Copenhagen. Denmark, of all places, might not seem first choice to organise a large-scale project going by the contestable title »Images of the Middle East«. With the toughest immigration policy in Europe, the recent Muhammed cartoon row, and a xenophobic rightist government, one could say that the image the Middle East engenders within the Danish political psyche is not a too positive or welcome one. However, despite the latter or perhaps precisely because of it, the Danish Center for Culture and Development embarked on a mammoth project … as a corrective, one could argue. The project ran across major Danish cities and encompassed cultural programs ranging from exhibitions and music and theatre performances, to lectures and films. These kind of endeavours always tend to reek of a top-down political correctness, well-meant »educationalism«, and covert Orientalism, mainly because of their sheer scale. Not necessarily the best ingredients for developing a sound and critical curatorial methodology. Yet, it would be unfair to judge the part by the whole: »Images of the Middle East« did bring an impressive array of artists and thinkers from this region – problematically designated as the Middle East - to Denmark, often for the first time. Though the curators working for the participating partner institutions and organisations found themselves under duress to comply with an even geographical spread of the artists involved, rather than a unifying aesthetics or thematics, gems were to be discerned. In what follows I will focus on one of the three major Copenhagen exhibitions: namely, the photography exhibition »Under the Same Sky«, curated by Christian Rud Andersen for the National Photo Museum at the Royal Library. The other two comprehensive exhibitions were: »Taking Place«, curated by Charlotte Bagger Brandt for Charlottenborg exhibition hall, and »Coding; Decoding«, curated by Khaled Ramadan for the Nikolaj Contemporary Art Center.
The PR image for »Under the Same Sky«, a young woman in »hijab« photographed by Iranian photographer Shirana Shabazi from the »Goftare Nik series« (2001), seems an odd choice for an exhibition that implies a misplaced sense of egalitarianism. It is quaint that the most stereotypical and exoticised image we know from the Middle East - the veiled woman - was chosen for an exhibition that wanted somehow to emphasise sameness under the same skies, but ended up de facto reinforcing difference and otherness. As »Bidoun« editor Negar Azimi writes in the exhibition preface: »[O]ne is left to wonder whether we are in fact ›Under the Same Sky‹…the fault lines, both real and imagined, are growing deeper by the minute…[w]e’ve never been more divided than now.« A case in point here is the striking photos of diaspora Palestinian Tarek Al-Ghoussein. In the »Self Portrait Series« (2002 – 2003), Al-Ghoussein depicts himself as a lone figure wrapped in the emblematic »keffiyeh« (traditional Palestinian headdress) who seems out of place in the non-descriptive locations he finds himself in: whether he walks down a sand hill that’s demarcated by red tape, stands in front of a tunnel blocked by heaps of sand, or walks briskly past a truck, a boat, a plane, a house in ruins. The sense we get is simultaneously one of menacing potential and of incumbent stasis: do we read him as the quintessential terrorist, hijacker, suicide bomber, or is he a refugee in his own country (or another) whose mobility is curbed? Al-Ghoussein suggests it can be both or neither, but what speaks from this remarkable body of work is a position that is exiled, and an iconic figure – that of the Palestinian - that is numbed.
Lebanese artist Walid Raad and his Atlas group also pose the question of mediated estrangement, yet one that resonates historically. Through the archive of a fictitious Lebanese historian named Dr. Fadl Fakhouri, Raad offers us a narrative of »what might have happened«, always crossing back and forth in-between the construction of reality and its registration. Fakhouri’s film »Miraculous Beginnings. No Illness is neither Here nor There« is presented as a two-channel installation. One channel shows us images the alleged Dr Fakhouri took every time he believed the civil war had ended, the other one shows us snapshots of dentist’s and doctor’s signs. The apparent incongruity and randomness of these images make up the psychopathology of a history that still is taunted by amnesia.
In addition, an obsession with seriality is also very much characteristic of archival work, and, by corollary, marks the practice of the Atlas Group. Archivists and chroniclers go through painstaking processes of labelling and categorising objects according to specific procedures in order to make the whole mean more than just the sum of its individual parts. However, as the Atlas Group’s »My Neck is Thinner than a Hair: A History of Car Bombs in the Lebanese Wars (1975-1991)« shows that, no matter how meticulously arranged and logged, some matters – like 15 years of ongoing civil strife and violence – cannot really be explained, and will never make sense.
A different approach to seriality – far more messy, organic and urbanised - is employed by Cairo photographer Randa Shaath. In her black-and-white images she easily moves from the tangled architecture of Cairene rooftops and the bustle of this metropolis with its monumental squares, buildings and chaotic traffic, to the stolen private moments of an individual. Her photographs capture the city’s energy, but also manage to seize instances of tranquillity and concentration. What oozes from her frames is life and how it is lived in its anonymous urban loneliness, where the sheer scale of the city tends to crush its inhabitants, but where the inhabitants seem to have carved out a place for themselves, stubbornly and sturdily. The exhibition also – rather surprisingly - features work by French/Moroccan artist Yto Barrada. Morocco is of course technically not part of the Middle East. And hence, the choice of works by Barrada, who focuses for a large part on the Strait of Gibraltar and its migrant complexities, felt somewhat misplaced within this exhibition.
I had initially, perhaps wilfully, misread the title of the exhibition as »Under the Last Sky«, a mistaken reference on my part to Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish’s celebrated poem »The Earth Is Closing on Us«; in it, he writes »Where should we go after the last frontiers?/Where should the birds fly after the last sky?«. Written more than 20 years ago, this question is still extremely pressing. It would have been advisable for »Under the Same Sky« to have scripted some of that urgency as a critical and unifying strategy in its artistic approach.