Akram Zaatari at Wiels
Artist: Akram Zaatari
Venue: Wiels, Brussels
Exhibition Title: This Day at Ten
Date: February 21 – April 27, 2014
Full gallery of images, press release and link available after the jump.
Images:
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Ain el Mir, 2002
HD Video, color, and ambient sound, mono. 150 min. Ed. 7 + 2 AP
Installation view, Akram Zaatari: This Day @ Ten, Sfeir-Semler Gallery, Beirut 2013/14
Courtesy the artist and Sfeir-Semler Gallery, Beirut / Hamburg
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Letter to a Refusing Pilot, 2013
Installation view at the 55th Venice Biennale.
Photo : Marco Milan.
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The Taamir District.
Photo: Hashem el-Madani.
Courtesy the Arab Image Foundation, the artist & Sfeir-Semler Gallery
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Letter to a Refusing Pilot, 2013
HD video, color, sound. 34 minutes. Video still. Ed. 7 + 2 AP
Courtesy the artist and Sfeir-Semler Gallery, Beirut / Hamburg
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Untitled, 2013
Courtesy of the artist & Sfeir-Semler Gallery
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Untitled, 2013
Courtesy of the artist & Sfeir-Semler Gallery
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Letter to a Refusing Pilot, 2013
HD video, color, sound. 34 minutes. Video still. Ed. 7 + 2 AP
Courtesy the artist and Sfeir-Semler Gallery, Beirut / Hamburg
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This Day@Ten Magasin Centre National d’Art Contemporain de Grenoble, France 2012/13
Installation view. Photo © Blaise Adilon
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This Day@Ten Magasin Centre National d’Art Contemporain de Grenoble, France 2012/13
Installation view. Photo © Blaise Adilon
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Taamir Project. Buildings Type
Archival Inkjet Prints. 100 cm x 145 cm
Courtesy of the artist & Sfeir-Semler Gallery
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Time Capsule, Karlsaue Park, Kassel, 2012
Reinforced concrete foundation and 16 photographic objects. Concrete, steel, wood, acrylic, time and photographic memory. 83 x 83 x 268 cm
Commissioned by dOCUMENTA (13) dOCUMENTA (13) and co-produced with Marseille-
Provence 2013, European Capital of Culture; Sfeir-Semler Gallery, Beirut/Hamburg; Köster Bau, Bielefeld
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Untitled, 2013
8 planes (polyamide 12, selective laser cintering) on walls Variable dimensions.
Courtesy of the artist & Sfeir-Semler Gallery
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Untitled (Plane 1 & 4), 2013
Archival Inkjet Prints. 100 cm x 145 cm each.
Courtesy of the artist & Sfeir-Semler Gallery
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Untitled (Plane), 2013
Archival Inkjet Prints. 100 cm x 145 cm
Courtesy of the artist & Sfeir-Semler Gallery
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This Day, 2003
Originally SD, HD remastered video, color and sound. 86 min. Video still
Courtesy the artist and Sfeir-Semler Gallery, Beirut / Hamburg
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This Day, 2003
Originally SD, HD remastered video, color and sound. 86 min. Video still
Courtesy the artist and Sfeir-Semler Gallery, Beirut / Hamburg
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Saida June 6th 1982, 2003
video, colour, sound, 4,30min, Ed5+1
Courtesy the artist and Sfeir-Semler Gallery, Beirut / Hamburg
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Saida June 6th 1982, 2003
video, colour, sound, 4,30min, Ed5+1
Courtesy the artist and Sfeir-Semler Gallery, Beirut / Hamburg
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Saida June 6th 1982, 2003
video, colour, sound, 4,30min, Ed5+1
Courtesy the artist and Sfeir-Semler Gallery, Beirut / Hamburg
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Souvenirs from the front, small stones, 2007
40x50cm
Images courtesy of the artist, WIELS, and Sfeir-Semler Gallery. Photos by Sven Laurent.
Press Release:
WIELS presents the first solo exhibition in Belgium by Lebanese-born, Beirut-based artist Akram Zaatari (b.1966). Zaatari showed one of the most celebrated works at last year’s Venice Biennale, Letter to a Refusing Pilot, and brings this film installation to WIELS, together with three works that revolve around a letter, or the writing of a letter.
The title of the exhibition refers to Zaatari’s cinematic essay from 2003, the similarly titled This Day. Ten years later, with the war in Syria escalating and unsolvable Israeli-Palestinian conflict, he uses the work as a prism through which to bring the past and the present into focus. Zaatari’s work is a meditation upon images, their meaning and function, and the ways in which they circulate.
Closely linked with the practice of archiving and opening up a collection, he has developed a very personal montage style, open and documentary with subjective voice-overs or text overlays. Zaatari thus gives a voice to the people portrayed and the photographers, and juxtaposes these subjective documents with the great historical developments and conflicts of the age.
Zaatari profiles himself as one of the people spearheading the renewal of documentary filmmaking and photography, and more specifically as a lucid observer of images from the emotionally laden Middle East, a region that has long been divided and scarred by war. Providing evidence to counter Western stereotypes of the Arabs, their culture and nature is a driving force for both Zaatari and the Arab Image Foundation, of which he is a co-founder. Writing a letter is simultaneously both proof and testimony: a personal reaction to events, and the registration of what takes place. In the exhibition, during the excavation of The Letter for a Time of Peace (2007), we encounter the voice of a resistance actor from war in Southern Lebanon. Letter to a Refusing Pilot is an evocative, poetic narrative dedicated to the former Israeli pilot who refused to bomb the school in the city of Zaatari’s birth.
Link: Akram Zaatari at Wiels