War is a reality. Art processes reality, rendering it tangible and susceptible to change. Curators and exhibition venues face the challenge of developing this potential and not allowing the art to be swallowed up by the surrounding cultural apparatus. Two exhibitions in Paris are currently defusing aesthetic dynamite, each in a somewhat different fashion.
Every frame creates an image: war, expulsion, even the most bitter suffering still provide frames of reference for identity, constitute a reality one settles into, in order to perceive it, like postcards, as a flat surface, as a screen and fixed context. Art introduces waves, ruptures or holes into this screen. When it comes to the reality of war, art can make visible the way in which this reality gives rise to new identities.
Ahlam Shibli photographs apparently insignificant places in the village in Lebanon that she comes from: a crossing or a baker who has hung an Israeli flag outside his shop. »These people were driven into the infertile mountains, they are oppressed – and this gesture appears nevertheless. How often are Israelis likely to go shopping at this bakery?« she asks furiously. Shibli’s work (she lives and works in Palestine) is committed, takes a stance. This is scarcely apparent in the images themselves, instead viewers need to read a little in order to find their way into the history of the war.
The subtlety of these photos is comparable to that of the other contributions to »Les Inquiets«, the Centre Pompidou exhibition bringing together work by five internationally renowned Lebanese, Palestinian and Israeli artists (Yael Bartana, Omer Fast, Rabih Mroué, Ahlam Shibli, Akram Zaatari). The works are not easily accessible, with the exception of the cinematic aesthetic informing the videos by Omer Fast (who has lived for some time now in Berlin), weaving together the history of an American GI in Baghdad and the casual friendship he develops on holiday in Germany to evoke an oppressive testimony to the disruption of inter-personal relationships. You have to be prepared to open up to them, need to understand the contexts that moved Rabih Mroué (who lives and works in Beirut) to create the performance in which he presents himself as a suicide bomber. Or indeed that transform actors and actresses into DIY bomb-makers, in images assembled into a long, peaceful film by Akram Zaatari (Beirut) for the exhibition. In the distancing context of the Centre Pompidou, it is all far from being a trenchant political statement. And yet: even simply by addressing the burning issue of the Israel-Palestine conflict, curator Joanna Mytkowska disrupts this institutional framework. The mere fact of the exhibition ruffles the smooth surface of this screen and its images.
That is not the case for curator Hervé Mikaeloff. His exhibition »Orients sans frontières« (»Orients Without Borders«) is not disturbed by thoughts of war. It is the by-product of a journey from Beirut via Bagdad, Teheran and Kabul to Peking, tracing out roughly the colonial adventure of the »Croisière jaune«, a car dispatched by André Citroën with assistance from Louis Vuitton in the Golden Thirties on trips to »unknown lands«. In his honour the show was set up in the »espace culturel« above the Louis Vuitton luxury boutique on the Champs Elysées. A little extra for culture-vulture clients of the finest leatherware, who are transported upwards to the expansive rooms by the liftboy in the entirely black lift (a work by Olafur Eliasson). A fade-out between the world of consumption and the universe of art, which does not succeed in concealing the fact that art serves here to provide added value, part of a perfectly arranged foil on which to present reality as a dispositive one can journey through in comfort.
Joreige/Hadjithomas’ work »Wonder Beirut« reveals the extent to which changing the framing conditions also modifies the art works: it was shown around the same time in the newly opened art centre outside Lyons, the »Fort de Bruissin« fortifications constructed during the wars in the 1870s. The battered old photos on postcards, which depict the once paradisiacal sides of a city where nowadays only ruins can be found, slot neatly into the broader context here. Within the walls of the old fort, these photos develop an oppressive proximity to the horrors of war, without losing sight of the problem of depiction, exhibited as they are alongside videos such as »Khiam«, in which former prisoners of the eponymous Israeli camp talk about torture and suffering in direct, frontal interviews, but also speak of the positive sides of this »experience«.
In »Orients sans frontières« the postcard ruins become a creepy yet beautiful backdrop. The same is true in the striking video by Adel Abidin (Bagdad), in which a girl learns words like »genocide« or »mass grave«. The poetic »écriture-automatique« drawings of the flight of a bird by Mohammad Ali Talpur (Pakistan) or works by Amal Saades (Beirut) securing the traces of destruction, which are per se powerful works, are integrated into the polished image of a nostalgic, kitschy postcard from the distant Orient in a »nomadic, globalised world«.
Reality stretches out like a screen in front of us. Art can make this screen permeable – or become part of the screen. Both artists and curators have a responsibility to preserve art’s potential in this respect.
Translated by Helen Ferguson