By Chad Elias
Clik here to view.
Founded in 2002 by Ashkal Alwan director Christine Tohme, the Beirut-based Homeworks Forum on Cultural Practices has in a relatively short space of time established itself as arguably the leading platform for critical enquiry and multidisciplinary art production in the Arab world. The sixth edition came at a difficult and uncertain juncture in the region. While the Arab uprisings of 2011 have opened up newfound possibilities of artistic and political expression, these freedoms have also been marked by the threat of renewed religious fundamentalism and sectarian violence. Indeed, with the victory of the Muslim Brotherhood in the last Egyptian elections and the disturbing rise of the Salafist groups in Tunisia, the sense of political possibility that initially accompanied the overthrow of repressive dictatorships has given way to feelings of disillusionment and fear about the future of democratic values in these societies. The outcome of the revolts in Syria, an uprising that seemed unimaginable for even its most dissident artists and activists, appears particularly unclear as the nation heads into a period of protracted civil war. Hezbollah’s decision to enter into the conflict has now increased fears that the fighting may ultimately spill over into Lebanon. While most artists in Lebanon have come out in clear support of the Syrian rebellion, some practitioners, like Rabih Mroué, have also produced works that question the documentary status of images uploaded by revolutionaries. In her curatorial statement for Homeworks 6, Tohme speaks suggestively of the current moment as an ‘indefinite trial’, in which the prospective citizens of the transitional states find themselves waiting for the appearance of an ‘authority which will adjudicate’ on the events of the recent past.
This premise was most explicitly manifest in Tony Chakar’s One Hundred Thousand Solitudes (2012), a lecture-performance that could well have been titled ‘Walter Benjamin in Damascus’. Beginning with images of the Syrian uprisings posted on his Facebook page, Chakar argues that the extraordinary uprisings witnessed in such unlikely places as Daraa, Homs and Kafr Nabl represent a radical reversal of the historical order wherein ‘the last become first’. These towns, which for decades were seen as backwards, marginal and insignificant, have now become the creative centres of the revolt against Bashar al Assad. In a similar vein, Chakar shows an image of a protestor in Tahrir Square holding a sign that reads: ‘From Egypt to Wall St. Don’t be afraid. Go ahead, Occupy Oakland, OWS.’ Here it would seem that Egyptian citizens were more eager to revolt openly than their counterparts in Western democracies, where a system of repressive tolerance has functioned to create a climate of widespread anomie and cynicism among the left. For Chakar, the images of ‘bloody’ fountains in the main squares of Damascus (dyed red by activists in reference to the regime’s brutality) are the symbols of ‘the coming of Messianic times’. Except here, the promise of historical redemption is evoked without there being an identifiable Messiah or redeemer to settle accounts.
The role played by social media in creating new forms of political and civic action is also the focus of Mroué and Lina Saneh’s play 33 rpm and a Few Seconds (2013). The play centres on the death of Diya Yamout, a fictional 28-year-old secular activist who commits suicide and leaves behind an email urging his friends and fellow activists to defend his right to be cremated, in defiance of the sectarian traditions and laws that still predominate in Lebanon. As the news of the suicide becomes public, Yamout’s friends, political supporters, family, girlfriend and the various state and religious powers try alternatively to politicize his death or delegitimize his final actions as the work of a deranged and amoral mind. Importantly, this discursive power struggle is not dramatized by actors on stage but transmitted through numerous overlapping media platforms which make up the mis-en-scene: Facebook discussions, television news reports, emails, text messages and voicemails projected onto various screens. Mroué and Saneh’s concern here no doubt lies in questioning the transparency of the mediated event and in unpacking the effects that stem from the collapsing of public and private, real and virtual space. 33 rpm is reportedly based on the actual suicide of Nour Merheb, a young activist who had single-handedly waged public campaigns against rising education fees and the endemic corruption of the military and the legal system in Lebanon. In contrast to the ingrained and largely predictable strategies of the established Lebanese left, Merheb’s activism did not fix itself to a set ideology, party or site of intervention. Yet the relative freedom of expression enjoyed by Lebanese critics of the state is perhaps one reason why they remain strangely disconnected from the anti-authoritarian movements that have emerged in other parts of the region. 33 rpm also points to one of the key contradictions of digital dissidence: if social media has made possible a new model of rhizomatic activism in which the same persons now engage in multiple struggles in ways that challenge the very parameters of politics, those same technologies complicate any search for truth and threaten to atomize human relations and activist movements.
While Mroué and Saneh’s work remains fixated on the uncertainties of the political present, the Homeworks 6 exhibition, organized by Tarek Abou El Fetouh, brought fragments of failed or obsolete futures into confrontation with an image of the recent past. One of the standout pieces was Ali Cherri’s video installation, Pipe Dreams (2012), which overlays archival television footage of a phone call between Syrian cosmonaut Muhammed Faris and late Syrian president Hafez al-Assad with a YouTube clip showing the removal of a statue of Assad by today’s Syrian government to prevent its destruction by demonstrators. The question of what it means to live in a suspended reality was also taken up in the excellent film and lecture programme put together for Homeworks 6. In one of the more compelling yet also problematic presentations, Portuguese film scholar Catarina Simão analyzed archival footage of a four-day ‘meeting of the compromised’, held in 1982 in Maputo, Mozambique, between the governing Frelimo Party, headed by independence hero Samora Machel, and the Mozambican officials who had collaborated with the ousted colonial regime. What is captured on camera resembles something like a self-reflexive ‘trial’ in which the role of interrogator, confessor and witness are at once enacted and critically deconstructed. While Machel’s aggressive line of questioning could be seen as a means of conscripting some of the compromised to fight in the civil war, the meeting at the same time opened up the possibility of a non-punitive model of justice within a larger project of decolonisation. What would it mean for a Portuguese citizen to mimic Machel’s performance rather than simply describe it from a position of assumed neutrality? This is the question we were left to ponder when Simão was herself interrogated by one member of the audience for not explicitly addressing her own place within a structure of (post)colonial knowledge/power relations.
Joshua Oppenheimer’s gripping documentary Act of Killing (2012) questions not only the ethical decision to reenact violence – in this case, the mass murders of Communists and ‘leftists’ in Indonesia in the 1960s – but also the process for viewers of witnessing the construction and valorization of that violence. Anwar Congo and Herman Koto, the two primary ‘actors’ in the film and one-time leaders of infamous anti-Communist death squads, are at once gleeful performers (obsessed with mimicry of Hollywood icons) and elderly men who have been directed by a foreigner to repackage the exploits of their youth for a new audience. Viewers are thus both silent witnesses – compelled to judge the violent murders, which are told in nearly unbearable detail at various points in the film – and participants, members of a predominantly Western audience that is implicated in the process of producing such a film and so objectifying the events it re-enacts. Had Oppenheimer achieved his original aim, of documenting the stories of victims rather than those of perpetrators, viewers may have been caught in much the same bind, between a potentially fraught empathy and a sense of guilt for valorizing the same Hollywood spectacles and anti-Communist rhetoric that framed the violence in the first place.
One of the undoubted highlights of Homeworks 6 was Mehdi Fleifel’s film, A World Not Ours (2012), which takes as its subject the Palestinian refugee camp in southern Lebanon known as Ain El-Helweh. Fleifel revisits the place where he spent his summer holidays as a child, interweaving home video and historical footage with his own recordings. Life in the camp is primarily shown through the eyes of two figures: the filmmaker’s grandfather, a cantankerous man now in his eighties, and his best friend Abu Eyad, who is roughly the same age as Fleifel. While the older man exists in a frozen mental state, grimly hanging onto a Palestine that no longer exists, for the generation who came of age amidst the disillusionment of the post-Oslo Accord era, ‘the right of return’ has come to be seen as a mere bargaining chip between the Palestinian elite and the Israeli state. Although he receives a token allowance from Al Fattah, Abu Eyad clearly no longer believes in its empty liberationist rhetoric. And while Fleifel’s Danish citizenship has granted him social mobility, his friend has been denied access to employment or education in Lebanon. With no opportunity for immigration open to him, Abu Eyad, like countless Palestinian men in his position, finds himself trapped within the suffocating spaces and constrictive routines of the camp. The filmmaker’s own relationship to Ain El-Helweh is also deeply conflicted. Fleifel recalls the summers he spent there in the 1980s with genuine nostalgia, but he is also aware that it is not the same place distilled in his memory: three generations of Palestinians have now built houses on top of each other, and with no real possibility for repatriation on the horizon, there is little room for hope. Yet Fleifel displays a remarkable ability to capture his subjects resilience and sense of humour at times when we least expect it. In this regard, A World Not Ours expresses a refusal to objectify the Palestinian condition through representations of victimhood. Perhaps most surprising is the original jazz score and the seemingly incongruous set of popular cultural objects (the Football World Cup, Michael Jackson, Neil Young, Rambo) that Fleifel draws on here. While these references might strike Western audiences as comically out of a place in a refugee camp, in the film they are shown to be very much part of the fractured subjectivity of exiled Palestinians. In making use of archives that encompass both personal and collective histories, Fleifel is able to expose the discontinuities of the present. More than simply offering an intimate reflection on the defeat of a Palestinian revolutionary project, his film stands as an important model for any documentary practice that seeks to make visible the upheavals of the last two and half years.
Image may be NSFW.Clik here to view.