ART CITIES:Malmö-Akram Zaatari
Akram Zaatari has developed an interdisciplinary practice that combines the roles of image-maker, archivist, curator, and critical theorist. He is concerned with notions of desire, resistance, memory, surveillance, and with the production and circulation of images during wartime. He has built a complex body of work that explores self-documentation and the current state of image making.
By Dimitris Lempesis
Photo: Moderna Museet Archive
Akram Zaatari is especially interested in the Lebanese postwar condition, particularly the televised mediation of territorial conflicts and wars, and the logic of religious and national resistance. Through the appropriation and exhibition of documents and image archives, he invites us to rethink what it means to witness, survive or document a war. Akram Zaatari presents his film installation “Letter to a Refusing Pilot” at Moderna Museet in Malmö. The work raises ethical and existential questions, while uniting the personal with a larger context. The work oscillates between documentary and fiction, combining archival material with newly filmed footage. In the summer of 1982, during Israel’s incursion into Southern Lebanon, a story swirled around the port town of Saida, a rumor that acquired mythological flourishes. Israeli fighter jets were sent to bomb a set of targets. One of these planes was sent near Ain El-Helweh, a Palestinian refugee camp just south of Saida. As the plane approached the target, the pilot recognized the building as a school that he had attended as a child. It was said that his family had lived in Saida for generations, a part of its now disappeared but once thriving Jewish community. The pilot swerved away at the last minute and headed towards the sea, where he dropped his bombs into the water. A few hours later the school was bombed and partially destroyed by another pilot. Zaatari first heard this story when he was 16 years old. His father was the founder of the school. Over the years, Zaatari heard versions of the same tale, with varying explanations for the actions of the pilot, and he came to regard it as a legend of sorts. He once referred to the story during a lecture that was transcribed and published in a book, and came to discover that it was no rumor and that the pilot did exist. His name was Hagai Tamir, who also had a degree in architecture. When Zaatari was selected to represent Lebanon at the 55th Venice Biennale, he chose to focus on this Israeli pilot’s act of conscientious objection with a quiet and evocative film, “Letter to a Refusing Pilot”. The film was shot in the neighborhood around the school, which has been rebuilt, and incorporates aerial photographs, drawings, computer imaging and some personal documents from Zaatari’s own life to tell the story from the perspective of a teenage boy. The installation includes a large video projection, a looped 16mm film, and an empty theater seat. The seat is waiting for the pilot, the sole audience for whom these films have been made. As the seat remains empty, it keeps the work open like an unanswered letter. The empty seat reveals the difference between the two points of perspective in this work. The pilot exists as an absent subject in “Letter to a Refusing Pilot”. His body and voice exist only in the imagination. This is in direct contrast to Zaatari’s point of view. He is the storyteller. And the pilot, as the subject of the story, is conjured mostly through speculation. The seat also becomes an invitation extended to the pilot, one that he accepted when he visited Venice in October 2013 to sit in the chair.
Info: Curator: Andreas Nilsson, Moderna Museet, Ola Billgrens plats 2-4, Malmö, Duration: 26/5-30/9/18, Days & Hours: Tue-Fri 11:00-18:00, Sat-Sun 11:00-17:00, www.modernamuseet.se
