Hannah Feldman

Mining War: Fragments from a Conversation Already Passed

In December 2005, we (Hannah Feldman and Akram Zaatari) submitted a joint application to the Council for International Exchange of Scholars and the Fulbright Visiting Specialist Program: Direct Contact with the Muslim World to bring Zaatari, a Lebanese multimedia artist and cofounder of the Beirut-based Arab Image Foundation, to Northwestern University for six weeks in the fall of 2006. Feldmans research on French vanguardist projects from the 1950s to the present, and in particular on their relation to the events and aftermath of the Algerian War of Independence, and Zaataris work recovering and researching photographic documents of an uneven modernity in Lebanon and the surrounding region suggested several fruitful points of intersection. In interrogating the implications of national and regional affiliations as emblems or determinants of identity, we both question—and hope to reshape—notions of aesthetic heritage in order to think about the political economy of cultural production. We envisioned our collaboration as one that might introduce to Northwesterns campus a sense of the immediacy and interconnectedness of otherwise apparently remote histories, times, cultures, and analytical practices. We hoped that it would also help our students reconceptualize a part of the world that the majority of Americans know only from the fragmented images of violence and war that the Western media routinely disseminate.

Of the Public Born: Raymond Hains and La France déchirée*

Le peuple constitue ses propres archives. Michel Foucault, 1974

Excavating Images on the Border

Abstract This text considers the function of the photographic image, both analogue and digital, in the multimedia interventions of the Beirut‐based artist Akram Zaatari. Instead of reading Zaatari’s work through the commonplace tropes provided by the rhetoric of documentary and archival appropriations, it focuses on generating more spatially and temporally dynamic epistemologies in order to better theorise the complexities of imagistic representation during times of war.