Mining War: Fragments from a Conversation Already Passed

Feldman, Hannah; Zaatari, Akram

doi:10.1080/00043249.2007.10791254

Cited by 11 publications

(1 citation statement)

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“…This aesthetic spectrum aims to critique the politics of representation, but often becomes mired in representational impossibilities (what video artist Akram Zaatari calls a "cycle of diminishing returns"). 36 Saab provides a pastiche of cinematic history, but what does the montage achieve? Her rigorous critique itself runs out of material and seems to retreat to a comedic farce.…”

Section: Yasmine Followsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Post-Orientalist Aesthetics:  Experimental Film and Video in Lebanon

Westmoreland¹

2009

InVisible Culture

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In Mona Hatoum's experimental video, Measures of Distance (1981), she densely layers fragmented clips of audio recording, written correspondence, and intimate images in a way that accentuates the distance of exile. Nude photos of Hatoum's mother appear in close-up, rendering them initially undecipherable. A second visual layer of hand-written letters from Hatoum's mother further obscures the images on screen, the letters themselves only revealing fragmented Arabic script that prevents the viewer from reading more than a few discontinuous phrases. Meanwhile, we hear a conversation in Arabic between two women that competes with the louder voice-over translations in English. While these communiqués between Hatoum in London and her mother in Beirut are themselves markers of separation, the way the layers compete and obscure each other speaks directly to the infrastructural ruptures of phone lines and postal services during the Lebanese civil wars. Furthermore, the way the narrative reveals familial tension offers another dimension of distance inflected but not caused by Hatoum's exile. While ostensibly about family relations and the experience of exile, Measures of Distance demonstrates a vexed relationship between modes of communication and technologies of documentation.

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Section: Yasmine Followsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Post-Orientalist Aesthetics:  Experimental Film and Video in Lebanon

Westmoreland¹

2009

InVisible Culture

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Making sense: affective research in postwar Lebanese art

Westmoreland

2013

Critical Arts

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Introduction

2018

Unruly Visions

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The introduction opens with a photograph of what appears (to a contemporary viewer) to be a gender queer figure, taken in a photography studio in south Lebanon in the early 1950s. The image is reproduced and exhibited by the contemporary queer Lebanese artist Akram Zaatari. Just as Zaatari’s act of queer curation reanimates and resignifies the meaning of this photograph by putting it into circulation some fifty years after it was created, so too does this book as a whole function as a queer curatorial project. By placing seemingly unrelated cultural texts in relation to one another, Unruly Visions is an act of queer curation that seeks to reveal not coevalness or sameness but rather the co-implication and radical relationality of disparate racial formations, geographies, temporalities, and colonial and postcolonial histories of displacement and dwelling.

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Mining War: Fragments from a Conversation Already Passed

Cited by 11 publications

References 0 publications

Post-Orientalist Aesthetics:  Experimental Film and Video in Lebanon

Post-Orientalist Aesthetics:  Experimental Film and Video in Lebanon

Making sense: affective research in postwar Lebanese art

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Mining War: Fragments from a Conversation Already Passed

Cited by 11 publications

References 0 publications

Post-Orientalist Aesthetics: Experimental Film and Video in Lebanon

Post-Orientalist Aesthetics: Experimental Film and Video in Lebanon

Making sense: affective research in postwar Lebanese art

Introduction

Contact Info

Product

Resources

About

Post-Orientalist Aesthetics:  Experimental Film and Video in Lebanon

Post-Orientalist Aesthetics:  Experimental Film and Video in Lebanon