Akram Zaatari: Earth of Endless Secrets

One part of this exhibition, "Writing For a Posterior Time," will be exhibited at the Beirut Art Center from July 22 to October 3, 2009

This show by Akram Zaatari was co-produced by Sfeir-Semler Gallery, Kunstverein München, and the Beirut Art Center

BEIRUT - Sfeir-Semler Gallery is delighted to present Earth of Endless Secrets, a comprehensive solo exhibition by the Lebanese artist Akram Zaatari.

Earth of Endless Secrets refers to an ongoing project by Akram Zaatari that consists of unearthing, collecting and examining a wide range of documents that testify to the cultural and political conditions of Lebanon’s postwar society. Zaatari’s artistic practice involves the study and investigation of the way these documents straddle, conflate, or confuse notions of history and memory. By analyzing and re-contextualizing audiotapes, video footage, photographs, journals, personal collections, found objects, interviews and recollections, Zaatari explores the “dynamics that govern the state of image-making in situations of war.” With an almost archeological eye, the artist reveals the intimate layers of history contained in records of everyday experience.

The exhibition includes photographs and videos organized into four chapters each focused around four of Zaatari’s video projects. In All is Well on the Border, Zaatari presents three staged testimonies that shed light on the experiences of prisoners held in detention centers during the Israeli occupation of South Lebanon. In this tribute to Jean-Luc Godard's film Ici et ailleurs, notions of heroism and suffering emerge amid a dissection of the codes of representation and ideological indoctrination during times of conflict. Shot between Lebanon, Syria and Jordan, This Day examines the relationship between mental and actual geographies in the Middle East, investigating various modes of access to information including travel, television, and the Internet. In This House presents the story of a letter buried years ago by a former resistance fighter in the garden behind an occupied house in South Lebanon. The filmmaker endeavors to find it, but in so doing he provokes the ire and anxiety of the house’s residents, neighbors and nearby intelligence officials. Yet, the search yields joyfully unexpected results. In Nature Morte, an old, wise man sits making explosives with a young, baby-faced man who is carefully mending the frayed cuff of a jacket. Zaatari offers a meditation on the tender relationship between these two men and the unknown end of their implied operation.

Zaatari’s work often examines technologies of communication and notions of surveillance, foregrounding the way different media apparatuses get employed in the service of power, resistance, and memory. His work reflects on the shifting nature of borders and the production and circulation of images in the context of the current political divisions of the Middle East. As co-founder of the Arab Image Foundation in Beirut in 1997, the artist is deeply invested in the collection, archiving and analysis of the subjective visual history of the Middle East, mainly focusing on the archive of studio Sherazade in Saida, through the work of photographer Hashem el Madani.

Earth of Endless Secrets was co-produced by Sfeir-Semler Gallery, Kunstverein München, and the Beirut Art Center, and was exhibited at the Kunstverein München in March 2009. Previously, Zaatari’s work has been the subject of one-person exhibitions with Sfeir-Semler Gallery, Art Basel (2007), the Grey Art Gallery, New York (2005), Portikus, Frankfurt (2004), and the Palais des Beaux Arts, Brussels (2002). His work has also been exhibited in group shows and biennales around the world, including at the Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris (2008), the 52nd Venice Biennale (2007), the Sao Paolo Biennale (2006), Sydney Biennale (2006), and Gwanju Biennale in South Korea (2006). Born in Saida in 1966, Akram Zaatari lives and works in Beirut.

This show is in two parts and takes place at the Sfeir-Semler Gallery, Beirut from July 22 to October 31, 2009 and at the Beirut Art Center from July 22 to October 3, 2009.

Akram Zaatari
Earth of Endless Secrets