Between Public Memory and National Narrative: The Visual Document and History in the Middle East
Panel 022, sponsored byAssociation for Modern and Contemporary Art of the Arab world, Iran, and Turkey (AMCA), 2009 Annual Meeting
On Sunday, November 22 at 8:30 am
Panel Description
National memory is often less about its subject and more about the frame that surrounds and presents it, formed more by its retelling, by the fraction of a scene captured in a photograph, or the bolded terms in a school textbook than an actual recollection of events. However, as the basis for historical truth, collective memory remains one of the most deeply contested terrains of modern politics and culture. National governments and elderly citizens, maps and diaries, news images and internet blogs all contend with one another to control the ways in which memory and thus history are produced, given authority, and transformed over time. In the Middle East, where many nations have relatively recently come to independently control their own national narrative these issues are at the forefront of governmental and scholarly discourse and art – whether formal or vernacular – is essential to these debates.
This panel will address the ways in which historical narratives are both institutionalized and challenged through four contexts: the museum, the urban landscape, the photographic archive and the traveling exhibition. Specifically, this panel includes studies of the Beirut National Museum rebuilt following the wars, government sponsored public art sites in the heart of Cairo, art works of contemporary Lebanese artists in the international market, and an American artist’s portrayal of ancient Egyptian objects, which provide four perspectives on the formation of collective memory in or about the Middle East.
Conceptually, these four sites are all mediated by time and space; thus, the public’s perception exists as a set of continually shifting meanings rather than a singular, fixed interpretation. From the violent divide of the Lebanese ‘green line’ to the traffic medians of wust al-balad in Cairo, interactions with the public sphere are circumscribed by the changing particularities of their locations. While in the case of archives and exhibitions, meaning shifts depending on each curatorial intervention with the collections and the purview of their international circuit. Through the juxtaposition of these various sites, the panel will strive to promote discussion of the distinctions offered by time and place in Lebanon, Egypt, and the international and national art markets with the common pursuit of institutionalizing collective memory.
In this paper, I seek to differentiate two separate social spaces in contemporary Cairo – the street space and the road space – and how those spaces shape the understanding of four particular public artworks. In the street space, I investigate the public sculptures of the economist, Ta’alat Harb, by Fathi Mahmoud, and Nahdat Misr [Egypt Awakening] by Muhammad Mukhtar. Both sculptures, installed in their current positions after 1952, represent the careful marking of the urban street space through governmental program. The names of the sculptures, and particularly Ta’alat Harb, become actual destinations of everyday movement. I posit that each sculpture directly interacts with the everyday life of the Cairo pedestrian, continually inscribing the state’s ideology on daily movement. In the road space, I look at the Memorial of the Unknown Soldier and the October War Panorama as fundamentally different social spaces, where the pedestrian must be an active participant in the experience of the monument. Unlike the street space, where the everyday pedestrian confronts sculptures directly and moves around them, the two later works exist only peripherally to the everyday experience. Thus, the participant must actively choose to stop on the road and enter the space, altering his or her mode of reception. Through this comparison of two social spaces, I seek to determine if Michel de Certeau’s hypothesis holds true in the Cairo context. Does the everyday movement of the public interrupt the power structure of the government’s message, or do both spaces preclude dissent?
The Beirut National Museum is a particular space that serves as a stage for the production of the idea of the Lebanese state, despite its often fragile stability. Founded in 1919 by a mandate-era French, The Beirut National Museum in Lebanon amassed a collection of antiquities between 1919 and the outbreak of war in 1975. Situated on the infamous ‘green line’ that divided east and west Beirut during the war years, both the building and the collection were threatened with destruction during the war years. In 1991, the museum was reconstructed, and today, visitors to the museum see a video detailing the attempts to ‘save’ the building and the historically valuable objects within it from war and destruction. The museum, the video detailing its resurrection and the objects within it construct a narrative of Lebanon’s history.
Today, the space of the museum evokes a particular experience of history. The visitor who navigates through the objects is meant to experience moving through time, a particular historical narrative of Lebanon’s ancient past. The arrangement of works, the story of the museum’s destruction and rebuilding and the video documenting this process present a version of history in which elements of ‘civilization’ – Phoenician, Roman, French – are threatened by ‘uncivil’ but unnamed forces posited as external, destructive, violent and alien.
In my paper, I discuss the production of time and history within the space of the Beirut National Museum. I will also explore the ways in which the museum legitimates Lebanon as a modern state with its own ancient historical trajectory, emphasizing connections to European historical narratives rather than Islamic ones.
From the moment of its invention, photography assumed the role of providing evidence. It followed that the cultural context of the nineteenth-century set the parameters and established the function of the photographic archive as a repository of truth in modern civilizations and it is upon that foundation that contemporary artists seek to interrogate, complicate, and reconfigure these historical truths.
Those most intensely engaged with the archival impulse include a group of Lebanese artists whose artistic careers emerged in the era of the Lebanese Wars. Drawing on Sandhya Shetty and Elizabeth Jane Bellamy’s theory of “postcolonial archives” as offering an authoritative voice for disenfranchised subjects, I will examine the work of Lebanese artist-scholars, such as Akram Zaatari, Walid Ra’ad and Lamia Joreige. Moreover, I will build on the work of Sarah Rogers, who in her convincing critique of the lacking historical context in the discourse of Beirut’s postwar generation points out that the “archival aesthetics” of this group link them to neo-conceptual art. However, extending beyond the contemporary trend towards conceptualism in the global market, this paper will draw historical context and contemporary theory on archives together to address the particularities of these artists’ engagement with archival strategies. Grounded in historical and current political and artistic realities, why are contemporary Lebanese artists turning to the format of the archive as the predominant mode for addressing their conditions and what makes the use of archives by this group of artists distinct from the widespread, popular fascination with archival practices within the contemporary sphere of art and discourse?
