Akram Zaatari is a Lebanese filmmaker, photographer, archival artist and curator. His work focuses on collecting, studying and archiving the history of the Arab World. In 1997, he cofounded the Arab Image Foundation with photographers Fouad Elkoury and Samer Moadad. His art practice involves unearthing, collecting, and re-contextualizing documents to make visible new notions of history while recognizing the complex and contested past and present that they reveal. He represented Lebanon at the 2013 Venice Biennale. His work has also been featured in exhibitions including Documenta 13 in Kassel, Germany, the Sharjah Biennial, and was on view at the Museum of Modern Art in New York from mid-May to September 2013.
In his lecture, Zaatari described how he has used letters in his artistic work from the mid-1990s to 2014. He discussed the creation of his film All is Well on the Border (1997) and how he began to see letters as a way of talking about distance in the context of Israeli-occupied southern Lebanon. He focused on the letters of prisoners in Israeli prisons which were sent through the Red Cross to their family, exploring how optimism is a source for hope when facing despair. He explained how he returned to these letters ten years later, increasingly interested in them not for the text, but for their visual form and the histories of resistance that drawings and photographs included revealed. He explained the use, too, of covert letter capsules for the transportation of political messages between prisons, and how it has inspired his curatorial practice. He concluded by discussing the case of an Israeli pilot who had refused to bomb the school that Zaatari’s father ran as an example of the power of the individual facing a war machine. The film that he created from this story, Letter to a Refusing Pilot (2013), was then screened in full.
While he was at Queen’s as the Dunning Trust lecturer, Zaatari’s first Canadian solo exhibition was featured at the Agnes Etherington Art Centre. His exhibition, All is Well, focused on the process of written communication. His displayed 48 letters of love, politics and secrets which were sent between Lebanon and Isreal in the early 1990s to the present day, a period of violence and tension between the two countries. Contrastingly, there were also videos demonstrating how messages were smuggled out of prison. The exhibition juxtaposed video and photography projects exploring what he called ‘the dynamics that govern the state of image-making’ in times of war.
Zaatari’s lecture was held on February 11, 2014. Watch it in full below.