Ziad began working on this project in 2010, inspired by the work of Lebanese historian Kamal Salibi on the origins of the Bible, which guided Ziad’s repetitive visits to the Arabian Peninsula, and the region of Asir in specific. After Images is neither about documenting nor about proving Salibi’s theories right or wrong. Instead, this work looks into the nature of the myth as a possible historical narrative and advocates the impossibility of documenting such narratives. The artist’s work has revolved around questioning photography: the medium, its constraints and limitations. How to document historical narratives with a camera? What are the limits of a photographic device in capturing or preserving traces, historical or other? Can these nonexistent traces be revealed to the human eye or to the eye of the camera? With the the modest means with which he treats his subjects and the technical constraints that he binds himself to, Ziad allows the medium to capture an instant translation of his ideas. Like in his earlier series Expired where he used 1976 black and white Expired films, a project about the disintegration of images, in which he questions the concept of documentation and the role of archives. In After Images he chose to work with a lens-less camera to experiment the metamorphosis of light. The outcome is a series of images with poetic colors and occasional ambivalent features, images that could have been taken in Asir, or in his olive groves in Saida. Photography in After Images captures the way light can only be accessed through perceptual experience, namely as color, the minimal way in which we can experience light, stripped of shape. After Images questions the notion of the one-truth by underlining the contrast between light, as a real-world physical phenomenon and color, as a subjective sensation. In this sense, Ziad’s photos capture the impossibility to have access to what there was. In this project Ziad collaborated with Saudi writer Yahya Amqassim who wrote a series of poems derived from the basic myths of the Bible. Amqassim’s poems seek to capture the evolving nature of the myths that can gain or lose details through space and time. By telling us his own version of the old myths Amqassim is proposing a perception and never a proof.
BOOK LAUNCH On the occasion of Ziad Antar’s upcoming exhibition, Nour Salame launches Kaph Books, a publishing house specialized in art books from the Middle East, with “After Images” as their first publication.
Beirut Exhibition Center is pleased to invite you to Ziad Antar’s solo exhibition After Images, Stories from the Mountain of Asir.
