chebaa. They are young, bombastic and sure they can change the world, or at least remake theirs. And, for a little while, through the pages of a journal known as Souffles, published in the late 1960s and early ’70s, they really do revolutionize the realms of art, literature and politics in the region. After the Six-Day War of 1967, the magazine takes a more radical political turn, most of the original poets and painters quit and Laâbi befriends Abraham Serfaty, a middle-class Moroccan Jew, hardcore communist and labour organizer, twenty years Laâbi’s senior, who has already been jailed by the French, exiled, returned, and deemed very dangerous for the monarchy because he is talking about a war in the Western Sahara even then. Souffles is perpetually grappling with the ironies of publishing in French, so Laâbi and Serfaty launch a sister publication in Arabic, called Anfas (both titles mean breaths, or, more idiomatically, inspirations, in their respective languages). Anfas runs a translation of an editorial (no byline) about the Western Sahara titled ‘Palestine in the Desert’, which may be the undoing of the entire enterprise. Laâbi and Serfaty both end up in prison, where they are severely tortured. Laâbi gets out a decade later and is forced into exile. Serfaty gets out two decades later and is stripped of his citizenship. Back issues of the magazine are introduced as evidence of state subversion in the trials of student protesters. The magazine lasts just six years and publishes only twenty-two issues. It basically ruins the lives of countless people. And yet it stands, still, today, as an incredibly important moment of artistic and political potential, of the intellectual momentum generated by crosscurrents of thought that put Marxism in conversation with Third World solidarity movements, the Non-Aligned, tricontinentalism, post-colonial discourse and more. The group that contributes to Souffles is, as with so many like-minded magazines of that time, terrible on women and feminism. Etel Adnan is one of just three women ever to contribute. And yet she is loyal to the spirit of the thing even now. Laâbi, for his part, spends the later decades of his life (he’s still alive) writing beautiful, searching poems, essays, and novels about his childhood and the loss of his country. Those writings are arguably far more inventive and meaningful than anything he ever wrote as a young man trying to change the world. He laments the fact that the urgency of the young poet’s questions, the insistence on finding what’s new or what’s next, no longer wake him up at night. Instead what wakes him up at night is total silence, total stillness, a kind of emptiness he can’t even begin to understand. But in taking a longer, more rueful view of history and of time, he ends up, in this period, doing the best work of his life and maybe (not just for him but for his readers, too) the most fulfilling.
Cover of ‘Souffles’ Issue 1, 1966
So it’s true. The past year has been overwhelmingly grim by almost any measure, especially in the Middle East. All the hopes of the so-called Arab spring are gone. The Syrian civil war has become an unmitigated disaster for the entire world to deal with – or not, most likely the latter, as the conflict festers through its fifth year. Palmyra, among the most majestic archeological treasures this side of Europe, has been systematically destroyed, bit by bit and piece by piece, in some of the most awful acts of spectacular violence seen anywhere this century. At the time of writing, one of the important contemporary art initiatives in Cairo – the Townhouse Gallery, an organization that belongs to the same willful era as the Arab Image Foundation and Ashkal Alwan in Beirut, and Platform, now SALT, in Istanbul – has just been shut down in a government raid. The artists, dissidents, activists and intellectuals of Baghdad, Damascus and Aleppo – who, unlike their counterparts from Beirut, Casablanca, Algiers, Tunis, Cairo, Alexandria or Istanbul, have never been so widely cast into exile before (the dictatorships of Iraq and Syria tended to imprison or kill their opposition figures, rather than allowing them to escape or flee) – are now so scattered and traumatized that it seems unlikely they will ever regroup and retell the stories of what they’ve done and seen, or reflect on the ideas, debates, works and arguments they’ve given to the world. Paris for this generation isn’t, sadly can’t be, tragically won’t be, what it was for generations of erudite Arab exiles in the past.
John Akomfrah, ‘Vertigo Sea’, 2015, installation view in Central Pavilion, Giardini, 56th Venice Biennale
And yet, all that being said, 2015 opened, before my eyes at least, with a beautiful, ruminative exhibition of Fouad Elkoury’s ‘Suite Egyptienne’ at Galerie Tanit, just down the street from where I live in Beirut. It was the first time the series had ever been shown as such, as prints, in the region. Elkoury added a set of sly, subtle bookends to his treatment of Flaubert and Du Camp’s trip, bringing the story up to date with a small, unframed triptych shot on the streets of Cairo in 2011, and tying it back to the time of the pharaohs with a few quotes and reflections quietly stuck onto the side of a concrete column. Then, toward spring, a lovely selection of Latif al-Ani’s photographs anchored the Iraqi Pavilion for the Venice Biennale. A few months later, Ani, who is now 84 and still lives in Baghdad, was honored with one of the annual awards of the Prince Claus Fund. And before the year came to an end, the scholars Olivia C. Harrison and Teresa Villa-Ignacio published a small but vital anthology of material from Souffles and Anfas, with Stanford University Press. A small army of seventeen translators helped them render the French and Arabic texts in English. All three of these stories came vividly to life in 2015.
Mohammad Ali Atassi and Ziad Homsi, Our Terrible Country, 2014
And there have been other, fleeting signs of hope, from Jimmie Durham’s sprightly, searching solo exhibition at the Fondazione Querini Stampalia in Venice to John Akomfrah’s virtuoso film study of the sea, the seasons, life, death and Moby Dick in Vertigo Sea and Theaster Gates’s Anthem of Mu, a boat ride at daybreak along the Bosphorus as part of the Istanbul Biennial. In a way, works like these pick up on a number of important arguments spilling over from the end of last year, arguments floated in Abderrahmane Sissako’s devastating film Timbuktu, about the horrors and absurdities of ISIS-like activities in Mali; Mohammad Ali Atassi and Ziad Homsi’s documentary Our Terrible Country, following the Syrian dissident Yassin al-Haj Saleh as he escapes from Damascus into an exile in Istanbul that he emphatically does not want; and Zia Haider Rahman’s novel In the Light of What We Know, about maths, banking, the invasion of Afghanistan, financial collapse and, most beautifully, friendship tested by pain, love and betrayal. (The channels of distribution to the wilds of the world being what they are, I encountered all of these works in 2015.) Among other things, those arguments consider how we use historical facts and poetic metaphors to talk about the most urgent political conflicts of our time. Is the storytelling that revolves around those facts and figures of speech a matter of imagination or misdirection, piercing criticality or some lame palliative gesture that assuages our guilt about making virtually no contribution to the betterment of the world? Are we circling around the thing without ever addressing it directly? Or are we talking about it in the only ways we can, in the only ways where meaning is possible – through artworks, novels, films and the rituals of seeing and reading and bringing stories, many of them old but still instructive, back to life?
On that note, and on the strange resurgence of ritual I found everywhere this year, where meaning is made through repetition: The work that meant the most to me in 2015 was, perhaps not surprisingly, a children’s book published to coincide with Jacob Lawrence’s ‘Migration Series’ at the Museum of Modern Art, New York. Jake Makes a World, a story by Sharifa Rhodes-Pitts with illustrations by Christopher Myers supporting the vivid details of works by Lawrence himself, is the book I read most often to my daughter, the book that makes her sit still and smile and give me a searching look, and not only because my voice catches on the ending every time. The final lines here are easily as enduring as ‘Goodnight stars, goodnight air, goodnight noises everywhere’ and ‘I love you all the way to moon, and back.’ And with incredible beauty and economy of phrasing, they also speak to what art at its best can do. ‘Jake has made a world, a small piece of this place called Harlem. It is now his home. Jake’s Harlem has all the shouts and songs and noises of the Harlem outside, but here they are not sounds. They are colors, they are shadows dancing, they are rhythms, they are light.’