Monday Night — 05.10.04 — Discussion – Jayce Salloum
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Contents:
1. About this Monday Night — three questions
2. About Jayce Salloum
3. About his screening at exit art this Saturday 05.08.04
4. Essay for monday night — sans titre [1] /untitled [2]
5. Interview: Occupied Territories:
Mapping the Transgressions of Cultural Terrain
6. ++ Tuesday Night ++ — Curatorial Series — Maria Lind
http://www.16beavergroup.org/monday
http://www.16beavergroup.org/jayce
http://www.111101.net/Artworks/JayceSalloum/
http://www.civilisations.ca/cultur/cespays/images/pay2_20p5.jpg
http://www.lot.at/politics/contributions/s_jayce1.htm
http://www.wwvf.nl/2001/0newarabvideo.htm
click here for vdb info
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1. About this Monday Night
What: Presentation/Discussion with Jayce Salloum
When: 7:30pm, Monday May 10, 2004
Where: 16 Beaver St. 4th Floor (see directions below)
Who: All are invited
As many of you may know, we have for some time been interested in the works of Jayce Salloum and on several occassions have screened his videos at 16Beaver.
This Monday, we are pleased to invite him to the space for what should be an interesting discussion. Since Jayce screening new work on saturday night at exit art, we decided to direct our time together toward a discussion. It would be good if you can make it to the screening on Sat. (info below) but if you can’t, he will be showing some excerpts on monday.
As a point of departure Jayce thought about the three following questions:
1) what is the role of the artist, is it any different from any other individual, do individuals have any responsiblity, do artists see themselves as carrying any responsibilities or not..
2) what are the possibilities of art (making) changing a/the world..
3) does beauty still exist..
We hope to see you there.
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2. About Jayce Salloum
Jayce Salloum has been working in installation, photography, video, mixed media, text, and performance, since 1975, as well as curating exhibitions, conducting workshops and coordinating cultural projects. His work takes place in a variety of contexts critically engaging the representation and actualization of social manifestations and political realities. A media arts philosopher and cultural activist, Salloum has lectured internationally and has exhibited throughout the Americas, Europe, East Asia, and the Middle East, at institutions including The Museum of Modern Art; American Fine Arts; Artists Space; National Gallery of Canada; Canadian Museum of Contemporary Photography; Canadian Museum of Civilization; New Langton Arts; Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions; Long Beach Museum of Art; Walker Arts Center; The Wexner Center; YYZ Artists Outlet; A Space; Contemporary Art Gallery, Vancouver; Western Front; Optica Gallery; Oboro; Dazibzo; Mois De La Photo à Montréal; Miyagi Museum of Contemporary Art; Hara Museum of Contemporary Art; Kunstlerhaus Bethanien; Werkleitz Bienniel; Galerie Nationale du Jeu de Paume; Cinematheque Française; Institute du Monde Arabe; Espace Lyonnais d’Art Contemporain; Shedhalle; Rote Fabrik; Rotterdam International Film Festival; Singapore International Film Festival; British Film Institute; Museo Nacional Centro De Arte Reina Sofia; Museo de Arte Contemporáneo, Seville; CaixaForum, Barcelona; and Théatre de Beyrouth. His texts have appeared in many catalogues, and journals such as, Documents, Framework, Fuse, Felix, Public, Pubic Culture, and Semiotext(e). In 2003 he represented Canada at the 8th Havana Biennial.
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3. about his screening at exit art this Saturday 05.08.04
(as if) beauty never ends..” and other works from the ongoing video project, ‘untitled’
Jayce Salloum videotape screenings at Exit Art
Saturday May 8 – 6:30 & 7:30 pm
475 Tenth Ave.
New York
(212) 966-7745
info@exitart.org
6:30 pm: untitled part 2: beauty and the east
7:30 pm: introduction to the ‘untitled’ project by Jayce Salloum.
7:50 pm: untitled part 3b (as if) beauty never ends, and untitled part 1: everything and nothing
Jayce Salloum will present his “untitled” project, an ongoing videotape addressing social and political realities, representations, enunciations, and the conditions of living between polarities of culture, geography, history, and ideology.
In part 1: everything and nothing (1999-2001, 40 mins.), Salloum, off-camera, talks with Soha Bechara, the ex-Lebanese National Resistance fighter who was detained for 10 years in the notorious El-Khiam torture and interrogation center in South Lebanon. In a riveting and intimate conversation, Salloum inquires about home, being interviewed to death, resistance, survival, and the distance between Paris, where Bechara now lives, and Khiam.
In part 2: beauty and the east (1999-2002, 50 mins.), Salloum turns obliquely to the former Yugoslavia after the NATO bombing. In a kaleidoscope of interviews, refugees, migrants, asylum seekers, and cultural producers address topics ranging from identity and fascism to nationalism and monsters. In both anecdotal and theoretical recountings, they lay out the issues currently at stake in this region of displacement and redefinition; their words are located within images of cities and landscapes. Also shown will be
part 3: (as if) beauty never ends.. (2003, 11 mins.), in which ambient footage including a montage of orchids blooming and material from the site of the 1982 massacres at Lebanon’s Sabra and Shatilla refugee camps are juxtaposed with the voice Abdel Majid Fadl Ali Hassan (a 1948 refugee living in Bourg El Barajneh) recounting a story told by the rubble of his home in Palestine. The tape permeates into an essay on dystopia in contemporary times, and provides an elegiac response to the Palestinian dispossession.
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4. essay — sans titre [1] /untitled [2]
To read the full version, with footnotes and images please visit:
http://www.16beavergroup.org/jayce
(for the evening Jayce suggested this essay)
the video installation as an active archive
Last night of spring break. I was a couple of days into the week when I realized that my plans to get lots of work done, and get lots of rest were essentially incompatible. I opted for rest, with a little work. Now, I can’t imagine walking back into the classroom tomorrow. It was interesting to see the Soha tape along with the tape of the older man telling his story. It made for a complex layering of the notions of home and loss. The older man is narrative. And, the piece made me think about how narrative is a useful way to structure knowledge. The scene seemed almost pedagogical — he tells the story while the younger men listen. Narrative is also portable – it’s what he’s carried with him, and what he can give to those who are younger – a story of loss. The Soha piece is non-narrative – like any conversation, it’s about breaks and pieces, interruptions and turning toward what the other said. I see that this was a good way to pull away from the narrative that dominates her – the martyr’s narrative. Made me think of the problems with narrative, the fixing of one meaning (she resists the titling). This tape made me think differently about fragmentation, loss, and home. So, anyway, they were interesting together. Couldn’t remember if I’d rambled this to you or not.
Love, Anne
‘Postwar’
Lebanon, January 1992, months after the city is open and traversing from East to West is made possible again (at least for us more distant from the recent war and the still remote occupation in the South) without fear of kidnapping or worse. Driving around the city, the slightly battered Fiat 128 looking somewhat the worse for wear, silver of sorts but covered in dust from years in the garage makes its way hesitantly down one of the arteries leading into the core of Beirut, or one of the cores as there are many centres here, old, new, destroyed, demolished, rebuilt, each act of construction part and parcel of a previous one of destruction.. Walid drives, I shoot, video, gazing through the camera at the passing layers of modern and ancient architecture, using it like an appendage, it inhales [3] inadequate images of people, place.. sites of historical and social signification, the fruit vendors, the shattered lives being pieced back together, and more tattered buildings and ruins upon ruins..
Posters of her [4] are everywhere, lamp posts, shop windows, private homes. She is framed on one side, the wounded Lahad [5] on the other, floating on a pinkish background. The photograph on the right is from 1988, the year Soha attempted to assassinate the guy, came close, close enough to be an instant heroine, but not close enough to kill him. She was thrown into the ‘living’ hell hole of Khiam. Those who referred to it as a prison knew nothing about it, others who knew and would raise troubling references referred to it as a concentration camp, colloquially here (or there) it was called something more benign, a detention centre.
Before coming to Lebanon and during the year there, the occupation of the South was a predominant concern in our minds. I decided to focus one of the videotapes (Up to the South… )on this occupation [6] , the terms of its representation inherent in the discourse surrounding the issues, (i.e. terrorism [7] , post-colonialism, occupation , collaboration, experts, spokespeople, symbols, resistance , the land ), and the history and structure of the documentary genre in regards to the representation of other cultures by the West in documentary, ethnography and anthropological practise and the predicament involved from the perspective of the subjects viewed and the practitioners practising. Up to the South.. challenged traditional documentary formats by positing representation itself as a politicized practice. We worked with the material and our experiences of living and working in Lebanon with the insistence on a visible resistance to the acts of aggression that documentary partakes in and the violence that is inherent in its means. The videotape developed a mediating ‘language’ of transposed experience in the guise of a ‘ reluctant documentary’ . These methodologies are refined and developed further in some of the untitled videotapes [8] which incorporate them in their own strategies and means. [9]
to read the interview further please go to:
http://www.16beavergroup.org/jayce
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5. Interview: Occupied Territories: Mapping the Transgressions of Cultural Terrain
http://www.111101.net/Writings/index.php
http://www.111101.net/Writings/Articles/jayce_salloum.php
Occupied Territories: Mapping the Transgressions of Cultural Terrain
an interview-essay with Jayce Salloum and Molly Hankwitz on some of the video works of Jayce Salloum
Framework Fall 2002 Vol. 43, No. 2, pp. 85-103
an international journal dedicated to plural approaches to film and media
Molly Hankwitz :As a video artist/cultural producer who has worked on a specific geographic region of the globe, the Middle East, the politics of representation in general, and the representation of resistance in South Lebanon specifically, can you discuss issues of representation with respect to your work which specifically deal with the subject of resistance and who would you most like your videotapes to be affecting and why?
Jayce Salloum : Perhaps it’s best to talk about this in terms of process. The process of producing and the process of viewing/reading or the reception of the material in an experiential sense. At times this work does feel like intervention, or prodding, poking with a stick, pushing or tugging at something, like seams and creases, or disjoints and fissures. I’d love to think of these as cracks in the underbelly or an implosion of the stereotypes, the conventions, but that may be wishful thinking. Intervention does not have to start out as a obvious public act, but in a psychological sense something has to take place within the viewer/reader. Somewhere in the midst of this transaction the work serves as a means of exchange. Redefinition is possible on some scale at least within the work itself and the various discursive activities that take place around it. Maybe the most we can hope for is some type of lasting effect in our community, what ever community that is, and that in itself may take all of our energies.
I think of what I’m doing as rather obscure and provisional, the years it takes to get a project off the ground and out there takes such a toll that one has to be making it for oneself first, and then for a small circle of friends and colleagues expanding outward, occasionally growing exponentially. This has happened with some of the videotapes and within other activist/cultural communities. Any ‘audience’ beyond the immediate one is a rather amorphous object to predict, so I set up the work to be ‘read’ on different levels by different viewers, at times in different languages, and sometimes through the structure and familiarity of content, specific audiences would have over others. I always try to construct an active audience, not providing easy answers or passive information as pabulum, but often aiming to provoke, producing a ‘productive frustration’ in the viewer where the viewers are responsible for how they’re perceiving, or at least raising questions about the baggage they’ve brought to the work and the responses they have within a very particular / problematized ‘field’ or set of inquiries.
I’m not into this knee-jerk game of show and tell PBS (public television) style. I don’t think ‘understanding’ is possible, or that the ‘subject’ can ever be ‘known’, as far as the western viewer understanding the other culture. The most we can hope for is a kind of empathy, an awareness of the situation on the ground and some sense of the subjectivities at stake. This is both a visual/aural sense as well as a sense of the political/subjective positions. I am still asked about balance and objectivity, as if there is a place where context is equivocal or there is a parity of voices and access to an audience. This question is not only naive, (often times the work isn’t shown because of the overt politics of the tapes or because programmers can’t find an opposing voice to ‘balance’ it out), it also betrays a very narrow and simplistic understanding of media. There is no such thing as ‘objectivity’ in this domain, you have to look to and through the subjective for whatever ‘truths’ you find. Balance has to be looked at in a greater context than what you are seeing in one particular moment. We forget there is a whole history of misinformation, misrepresentation and blatant lies accepted as ‘truths’ here in this county and others like it, especially considering the history of the Middle East, and the more recent Israeli and other western aggressions there.
So there is no one privileged audience but many corresponding or parallel audiences having various accesses to the work. Because the tapes are constructed in a manner that lends themselves a discursive reading, referencing a ground, a history of social acts and reconstruction, I am not worried that they could be taken out of context or dematerialized. Their arguments are self-contained. They’re meant to be effective both conceptually and physically, at times actually working with the equilibrium, the visceral and emotional conditions of the viewer, always though with a direct connection to the perception, the reading of the representation, the history of that representation and the questions raised herein.
As a general paradigm ‘resistance’ could be thought of as a key, the underlying precept to the impetus of my work. There are many different forms of resistance, on the ground, in the political arena, in social and cultural relations/positionings and productions, – they all must play a role. In the work I’ve produced there is not only ‘resistance’ being represented – for instance, the resistance to the occupation of South Lebanon by the Israeli Army, the resistance to the continuity of misrepresentation, and resistance to the use of Lebanon as a product/subject and ‘laboratory’ for the West (in the testing of new & banned warfare technology, the ‘coverage’ by writers, journalists, travelers and ‘experts’, and as a case study for social/cultural studies) – but ‘resistance’ is also being (re)produced structurally, formally, and ideologically in the pieces themselves albeit in a much different capacity. One way or another these productions are a type of resistance, a part of a greater movement, and though limited in its means it still plays a role. It correlates to other work on the ground or groundwork by engaging and one would hope mobilizing a viewer/reader through the agency that the work demands.
I work hard to create an audience, a circulation for my work by making it known to all types of institutions, grass roots organizations, cultural clubs, societies, cinemas, and galleries, through to universities, film/video festivals, and museums. In attending many of my screenings, literally hundreds, I engage the audience directly, and try to invite them into the intricacies and context of the work, this closeness allows for a concrete dialogue to develop with reality checks of various sorts along the way. To know that one’s work can have an impact, an apparent domino effect and actually affect concrete catalytic change in someone’s life is enough motivation to keep one going. I have heard that ( Talaeen a Junuub ) Up to the South [2] did realize some of it’s ambitions in this regard.
MH :Will you discuss some of the critical mediations you employed when you went into Lebanon, viewing it as a site of experience and ‘documentary’ production? How did your methodology change, either by necessity or intellectual decision? Can you discuss this specifically, especially with regard to … Up to the South, (This is Not Beirut)/There was and there was not [3] and your new work which includes material on Soha Bechara?
JS : My methodology is constantly being reinvented, through the production and conceptualizing of each project I try to develop an approach specific to those sets of terms and experiences. Video does have constants though, its mediating properties. These are often mixed up with the properties of language. Video is not a ‘language,’ it may have elements of language, but this is subject to misreading when the two semantic vocabularies are talked about in an overly simplified notion of ‘video as language’.
Going into Lebanon there was plenty of conceptual baggage (not to mention over half a ton of video equipment) that I was bringing along for better or worse. There was also the ‘tools’ of the process, the syntax structure or editing system and the critique inherent in it, the methodology of research, the shooting mannerisms, the collecting of appropriated footage, the intricate obsessive logging of all, the refining and slicing up of the material, building of sequences, the rejoining, the deliberate weaving and layering, the conceptual and physical shifting, the building of narrative through reoccurrent images and metaphors, the spreading out of narrative, fragmenting it in continuous and discontinuous threads, the use of disjunctive video and audio elements, the matching & mismatching and editing of audio from material recorded and gathered, the use of text in titles, subtitles, inter titles & headlines, the lack of easy monikers, the use of visual and aural jokes, using laughter as a critical tool, the suspension of belief, the ending of information, the insistence on moments of pleasure and the production of frustration. These are all elements or “nuances” if you like, that I had been developing in my work in video and other media since 1978.
In Muqaddimah Li-Nihayat Jidal (Introduction to the End of an Argument) Speaking for oneself … /Speaking for others … [4] I was able to direct these elements at a specific political situation regarding the construction of the ‘Arab’ in the media and the representations of the Middle East, Arab culture and the Palestinian people produced by the West. Initially this project had started out as something very different from the way it ended up. In 1988 I went to the West Bank and the Gaza Strip and spent a few weeks recording Palestinian accounts of the occupation both inside and outside the ‘Green Line’ and following an NBC news crew around to different locations in the middle of this ‘eye witness’ tour with educational and religious leaders from Houston, Texas. This was shortly after the beginning of the ‘first’ Intifada (Dec. 8, 1987). After spending three weeks in Beirut on my way back to California I still was trying to figure out what to do with the forty plus hours I had recorded. I was adamant that I wanted to do something completely different than the works with appropriated TV footage I had done before (“In the Absence of Heroes …” Warfare; A case for context, 105:00, 1984, and “The Ascent of Man.” Parts I-III, 23:00, 1985-87), partly because it was too labor intensive and partly because I thought that this type of material warranted a different approach. While I was mulling this over I finished a short videotape in California, ‘Once You’ve Shot the Gun You Can’t Stop the Bullet’, 8:00, 1988, which combined footage from travels through sixteen different countries, including my hometown, and my mother pointing to our place on the map, to watching the ‘Cosby’ show in Beirut. The tape tackled the idea of distance and alienation in moving through cultures and personal relationships and the space, the separation that always remains. It turned out to be a blend of my older style of quick editing with some of the techniques I was to use subsequently in Lebanon when working with longer first person accounts. Right after finishing this tape, I moved to New York, thinking what I wanted to do with the material collected in the Occupied Territories was to produce a piece stringing together stories of life under Israeli occupation. I started looking for someone to work with to do the translations and to help make sense out of the material, ideally someone both inside and outside of the culture. After meeting with several Palestinians living in New York who were involved in the media community I decided to work with Elia Suleiman, and after much discussion and negotiation I agreed to turn this tape into a collaboration using my material as found footage, together with appropriated footage ranging from Lumiere’s depictions of Egypt, through Valentino, Elmer Fudd, Exodus, Elvis in ‘Harem Scarum’ etc. up to the ‘Raiders of the Lost Arc’ and ‘Nightline’. I dreaded the thought of once again coming face to face with volumes of television and movie material but was reconciled to the fact that before one could make any more representations of/from the Middle East, we had to confront the representations that existed previously forming the dominant images and stereotypes that we were up against. We had to carve out a space, arresting/deconstructing the imagery and ideology, decolonizing and recontextualizing it to provide a rupture, a rift for other voices and projects to emerge or exist. And in doing so we needed to replace and open up this former space of subjectivity that was absence enforced, consistently denied and marginalized to its furthest extremes in the ‘media’. We mimicked the form of television, trying to subvert its methodology in an implosionary means. Basically we made a conceptual attack, an aggressive work, but conceptual nevertheless because realistically we couldn’t hope to dent the mass of misrepresentation that existed and continues to exist. This was in part an action for our own minds, and our own working process practically speaking where we knew that this had to be done first before other projects could have an appropriate context to be seen and heard.
The Lebanon project including the tapes and year long workshops, both extended and provided alternatives to the positions adopted in Introduction to the End … . Approaching Lebanon I had first had to ‘find’ it, locate it, its history of representation, its consumption in the West and its current situation, this is what This is Not Beirut … tries to deal with, this and the experience of being there, and the making of … Up to the South… . Up to the South works with the notion of accounting and recounting experience. We (Walid Ra’ad and myself ), had to devise a method to present these stories while still constructing a piece that would critique the documentary genre and its history of representing other cultures. This was done for the most part in the editing process long after having been there. While there we gathered as much material as we could (over 150 hours of interviews and close to 50 hours of archival material), the methods we devised for this were more of a shooting plan, figuring out a schematic of representative subjects then interviewing them and recording the moments inbetween. So this was a new way of working for me, instead of an all encompassing initial gathering of material, we focused on a group of people that we tried to locate and get close to. I carried some techniques over from previous works and developed them further, for example, highlighting the idea of ‘naming’, and how terms like ‘terrorism/terrorist’ are used to efface the historical roots and current conditions of conflict, and the positions of power concerned. In … Up to the South the experiences recorded transgress the imposition of ‘naming’, the story told/accounted for and revealed, contains a particular subjecthood that one is at once close to but always kept distant from. In an attempt to make evident the machinery, the apparatus of ‘documentary’, we also made the acts of mediation obvious. Forefronting the cutting, the editing, the elimination and obsessions of the construction process, visual and audio segments are presented and received one after another. Basic blocks are linked conceptually over broken spaces, gestures are cut off, their weight collapsing them forward into a spiral of consecutive accounts that slice up, or sever the ‘approach’ of ‘documentary’, the encroachment, the manipulation that is the inevitable by-product of this history of scientific and cultural imperialism. This is a mediating ‘language’ of transposed experience, a ‘reluctant documentary’.
We had many discussions about what forms or levels of manipulation should/could be used when handling the interview material, what we had to ‘preserve’, remain ‘truthful’ to, whether scripting could be mixed into the ‘live’ accounts, and how we had to handle this material differently or not than the appropriated type of footage used in my earlier tapes. And this idea of the responsibility of representation, who and what it was responsible to, the subjects taped, or the object of the tape itself. We didn’t rule out much in the gathering stage and figured the rest of it out as we went along. It’s like this for each tape though, trying to come up with the most appropriate methodology, usually stumbling along for quite a while without really knowing how things will look in the end.
to read the interview further please go to:
http://www.111101.net/Writings/index.php
http://www.111101.net/Writings/Articles/jayce_salloum.php
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6. ++ Tuesday Night ++ — Curatorial Series — Maria Lind
Please stay tuned for details, but we have invited Maria Lind, the day after Jayce, Tuesday May 11, for an informal discussion about her curatorial practice and recent activities.
What follows is a bio from http://www.artspace.org.nz/shows/02_12.htm
Maria Lind
Swedish born curator Maria Lind was appointed at the beginning of 2002 as director of Kunstverein München. During that time, she has reinforced her reputation as a curator of opinionated and intelligent art events, with a collaborative working method. Lind’s reputation has been established with edgy projects such as What if: art on the verge of architecture and design, collaborative video projects and commissioned installations with European artists such as Apolonija Sustersic. From 1997-2001 she was curator at Moderna Museet in Stockholm and in 1998 was co-curator of Manifesta 2 Europe’s biennale of contemporary art. Notable among her academic credits is her stint with the influential Whitney Independent Study Programme in New York. Lind was one of 10 contributing curators to Phiadon’s Fresh Cream book, and in the magazines Index (where she was on the editorial board) Katalog as well as in Frieze, Art Monthly, and Parkett.
“We intend to break the typical relationship between the exhibition itself and the programme of the institution, reconfiguring the relationship between the curator and the artist”.
http://www.kunstverein-muenchen.de
http://www.artmonthly.co.uk/curator.htm
http://www.curatingdegreezero.org/m_lind/m_lind.html
