Space between our fingers
Jananne al-Ani
Ali Cherri
Faycal Baghriche
Ala Ebtekar
Joana Hadjithomas & Khalil Joreige
Assad Jradi
Mehreen Murtaza
Larissa Sansour
2—30 May 2015
Ashkal Alwan
Arab Image Foundation
Dawawine
The Hangar, UMAM
Mansion
all Beirut, Lebanon
Curated by Rachel Dedman
Space between our fingers / أنامل بين الفضاء was the first-place winner of apexart's Franchise Program, 2014/15.
The exhibition featured artists imagining and challenging outer space and science fiction, from Lebanon, Palestine, Algeria, Iran, Iraq and Pakistan. A satellite exhibition, the work was spread across five venues, engaging with the city and each space's identity, activities and collections.
Ali Cherri
Faycal Baghriche
Ala Ebtekar
Joana Hadjithomas & Khalil Joreige
Assad Jradi
Mehreen Murtaza
Larissa Sansour
2—30 May 2015
Ashkal Alwan
Arab Image Foundation
Dawawine
The Hangar, UMAM
Mansion
all Beirut, Lebanon
Curated by Rachel Dedman
Space between our fingers / أنامل بين الفضاء was the first-place winner of apexart's Franchise Program, 2014/15.
The exhibition featured artists imagining and challenging outer space and science fiction, from Lebanon, Palestine, Algeria, Iran, Iraq and Pakistan. A satellite exhibition, the work was spread across five venues, engaging with the city and each space's identity, activities and collections.
Walking through Beirut, I noticed a recurrent symbol sprayed fuzzily on underpasses and public walls: a cedar on the moon, hugged by a rocket in flight, emblazoned with the words BELIEVE IT. The image is from a project by Khalil Joreige and Joana Hadjithomas, who resurrected the forgotten story of 1960s Lebanese space exploration. Reflecting upon the cedar-moon, interested in alternative narratives to twentieth century space-races, my work expanded to engage other artists whose work tapped into imagery of outer space.
Space between our fingers brought together artists working with imagery and ideas of spaceflight and stars, aliens and astronauts. On the one hand this material is associated with fantasy, dreaming, discovery, and the unknown. At the same time, in the hands of these artists outer space and science fiction are catalysts for reflection upon legacies of colonialism, formulations of history, the militarisation of space, and the intersection of landscape and politics. The exhibition considered their work a channel for criticism of the past, as well as speculation about the future.
The show took the form of a constellation exhibition – placing works in conversation across multiple venues in Beirut, and engaging with those institutions' archives, collections and identities. At The Hangar, the work of Lebanese artist Ali Cherri is installed alongside Joreige and Hadjithomas. Golden Record, 2011, is an element of Joreige and Hadjothomas’ Lebanese Rocket Society project, and takes as its catalyst the idea that the Society’s scientists installed radio transmitters in the head of their Cedar rockets, broadcasting messages such as ‘long live Lebanon!’ out into space. In this installation, the artists use archival sounds from the 1960s and today to build a portrait of Beirut. The work conjures a specific and yet immaterial picture of the city, one that goes beyond associations of pan-Arab idealism or Lebanese patriotism, at a time when such definitions were in flux. The virtuality of the piece itself hints at the instability of history, its physicality is elusive – the record, both historical and musical, is all surface.
Ali Cherri’s Pipe Dreams, 2011, makes us witness to a historic phone call between the first Syrian cosmonaut in space and President Hafez al-Assad, from 1987. Overlaying this moment of political self-fashioning is YouTube footage of statues of Hafez being torn down across the country at the start of the Syrian civil war. The latter was ordered by Syrian government to avoid the humiliation of having such monuments lavishly destroyed in full view of the media. The work thus brings into one space two times: one of aspirational fantasy on the part of Syrian politics, and one of contemporary fear of the media and its potential to undermine authority. Cherri thus unpicks the notion of monumentality and the (un)making of reputation.
Situated in The Hangar, both works are brought into productive tension with local dynamics, as The Hangar – and its research body UMAM – is located in a predominantly Shi’a area of Beirut’s southern suburbs, controlled by Hezbollah, which supports the Assad regime in Syria. The work is accompanied by primary material from The Hangar’s archive and projects on memory in Lebanon and Syria.
Nestled in Ashkal Alwan’s Library in the east of the city is a new commission from Pakistani artist Mehreen Murtaza. Generated from time spent in the city of Karachi, Pakistan, and the perception Murtaza had of its similarity to Beirut, the work combines strands of her research into UFOs, space junk, and ‘probes,’ and the tension between the man-made and organic nature of metals and their chemistry. Murtaza’s recent work has involved planting space objects in industrial environments to open up seams within their space and time. By embedding such pieces in the earth, she creates oxymoronic future-fossils, part of her breakdown of science fiction as creative form.
Alongside Murtaza, Ala Ebtekar’s Tunnel in the Sky, 2013, also engages with science fiction. Ebtekar is an Iranian artist based in San Francisco, who sets inky monoprints over copies of Robert Heimlein’s 1955 sci-fi novels, obscuring the literary page by flooding it with stars and sky. The curlicued mount over each print echoes the shapes of Persian miniature paintings, whose scale invites intense intimacy. The reference to manuscripts creates a connection between the fictive work of Persian literature and contemporary science fiction, just as Murtaza makes a dynamic connection between historical source and contemporary invention. Murtaza’s tendency to bury and half-hide chimes with Ebtekar’s use of visual language to obscure the written word.
In Mansion, Zoqaq el-Blatt, Larissa Sansour and Jananne al-Ani’s work address themes of territory, surveillance and perception. Sansour’s A Space Exodus, 2008, mimics the classic Hollywood image of a man planting a US flag on the moon. The film, however, does more than re-stage this: on the one hand Sansour claims for Palestine – a nation denied territorial sovereignty on Earth – a physical homeland in space. On the other, Sansour questions the very nature of such imagery: its imaginary character defined by the cinematic production of Hollywood and its gendered, masculine form, is here challenged bodily by the artist as a Palestinian woman. The space of the moon as alternative site for Palestinian territory is not without ambiguities – Sansour hints at the marginalisation of the Palestinian as Other, not only in terms of landscape, but as a form of alien, or an astronaut lost in space.
Al-Ani’s Shadow Sites II stills, from 2011, speak interestingly to A Space Exodus, as al-Ani counters simplistic understandings of Middle-Eastern landscape as barren, empty, and lifeless (assumptions which themselves formed part of the original justification for Zionism in Palestine, a supposed ‘land without people…’). For Shadow Sites, al-Ani travelled in a light aircraft across Jordanian airspace, photographing the landscape as articulated by shadow at dawn. The images reveal the presence of ancient structures alongside contemporary military infrastructure, and the crisp aesthetic of the photographs hint at the gaze of the satellite – and the colonisation of space for surveillance.
At the Arab Image Foundation, Faycal Baghriche’s mural Elective Purification, 2009, is inspired by a children’s encyclopedia imagery of the flags of the world. Reproduced on a wall at large scale, Baghriche has drained the flags of their backgrounds, leaving only their stars swimming on ambiguous blue ground. Certain elements of this global political constellation are recognizable – the USA/New Zealand/Israel using stars most obviously – but the ultimate effect is of illegibility. Bled of individual meaning, the stars stand isolated from their context, as the work disrupts notions of borders and limits, reimagining the political realm on earth as a loose constellation in space.
Baghriche’s work critiques the arbitrary nature of a universal visual language of international government, setting the reductive iconography of flags in the vast, democratising openness of space. Drawn from the Arab Image Foundation’s collection, Assad Jradi’s archival photographs of Lebanese space rocket launches sit in conversation with Elective Purification. Jradi’s 1960s images miss their rocket-subjects entirely, capturing only their smoke. For Jradi these are failed images, which sit – like Baghriche’s work – in the liminal space between the legible and immaterial. Interestingly, Jradi’s photographs constituted the starting point for Joreige and Hadjithomas’ Lebanese Rocket Society project, bringing the exhibition full circle.
The curatorial structure of the exhibition is the creative result of struggles with Beirut’s art infrastructure. With no government support for the arts in Lebanon, few museums (though many in the pipeline), and a growing commercial art scene, finding a sizeable non-profit venue for the exhibition proved difficult. Instead, dynamic collaboration with multiple non-profit spaces, of varied identities, has given rise to exciting possibilities. Dawawine will feature a new commission from Ala Ebtekar: Journey to the Moon, 2015, and also host a hub space for the exhibition. This hub will draw together articles, research and texts from the library for the public to explore. 98 weeks’ Home Works Forum conversation on sci-fi in Arabic literature will be available for listening, for instance, alongside links to other artists and related practices. The artworks aim to relate to the spaces/collections/archives in which they sit, and to invite visitors to spend extended time with two works in conversation at each space. Scattered across Beirut, Space between our fingers offers multiple routes through the exhibition and is accompanied by a dynamic public program.
Just as the cedar on the moon pervades the public spaces of Beirut, the exhibition brought together artists for whom outer space is operating as a powerful site for the proposal of alternatives – not just to spatial polemics on earth, but to strategies of historiography. Inherently liminal, subject to transformed laws of physics, space is a site of radical potential. So, too, is art interrogating and playing with questions of place and placelessness, identity and its absence, history and its writing, throughout the region, in the very skin of its cities.
