art & culture in times of conflict: contemporary reflections

Art and Culture in Times of ConflictContemporary Reflections

introduct ionart and culture in t imes of conflict

art and culture in t imes of conflict contents

Preface – Luc Delrue and Eva Wittocx

introduction

Out of the Libraries Emerge the Butchers – Ronald Van de Sompel

a l'attaque!

Knots – Pier Luigi Tazzi

the impossibility of historiography

Memory and Identity in Beirut: The (Im)possibilities of Artistic Historiography – Bariaa Mourad

destruction in creation

Art: The Critical Point of Creativity and Destruction – Asada Akira A Trace of an Imprint of a Ruin – Mihnea Mircan

targeted heritage Targeted Bodies – Dorothée DupuisThere Will Be No Paradise – Ronald Van de Sompel

war of words

Re-producing History – Octavio Zaya

most wanted work of art

May the Arrogant Not Prevail – Dieter Roelstraete

a.p.

Abandoned Property – Eva Scharrer

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prev ious spread Fig. 1 Pierre Alphonse and Pierre Emile Arnou, The Library of Leuven after the Fire of 1914

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The College of Mayor and Aldermen, the University (KU Leuven) and M –Museum have organised the exhibition Ravaged: Art and Culture in Times of Conflict to commemorate Leuven’s deliberate destruction in 191, one hundred years ago, and more particularly the burning of its university library. The exhibition takes Leuven’s specific history as its starting point, before expanding its geographical and historical scope to highlight the deliberate destruction of heritage and culture in times of conflict throughout the centuries.

On Tuesday August 191, Germany declared war on France. Kaiser Wilhelm II had sent Belgium an ultimatum demanding unhindered passage for the German army, which the Belgian government, under King Albert I, rejected: Belgium hoped that its neutral status would ward off the ravages of war. Despite confirmation of this neutrality, Prussian soldiers marched across the border at nine in the morning on August. The German army was a perfectly oiled machine and boasted an unprecedented level of military equipment. The first great industrial war had begun. Germany hoped to capture Paris swiftly, and continued to rely on the Belgian government to grant free passage, or at least not to offer any military resistance. Belgium, however, proved more resilient than anticipated. Armoured fortresses at Liège and Antwerp, as well as more isolated and less well-organised skirmishes by a non-professional army, delayed the German advance. Although the Belgian army was ultimately defenceless in the face of the enemy’s numerical superiority, German commanders struggled to overcome this unexpected obstacle. Belgium’s refusal to comply with the German master plan no doubt motivated the ruthless acts of revenge that followed. From the very first day of the invasion, the Kaiser’s troops engaged in plundering, theft, systematic destruction and summary executions. Research shows that there were reprisals for each delay in the German advance, with every stray bullet blamed on franc-tireurs or ‘free shooters’ and punished accordingly.

The franc-tireurs excuse was also used in Leuven. At eight o’clock in the evening of August 191, two German battalions came face to face in the course of the confused advance and opened fire on each other. Several soldiers died because of the mistake, and Leuven paid the price. The town was burned to the ground, two hundred citizens died in cellars or were shot, hundreds more were deported, and over a thousand houses were destroyed. The fire lasted for three days, leaving the town centre completely destroyed, including the university library, which had housed an immensely rich collection of medieval manuscripts and incunabula, amounting to some three hundred thousand valuable books. News of the attack on Leuven and its university heritage travelled around the world, eliciting a shockwave of indignation. These acts of ‘Teutonic barbarism’ became key elements in the Allied propaganda battle. The Germans’ relentless

Preface

preface

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The contemporary works in the exhibition offer a range of perspectives from which to reflect on the destruction of physical and intangible heritage. By using a variety of media, the artists do this in ways that can be read directly in some cases, and which are more multi-layered in others. The exhibition opens with the small sculpture Cheval arabe (1 – on Green Book Vol. 1) (011) by Adel Abdessemed. A dying horse lies on its back on Colonel Gaddafi’s famous Green Book, suggesting the destruction of a tradition. Mona Hatoum’s installation Bunker (011), meanwhile, is a monumental ensemble of black steel structures that evoke a post-war city, a poignant work that refers in the first instance to Beirut. Many of the contemporary artworks in the exhibition likewise refer to the Middle East, which is perhaps not surprising at this point in our history. Other names or installations, by contrast, relate to different parts of the world, and to countries like Japan, Poland and Congo.

Two new creations were specially commissioned for Ravaged: Art and Culture in Times of Conflict. Building on his earlier work, the Belgian artist Sven Augustijnen presents a visual reconstruction of post-colonial Congo, with a focus on a destroyed monument to Patrice Lumumba, the country’s first democratically elected prime minister. Fernando Bryce, an artist from Peru, has made new pen-and-ink drawings based on existing archival material (newspapers, postcards and posters) linked to the destruction of the library in Leuven. Although Bryce copies the original source materials, his focus on the international propaganda struggle – with ideologically charged concepts such as ‘Kultur’, ‘civilisation’ and ‘barbarity’ – gives his installation a homogeneous character in which the distinction between news value and propaganda is blurred. The highly varied approaches the contemporary artists have adopted to this subject encourage us to reflect on both the history and future of our world heritage.

In conjunction with the larger publication Ravaged, which discusses the exhibition and its themes at greater length, this second, complementary publication Art and Culture in Times of Conflict: Contemporary Reflections sets out to explore the ten contemporary contributions to the exhibition more deeply. The aim is to situate the works within the artists’ respective oeuvres, and to provide more information about the specific productions and creations. Essays, interviews, images and other references also place the works in an international context.

We would like to conclude by expressing our sincere gratitude to the authors – Asada Akira, Dorothée Dupuis, Mihnea Mircan, Bariaa Mourad, Dieter Roelstraete, Eva Scharrer, Pier Luigi Tazzi and Octavio Zaya�for their contributions to this book.

Luc Delrue, General Director, M – Museum Leuven Eva Wittocx, Head of Contemporary Art Department, M – Museum Leuven

progress through Belgium, accompanied by acts of organised terror, lasted until early November 191, when it became bogged down in a trench war that stretched from the Belgian coast deep into Europe. The conflict dragged on for four gruelling years, until the German army surrendered in the autumn of 1918.

The exhibition Ravaged: Art and Culture in Times of Conflict is composed from a culture-historical perspective and centres on five thematic clusters that recur throughout history in allegorical representations of ‘crimes against culture’. In the first chapter, The Destroyed City, Leuven is given a prominent place among the litany of towns and cities destroyed in the past, such as Troy, Jerusalem, Paris, Reims and Ypres. When cities are reduced to rubble, all that remains are Ruins. Artists have used paintbrushes, pens, burins and cameras to depict the destruction of cultural heritage – and the violence with which it is committed – in fascinating ways, combining the disappearance and remnants of architectural heritage in a single snapshot. Throughout the centuries, buildings, monuments and artworks have also been attacked for their symbolic value – their associations with a civilisation, specific identity, worldview or religion. A prototype of such Deliberate Iconoclasm is the ‘vandalism’ wreaked during the French Revolution. The intended victim here was not so much the art itself as the French monarchy and absolutism. Artworks are not only destroyed, however, they are also looted, stolen from museums and buildings, or dug up illegally from archaeological sites. From antiquity to the Middle Ages and the present day, the looting and Art Theft of cultural objects occurs in almost every war. For example, the dream to fill an immense imperial museum with art from conquered territories was not only fostered by Napoleon, but also by Hitler and Stalin. The last thematic cluster in the exhibition treats the destruction of art and culture as an instrument of Propaganda. Postcards of the burned-out university library in Leuven elicited worldwide indignation and became an instrument of national and international mobilisation. These five aspects are treated extensively in the exhibition, and are described and analysed in the publication Ravaged: Art and Culture in Times of Conflict, directed by Professor Jo Tollebeek, chair of the exhibition scientific committee.

Parallel to the historical section, which covers the period up to the end of the First World War, the exhibition also contains contemporary art, woven through the five thematic clusters. Guest curator Ronald Van de Sompel, who has been researching the field over the past three years, composed the contemporary strand in consultation with the exhibition’s scientific committee. Ten contemporary artists were invited to show new or existing work tying into the exhibition theme. The juxtaposition of historical and contemporary art lies at the heart of M’s artistic policy. Through this exhibition, the museum also aims to stimulate dialogue between an art-historical perspective and different artistic visions, each of which has developed its own visual language. By including a number of contemporary visions in the exhibition, the museum also shows explicitly that general indignation at the destruction of cultural heritage remains extremely strong today. The appeal from the Director General of UNESCO to respect and protect cultural heritage can only be endorsed and supported. Irina Bokova has repeatedly emphasised that the ‘destruction of national heritage equates to the destruction of the soul and identity of the people’. It would be impossible, however, for the exhibition to represent all the world’s current conflict zones, such as the destruction of sites in Timbuktu in Mali and numerous valuable historical sites in Syria, including Damascus, Aleppo and Homs.

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To articulate the past historically does not mean to recognise it ‘the way it really was’ (Ranke). It means to seize hold of a memory as it flashes up at a moment of danger. – Walter Benjamin

Background

During the night of August 191, a library holding 0,000 volumes, including 70 medieval manuscripts and more than a thousand incunabula, went up in flames. It was the centenary of this incident – the destruction by German troops of the fourteenth-century Cloth Hall and its eighteenth-century university library wing in Leuven – that prompted the exhibition Ravaged: Art and Culture in Times of Conflict.

The First World War began for Belgium on August, two days after Germany had delivered an ultimatum demanding free passage for its troops to France. The Belgian government refused to comply, citing the country’s neutral status, and so Germany invaded. Anything that delayed the well-organised advance of the German army was met with reprisals. A recurring pattern was established, in which a stray shot provoked panic among the invaders, followed by claims that townspeople had fired on them. The myth-complex of this so-called ‘franc-tireur war’ is discussed at length by John Horne and Alan Kramer in German Atrocities: A History of Denial, which emphasises the historically formed cultural presumptions that underpinned it.

The myth of the franc-tireur also played its part in Leuven, a university town to the east of Brussels. Around eight o’clock on the evening of August, two companies of Von Kluck’s Landwehr mistakenly began firing at each other. Leuven burned for three days and little was left of the town centre once the fires abated. Not even the Cloth Hall, the official seat of the university, was spared: ‘Soldiers kicked in the cellar door at eleven o’clock in the evening and started a fire. All the librarian found a week later was a heap of broken pillars, stones and charred beams, among which tens of thousands of books lay smouldering.’

The burning of Leuven sent a shockwave around the world. At the same time, the terror inflicted on the town provided the Allied cause with an ethical argument to exploit. According to historian Barbara Tuchmann in The Guns of August, the burning of Leuven was intended not only as a punishment for alleged Belgian resistance but also a warning to Germany’s enemies. Though other parts of the town’s academic heritage also fell victim to the flames, this only accounted for

ronald van de sompel

Out of the Libraries Emerge the Butchers 1

a small part of the damage Leuven suffered. Above all, it would be the image of the burned-out university library that went down in history.

The destruction of the centuries-old university library in Leuven heralded the start of the deliberate destruction of libraries and other cultural resources as a strategy of twentieth-century warfare.6 Germany under Hitler is perhaps the most obvious example of the organised destruction of books and libraries in the twentieth century. The plundering and destruction, not only of libraries but also of museums, statues, temples, churches, mosques and other cultural patrimony, has always been with us, as has the looting of books, paintings and works of art. The Serbs in the former Yugoslavia and the Taliban in Afghanistan are recent examples of aggressors who have deliberately destroyed cultural heritage.

Germany contravened the rules of the Hague Conventions of 1899 and 1907, right from the beginning of the Great War. Three stipulations in these conventions refer to the protection of cultural heritage, indicating that states should take steps to safeguard buildings dedicated to art, science or religion; that an occupying power bears responsibility for museums and other public institutions; and that precautionary measures should be taken during bombardments to safeguard historic monuments and buildings. The conventions failed to prevent the destruction of cultural heritage not only in Leuven, but also in Reims, where the cathedral was shelled on 19 September 191.7 The nascent internationalism expressed in these conventions was stifled by growing nationalistic sentiments, which finally exploded into a world war.8

art and culture in t imes of conflict

Fig. Map of Leuven showing the damaged areas, drawn up during the First World War for the city counsel

prev ious spread Fig. Mona Hatoum, Bunker (detail), 011


Contemporary Reflections

Two story lines, one historical, the other art-historical, are interwoven in the exhibition Ravaged: Art and Culture in Times of Conflict. The historical strand places particular emphasis on what happened in Leuven during the First World War, while the art-historical approach presents traditional visual representations in close proximity with the reflections of contemporary artists. The destruction and plundering of cultural heritage have, in fact, been an important theme in artistic representation through the centuries and round the world, and remain so in conflicts to the present day. The contemporary artists in the exhibition use their knowledge of the present and the past to interrogate the role of artistic representation in relation to this destruction, or seek to formulate critical reflections on the legitimacy of historiography.

Around the time of the First World War, the representation of conflict underwent a fundamental transformation. According to the critic Boris Groys in Art at War, the division of labour between war and art in the classical era was quite clear. The warrior did the actual fighting, and the artist represented this fight by narrating or depicting it. The artist needed the warrior as a subject. But the warrior needed the artist even more. The artist could always find a more peaceable topic. But only an artist was able to bestow fame on the warrior and to secure it for generations to come. With the advent of the historical avant-gardes, military concepts were introduced into artistic discourse – including the term ‘avant-garde’ (vanguard) itself – and artists developed ideological and visual strategies to destroy existing, traditional forms of art. In other words, the modernist artist not only limited himself to illustrating, lauding or denouncing a conflict, he waged war himself.9

Fig. Sven Augustijnen, Spectres, 011

Fig. Fernando Bryce, To the Civilised World, 01

Contemporary artists need to search for alternative approaches. Conflicts can no longer be seen as isolated incidents: wherever they might erupt in the world, they are connected. With every fresh act of war or terror, moreover, the mass media project a never-ending stream of images of destruction into our homes. Contemporary warriors no longer need the artist to inscribe their feats into the universal memory: the mass media are at their immediate disposal to do it for them.

Today’s artists have also taken up a new position in relation to historiography. The representation of historical events long remained the sole preserve of painting. In the nineteenth century, history painting was regarded throughout Europe and the United States as the greatest of all genres. In the twentieth century, modern artists – such as Picasso in Guernica – interpreted history painting in a new way. And where history painting in previous centuries delivered clear messages, for the most part aimed at strengthening national identity, contemporary artists today often call this approach into question. Artists who cast their gaze on the past from the present are drawn to cultural difference or the post-colonial, or they choose to return to the past in the hope of identifying the roots of the present. In doing so, they are no longer tied to the traditions of historical representation: on the contrary, their approaches to history are just as diverse as the motivations driving their investigations. At the same time, the boundaries between the empirical approach of the historian and that of the artist are seemingly blurred by the coupling of archive research with fiction, historiography and personal testimony.

All this suggests that contemporary artists feel compelled to take up a new position towards the role of historiography on the one hand, and that of conflicts


Adel Abdessemed (°1971) makes use in his work of subjects such as violence and society, life and death, man and animal, exile and globalisation. Using them as a basis, he constructs a world view that in one way or another is always driven by an autobiographical impulse – ‘For me, a work doesn’t exist if it isn’t autobiographical’, he says10 – without leaning towards the anecdotal. It is an attitude that can be formulated as being part of the world. The way he does this, like a global nomad, appears at first sight or in part to be determined by his background. He was born in Constantine in Algeria, where he grew up in the turbulent post-colonial period and witnessed the collapse of a collective dream of modernisation.

Abdessemed’s work is often perceived as violent. And yet it consists only of images that appeal to us directly – made without any unnecessary manipulation – aimed at communicating what he describes as the intensity of a cry.11 This intensity or potency is present throughout his work, the result of a fight. Hou Hanru writes in To Live Dangerously! that ‘he simply plunges into real life, a world of confusion, violence, and risks’. Abdessemed does not allow himself to be pushed into the role of victim. Instead he pays tribute to the liberating thought that people should learn to be masters of their own fate. Referring to his work as à l’attaque, he fights back, in his own way, in complete freedom.1

In his video The sea (008) [Fig. 6, p.16] the artist finds himself in the middle of a rough ocean, clinging to a plank as a provisional raft, attempting to write the words ‘politically correct’ as if in a performance. This is not an artist who imagines himself above the fray, in an academic ivory tower, but as a puppet of fate, subject to the laws of nature, just like the refugees who, legally or illegally, try to reach the European mainland by boat. Which brings us to Salam europe (006) [Fig. 7, p.16], a sculpture constructed from rolled-up barbed wire with a total length of ten miles, the exact distance between the Maghreb and Europe.1

Although the à l’attaque attitude calls to mind the ideas of the avant-gardes, the way in which Abdessemed – at least in Cheval arabe (1 – On Green Book Vol. 1) – connects tradition and modernity is ambiguous and non-narrative. The local challenge of a situation such as in Libya (Cheval arabe dates from 011) is part of a worldwide battle, with the street as a locus of hope and change. ‘Before the advent of the Arab Spring,’ writes Kaelen Wilson-Goldie, ‘the question had become: Why have we failed, period, without hope? In the early 000s, there was a sense of total incapacity and total despair.’1 In a conversation with Pier Luigi Tazzi, Abdessemed admits that he has always lived with the idea of a war of liberation: ‘[In] the 1980s, there was a popular uprising, and later the civil war, Islam on the march and bloody terrorism. The story isn’t finished. I spent my entire youth in terror and violence.’1

With Cheval arabe (1 – On Green Book Vol. 1) Abdessemed appears to take us to a state of exception, to the first moment of a Hobbesian logic, in the assumption of a civil war as the original state of human society, which means to say a generalised conflict between all the individual actors. Just as man slaughters his fellow man, so too does he treat the animal – that was initially his equal and partner – in an inhuman way.

and their representation in the media on the other. This can be extrapolated to the way the destruction and pillaging of cultural heritage is represented. In inviting contemporary artists to participate in Ravaged: Art and Culture in Times of Conflict, we hoped to discover which ideological and visual strategies they develop toward the formation of images of conflict in the media and the limitations of historiography.

À l’Attaque!

The contemporary sculpture in the first exhibition room of Ravaged: Art and Culture in Times of Conflict is concentrated in its simplicity, complex in its stratification, and sows confusion. There is something uncomfortable about it: it is provocative and mysterious. Although at first sight the component parts of the sculpture appear easily legible, the work as a whole does not yield up its secret immediately.

Cheval arabe (1 – On Green Book Vol. 1) (011) [Fig. 18, p.1] by Adel Abdessemed shows us a resin horse, seemingly in the throes of death, tied with thin wire to a green book. The title suggests a reference to an age-old tradition, integrally linked to Arab culture and that of the Bedouin people: the Arabian horse is known for its unique characteristics – speed, reliability, endurance and intelligence – aspects that have made it possible for man to deploy it when waging war. Numerous wars resulted in the breed spreading throughout the world. It has been in Europe since as early as 109, following the invasion of Palestine by the Crusaders, who brought back Arabian horses as spoils of war. The Green Book sets out the political philosophy of the former Libyan head of state, Muammar al-Gaddafi. The civil war in 011 was quickly brought to a close by a well-prepared NATO intervention and copies of the book were burned by anti-Gaddafi demonstrators. This relic of the old regime disappeared from public life with the so-called ‘Arab Spring’, which has meanwhile been redubbed an ‘Arab Autumn’. Algeria ISP, the news agency that reported Gaddafi’s final hours, claimed that he was tortured before falling into the hands of a gang of ‘rebels’, who then went looting.

Fig. 6 Adel Abdessemed, The sea, 008 Fig. 7 Adel Abdessemed, Salam europe, 006


The Impossibility of Historiography

For centuries towns and cities have been the theatres of battle. The siege of Troy – a city that was destroyed several times and rebuilt on the ruins of its predecessor – is legendary. Another city that appears to have incorporated the incessant cycle of destruction and regeneration in its myth of origin – as ontological status, as it were – is Beirut. In the words of architecture historian Hashim Sarkis, the city has arguably been destroyed and rebuilt five to ten times: ‘It is predestined to be destroyed in order for it to be reborn.’16

Another myth in Beirut’s image formation is that of the instability of a hotbed of political violence combined with cosmopolitism. Beirut acquired its cosmopolitan status in the second half of the nineteenth century. In the 190s and 60s, the city was home to over seventeen official religious sects and a place where Arabic, French and English were spoken. With ‘local’ defined as ‘cosmopolitan’, debates over cultural authenticity seemed unable to take root. However, with the civil war in 197, fragmentation escalated along political and sectarian lines.17

Even though in 1989 there was a fragile truce, a committee of historians never managed to produce a narrative about the war satisfactory for all the sectarian factions. Instead of historicizing the war, some of the interpretations are trapped in the nostalgia of an idealised pre-war Lebanon. What’s more, large-scale and lucrative redevelopment in central Beirut seems to have destroyed more of the city’s valuable architecture than occurred in nearly two decades of conflict. And yet the memory of the war in Lebanon is a central subject of contemporary art from Beirut.

Mona Hatoum and Lamia Joreige approach this history of destruction in the context of Ravaged: Art and Culture in Times of Conflict from two different starting points. Mona Hatoum (°19) left Lebanon at the start of the civil war and introduces the memory of her native city as an apocalyptic physical landscape, while Lamia Joreige (°197) – associated with the so-called ‘post-war generation’ of artists (‘so-called’ because the conflict never really ended) – presents a psychological landscape of Beirut, the starting point of which is the near impossibility of historiography.

Mona Hatoum’s background is well documented. The artist was born to a Palestinian family living in Beirut. She went to London in 197, intending to stay only briefly, but was forced to remain there by the outbreak of war in Lebanon. In the past, Hatoum created few works that directly referred to Beirut. One exception was Under Siege (198), a seven-hour performance focusing on:

a human figure reduced to a form covered in clay, trapped, confined within a small structure, struggling to stand up again and again… slipping and falling again and again.… This action represented an act of separation… stepping out of an acquired frame of reference and into a space which acted as a point of reconnection and reconciliation with my own background and the bloody history of my own people.… A week later came the invasion of Lebanon, the siege of Beirut and the horrific events that followed, making the extent of their suffering clearly visible.18

With Bunker (011) [Fig. , p.10–11] [Fig. , p.0–1], Mona Hatoum revisits her birthplace. A group of twenty-two steel constructions evoke the experience of a city abandoned by its population. Although the structures are stripped of architectonic details, reduced to their basic elements, some of them are based on recognizable buildings, such as hotels. In fact, hotels played an important role right from the beginning of the civil war – in what became known as the ‘Battle of the Hotels’, for instance, which began on October 197 and lasted for several months. The twenty-eight-storey Murr Tower was a tactically valuable location, towering over the buildings in adjacent areas, both Christian and Muslim. The lobbies of other hotels, such as the Holiday Inn, featured during the episode of the hostage negotiations.19

The physical experience of an artwork always comes first for Hatoum, and this is undoubtedly the case with Bunker: walking through this collection of modern ruins the visitor is immediately seized by their emotional impact. This is a hostile place, not a protective one as the title of the work would lead you to believe. The experience of unsettledness is a returning motif in Hatoum’s work. According to the artist, it was first expressed in Light Sentence (199) – a space in which the movement of a light bulb causes the shadows of wire-mesh lockers to be in perpetual motion: ‘It is only after I made this work that I started reading some possible connections with my background or my own experience of unsettledness and this feeling of a constantly shifting or even threatening environment’.0

Where Bunker primarily responds to the situation in Beirut, other works relate explicitly to other conflicts. In 3-D Cities (008–10) a topographical map of Beirut is combined with similar maps of Bagdad and Kabul, all of them modified by geometrical laser cuts – concentric circles that create concave and convex areas referring to the cycle of destruction and rebuilding that these cities have gone (and continue to go) through – as evidence of their shared instability. The work seems to endorse recent theoretical approaches, such as Negri and Hardt’s, which suggest that the concept of Empire is fundamentally characterised by a lack of boundaries; that it encompasses the spatial totality; or that it rules over the entire ‘civilised’ world.1 This is even more pronounced in Hot Spot (006), a spherical, gridded, steel frame in the shape of a globe – 0 centimetres in diameter – in which hot, red neon lines suggest the ubiquity of conflicts throughout the world.

Hatoum returns to Beirut in Witness (009) [Fig. 8, p.0], which features a porcelain miniature of a well-known statue on the Place des Martyres. The bronze original – faithfully reproduced, including the bullet and shell-damage – also appears in a video that is a part of Lamia Joreige’s a-linear time line in Beirut, Autopsy of a City (010) [Fig. 9, p.0 ] [Fig. 0, p. –]. The statue commemorates Lebanese nationalists of the First World War and symbolises the destruction of central Beirut.

The previously mentioned sense of unsettledness is echoed in the way Joreige deals with the experience of time. What goes for the general historiography of Beirut is also applicable to artists of the ‘post-war generation’ and how they try to find their own place in this historiography. Joreige’s work mirrors conceptions of history, fractures in time and the associated loss of identity.

Beirut, Autopsy of a City grew out of a series of tragic events that have taken place in Beirut since 00. The constant fear that the city might disappear led Lamia Joreige to investigate the past, searching for other moments when the city had been in danger. Using archive material, a time line, documentary photos


and videos, she brings together in the installation fragments from the historiography of the city, which she combines with reflections and texts that embody a personal perspective.

There is an encounter in the installation between archaeology, poetry, modern images and ancient texts. Wandering between stories of conquest and defeat, the visitor slowly comes to realise the unfeasibility of constructing a comprehensive history. The time line of the first chapter, A History of Beirut’s Possible Disappearance, is not conceived in a linear way, but makes seemingly arbitrary connections between different instants in time. A projection in chapter two, Beirut, 1001 Views – an overlapping of various moments in history – is neither an image from the past nor an image from the present. In the last chapter, Beirut, 2058, the anxiety is projected into an apocalyptic future.

Elsewhere in this publication Bariaa Mourad points out that ‘many of the same protagonists of war are still actively involved in the production of history’. Referring to Here and Perhaps Elsewhere (00), in which Lamia Joreige addressed the subject of missing persons, the artist herself notes having mixed feelings about the possibility of historiography:

I find myself caught in a tension between the temptation and even the necessity of recounting that history, and the impossibility of fully accessing it. The diversity of the many stories recounted, their accumulation and unequal repetition link each personal experience to the collective one, making difficult if not impossible the idea of a unique truth.

Destruction in Creation

Two works were chosen for this exhibition that deviate from the long tradition of classical representation of ‘war ruins’ through the creation of picturesque images or pure documentation. They adopt an atypical approach in pursuit of artistic creations in which the relationship between creation and destruction is achieved through the materials or media used to make the actual work of art. Both creations look back to the moment when the Second World War came to an end.

Following the fall of Nazi Germany in May 19, the United States wanted to bring the war in Asia to a conclusion as quickly as possible. To force Japan to surrender, it was decided to deploy a new weapon: the atomic bomb. Following the first successful detonation at the Trinity test site in July 19, the bomb was only deployed twice in actual warfare. Two atomic bombs, codenamed ‘Little Boy’ and ‘Fat Man’, were dropped the following month above Hiroshima and Nagasaki. At 8.1am on 6 August 19, Little Boy exploded over the western coastal city of Hiroshima, where the military headquarters were located. Japan surrendered unconditionally, bringing its fifteen-year Pacific campaign to an end.

The survivors gave their own nickname to the bomb: Pika-don, a reference to the flash of intense light (pika) and the sound (don) that the explosion created. The atomic bombs left a permanent scar on Japanese history – far beyond the catastrophic physical destruction, according to Takashi Murakami in Little Boy: The Arts of Japan’s Exploding Subculture. Pika-don symbolises the visual, auditory and other sensory impressions in the Japanese psyche that totally changed in the aftermath of the collective subjection to the experience of nuclear annihilation.

top Fig. 8 Mona Hatoum, Witness, 009

bottom Fig. 9 Lamia Joreige, Beirut, Autopsy of a City, 010


and Florin Tudor (°197) approach the destruction of architectural heritage by reintroducing the material residue left after its destruction has already taken place: using what corresponds with the physical decomposition of the matter, pure pulverised dust.

A recurring concern in the work of Vat amanu and Tudor, who both live in Bucharest, is how ideologies graft themselves onto architecture, monuments and other ruins of modern history. As Vivian Rehberg has noted: ‘While the temporal dimension undoubtedly plays a significant role in Vat amanu and Tudor’s work, this dimension is chiefly worked through, explored, and exposed in performative filmed navigations of spaces, territories, sites and structures’.8 A tragicomic example is Praful / The Dust (006) [Fig. , p.9], which refers to a chapel of the Schitul Maicilor monastery in Bucharest, razed in 198 to make way for the construction of a communist civic centre. Walking from the original site of the chapel, Tudor filled his pockets with dust to empty them again near Ceausescu’s House of the People.

Dust often features in other works by these artists too. For them, materials like rust and dust are ‘essential particles, produced by the actions of political or financial power’, by which they mean that ‘these particles and their various configurations are what remains after the moment when political decision cuts through society, either via an act of creation or destruction. They localise political power, and give shape to the events it performs’.9 Dust is not a ‘neutral’ material. The artists use it in their work because of their interest in its capacity to reflect the political systems to which it belonged or still belongs.

In modern-day Japan this national trauma led to the creation of the otaku culture that emerged in the 1970s. The definitive otaku animation films, including Space Battleship Yamato and Mobile Suit Gundam – which Murakami views as pivotal in the way that Marcel Duchamp’s urinal was pivotal to twentieth-century art – invariably depart from a post-apocalyptic scenario or a post-atomic world in their story line.

Hiroshima remains a source of inspiration and the destruction of ‘Hiroshima’ has continuously inspired artists to create sculptures. In her essay in the companion publication to Ravaged: Art and Culture in Times of Conflict, Yukie Kamiya refers to Yves Klein who in 19 stayed in Japan for a year as a judoka. The sight of the human shadow burned into the stone stairs by the heat of the explosion is said to have inspired him to create his later Anthropométries. The human shadow, like the flash of light and the mushroom cloud, has become a symbol for the atomic bomb and the artistic production that refers to it.

The Chinese artist Cai Guo-Qiang (°197) is known for his spectacular projects using gunpowder. In an attempt to convey the ‘Spirit of Hiroshima’ – a longing for peace – through contemporary art, the city awarded him the Seventh Hiroshima Art Prize in 008. ‘By developing a variety of creative projects,’ the organisers stated, Cai has addressed ‘increasingly universal questions of concern to humankind as a whole, while remaining rooted in a uniquely Chinese outlook on the universe and Asian thought and philosophy.’

At the same time, the Hiroshima City Museum of Contemporary Art introduced Cai Guo-Qiang’s artistic practice in an exhibition that focused on works dealing with war and destruction, peace and regeneration. This led the artist to create Black Fireworks: Project for Hiroshima (008) [Fig. 10, p.–] [Fig. 9–0, p.6–7], an open-air work on a Land Art scale. At one o’clock in the afternoon on October 008, against the backdrop of the Hiroshima Peace Memorial (Genbaku Do- mu), no fewer than 1,00 black smoke shells were launched. Blending with the black smoke that appeared after the reverberation of the explosions, it appeared as if an enormous ink-wash drawing had been created in the blue sky. Besides its allusion to modern-day terrorism and other crises – ‘that suddenly appear as black clouds in a clear sky’ – the work served to commemorate Hiroshima and offer a plea for peace: ‘The overwhelming presence of the ever-expanding black cloud evokes in the observer a deep sense of sorrow along with the sense of dignity that endows those who have overcome such sorrow.’6

Cai Guo-Qiang has addressed the topics of conflict and violence throughout his career, with gunpowder gradually taking centre stage as a material in his creative activities. He uses it in the execution of his large-scale firework events, but also in creating drawings. His affinity with the explosive powder – invented in tenth-century China – is in itself not that surprising. Cai was born in Quanzhou on the southeast coast of Fujian province, where masses of firecrackers are set off on festive occasions. His experience is supplemented, moreover, by memories of repeated military confrontations between the governments of China and Taiwan. As a youngster Cai got to know all sorts of nuances and applications of gunpowder – a familiar material can also be a symbol of violence and war: ‘I am well aware that violence created everything, and that it also destroyed everything.’7

Cai Guo-Qiang tackles the legacy of the ruin of the Hiroshima Peace Memorial – a designated World Heritage Site since 1996 – in a homeopathic manner: fire is fought with fire. For their part, Mona Vat amanu (°1968) Fig. 11 Mona Vat amanu & Florin Tudor, Dust, Grzybowska 51, 008

prev ious spread Fig. 10 Cai Guo-Qiang, Black Fireworks: Project for Hiroshima, 008

Realised at Motomachi Riverside Park, Hiroshima, October 008, 1pm, 1'


Dust Square (008) [Fig. , p.61], originally created for the Dada East? Romanian Context of Dadaism (008) exhibition in the Zacheta National Gallery of Art in Warsaw, is precisely what its title says: a rectangle measuring 0 by 60 centimetres applied directly onto the wall, composed of no more and no less than coarse cement dust. The origins of the work can be traced back to the country house owned by Erich Wolf in Gubin, in western Poland, which Mies van der Rohe designed in 19. Wolf was a textile manufacturer and collector, who owned a large collection of porcelain as well as nineteenth and twentieth-century paintings. The house was destroyed at the end of the Second World War. All that is left of the former Wolf residence, after its total devastation in 19, are ruin-like structures. Since the beginning of the twenty-first century, these have been the subject of archaeological excavations and study performed by, among others, a group of World Heritage students led by Professor Leo Schmidt. Besides excavating the site, they also looked for Poles who remembered the house – an exercise that chiefly revealed the full extent of the region’s ‘extremely difficult history’.

A work of art does not wholly disappear with its physical dissolution. It persists as long as there are people to remember it; people to whom it is of significance even as a memory or as a concept. Often, but not always, personal acquaintance plays a role in this. There is an obvious analogy with a much-loved and respected human being who lives on in the memory of his friends and even of later admirers. Perhaps even more than a lost painting, a great historic building, destroyed by war or ignorance, has the capacity to persist in our minds because architecture is rooted in place.0

It is notable how, in the above quotation, Leo Schmidt applies concepts of mourning and trauma, which are normally used with reference to people, to architecture and art. A recent symposium on the Wolf house focused both on its architectural history and on possible ways of dealing with the site in the future. Pending that, the question can be raised as to whether we can view the creation of a contemporary artwork as an act of mourning, in which the effect of remembering rather than forgetting provides the impetus for a form of redemption. The intense physical vulnerability of Dust Square – tellingly described by Mihnea Mircan elsewhere in this publication as ‘an almost-contact image’ – makes the incommensurability of trauma measurable.

Targeted Heritage

In numerous conflicts, cultural heritage is not destroyed as collateral damage but as a deliberate attack on a community’s identity. The term ‘collateral damage’, referring to unintentional damage during an attack, is moreover frequently employed as a pretext to mask the true objective of an attack. We have already mentioned the Serb militias as a recent example of deliberate attacks on cultural heritage. Although the National Library of Bosnia-Herzegovina in Sarajevo was marked with blue flags indicating its status as cultural heritage, the Serb general Ratko Mladic gave the order in August 199 to burn the building down: ‘The National Library burned for three days last August and the city was choked with smoke.’1

The most staggering destruction of cultural heritage in recent decades was that of the two monumental sixth-century Bamiyan Buddhas, carved into a cliff face on the Silk Route in central Afghanistan, which were blown up by the Taliban in 001. Mullah Omar, leader of the Afghan Taliban, declared: ‘All we are breaking are stones.’ In reality, of course, the act was a political statement, all the more so since Omar, with an eye to the income from tourism, had previously ordered the protection of cultural heritage. Nevertheless, the edict to destroy all non-Islamic symbols was issued on 6 February 001, and the statues were blown up soon after.

In her 16mm film Clapping with Stones (00) [Fig. 1, p.7] [Fig. 9–1, p.66], Lida Abdul (°197) subtly condemns the destruction of the Bamiyan Buddhas. A group of young men dressed in black standing in front of the empty niches in the cliff perform a ritual using stones from the ruined statues. The visitor is confronted with all that is left of the Buddhas: a gaping void in the rock face coupled with the hypnotic clicking of stone fragments. In reusing the fragments of rubble, Abdul makes the point that you cannot destroy a cultural past. There is no such thing as total destruction. The ruins, the stones and the survivors are still here to tell the tale. People flee, they put the broken pieces back together again, they tell their stories and they reveal the destruction.

A completely different iconoclastic history, this time a Belgian post-colonial one, is presented by Sven Augustijnen (°1970): Appelle-moi Pierre comme je t’appelle Joseph (01) [Fig. 1, p. 8] [Fig. , p. 7–7], a new creation at the invitation of Ravaged: Art and Culture in Times of Conflict. The installation is a sequel to his research for the film Spectres (011) [Fig. , p.1] [Fig. , p.69].

Fig. 1 Lida Abdul, Clapping with Stones, 00


While preparing his book of the same name, the Brussels artist was allowed access to the archive of photographs belonging to Jacques Brassinne de La Buissière – a young Belgian diplomat in Congo at the time of Patrice Lumumba’s murder.

During his research, Augustijnen stumbled across pictures of the monument to Lumumba taken during the recapture of Stanleyville in November 196. They included photos of a half-destroyed monument and another showing Moïse Tshombe, the former prime minister of Congo, visiting the still-intact monument with a small group of journalists. Other pictures contained images of the retaking of Stanleyville by the military coalition. In an interview with Brassinne in his book Spectres, Augustijnen touches on the dating of the photo of Tshombe, which had supposedly been taken after the town had been recaptured:

On page 7 we see Moïse Tshombe in front of the Lumumba monument in Stanleyville. It is doubtful that the photo actually dates from November 196, since further on in the series we encounter Jacques Brassinne and his friends in front of a mutilated monument: it was badly damaged during the retaking of Stanleyville on November 196.

The reason why Sven Augustijnen wanted to revisit this material is substantially indicated in this conversation with Brassinne: ‘I was fascinated by the fact that history can be entirely rewritten within a few months by the same journalists.’ According to some sources the monument was blown up by Mobutu’s ANC troops, according to others it was Europeans who did it. The monument was also the scene of acts of cruelty. It was here, for instance, that Alphonse Kingis executed followers of Mobutu on behalf of General Olenga. In 1961, the ‘République populaire du Congo’ was established in Stanleyville by Antoine Gizenga who, unlike Lumumba,

had been able to escape to the eastern province. The body of Alphonse Kingis was thrown onto the remains of the monument after Stanleyville was retaken by a coalition of ANC, Belgian and American troops, and a mercenary army from Katanga (composed of Katangese, South Africans and French, Belgians, Portuguese and others).

The monument, erected in 1961, was the first in honour of Patrice Lumumba, the democratically elected prime minister of Congo, who was murdered in Katanga on 17 January 1961. It stood on the spot where a monument to Leopold II stood during the colonial period. There are practically no photos of the spot, however, despite that fact that it was both a battlefield and a symbol of the complex process of decolonisation and neo-colonialism played out in the Congo in the 1960s and in the international context of the Cold War.

War of Words

During the First World War the ethno-historical connotations of the concept of ‘vandalism’ were exploited to the fullest. The French defined German aggression as an attempt on the part of ‘Teutonic barbarism’ to annihilate ‘Latin civilisation’. The damage caused to major Belgian and French works of architecture, especially the university library in Leuven and the cathedral in Reims, became an instrument of national and international mobilisation. The Germans responded with counter-arguments, claiming for instance that there had been unlawful military use of Reims Cathedral.

The Allied and German press and propaganda machines concurred that the damage had been done by German troops. But beyond this level of agreement, the details of the events were presented in opposing, contradictory accounts, which took on greater importance than a ‘true’ account of the facts.6 The traditional contrast between French civilisation and German Kultur could now be translated in the light of damaged heritage into proof of French cultural superiority over the German ‘barbarians’. Characterisation of the bombardment of Reims Cathedral as a deliberate act of barbarity became a keynote in the French narrative. It had been premeditated and all the evidence pointed to the conclusion that the enemy, from the start of the First World War, had intended to destroy the landmark. The German narrative contradicted this on every point, suggesting that the shelling had been in the enemy’s interests. This version begins before the initial bombardment, with conscientious German soldiers marking the church with a white flag to designate it a non-military, neutral building.7

The extent of German atrocities in Belgian towns and villages could not yet be fully understood at the moment they took place. Key events such as the destruction of Leuven were known, but in the absence of reporting as we know it today, testimony from either side was important as it allowed the phenomenon to be particularised. What the newspapers did in reality was to add powerful editorial rhetoric to their reporting. As early as August 191, Le Matin portrayed the war as a conflict between civilisation and barbarie.8

The hold that the German atrocities exerted on Allied opinion can be explained by deeper-lying cultural and historical backgrounds, which were Fig. 1 Sven Augustijnen, Appelle-moi Pierre comme je t’appelle Joseph, 01


expressed in the pre-war use of language in which the dichotomy between French ‘civilisation’ and German ‘barbarism’ since the Franco-Prussian War was reinforced. Between 1870 and the beginning of the First World War, the claims of the French Enlightenment and Revolution were extended into a concept of civilisation with a universal sense, which was increasingly contrasted with the concept of Kultur, as cultural and linguistic particularism.9

The elaborate efforts made on both sides to construct and publicise accounts of alleged ‘art atrocities’ – at a time when far more serious human suffering was being inflicted – undeniably demonstrate the benefit of cultural war damage for the propagandists. Censorship laws in France meant that precise figures on human casualties were not made public, with the result that the destruction of cultural goods also served as a metaphor for other, censored war crimes.0

For the exhibition Ravaged: Art and Culture in Times of Conflict, the Peruvian artist Fernando Bryce (°196) was commissioned to create a new work in the propaganda chapter, focusing on the destruction of Leuven University Library and Reims Cathedral. The artist habitually seeks out representations with a clear ideological or political content in archival documents that convey world history. Following intense study, the content of the selected primary documents is faithfully reproduced in ink on cream-coloured paper and the drawings brought together in ensembles. In this way Bryce creates his own version of history, with a critical look at representations of power, national identity or revolutionary struggle. The visual strategy of transforming all the original images into pen-and-ink drawings has a homogenizing effect with respect to

the ideologically-charged content, allowing the archival information to be juxtaposed and placed in a different context. In this way, new comparisons and perspectives of a critical or ironic nature are created.

The artist approached his exploration for Ravaged from two different angles, namely from the Allied and from the German perspective. He drew on his archival research in Leuven’s university and city libraries to examine the local history of both Leuven and Reims from the viewpoint of ‘occupied territories’. At the same time, he included excerpts from intellectual manifestos of the time, in which a distinction is made on the Allied side between the ‘authentic German culture’ of the poets and philosophers, and the Kultur of imperial militarism; while the German side seeks to justify that militarism as a defence of western civilisation itself.

Most Wanted Work of Art

Works of art are not only destroyed but also plundered, stolen from museums or dug up illegally from archaeological sites. The first museums of art came into existence at the turn of the nineteenth century, and became established over the course of that same century as a consequence of revolutions, wars, imperial conquest, and pillaging of non-European cultures.1 Several of the world’s most important museums still proudly display their stolen art treasures, canonised as universal art, while in fact they are part of world heritage.

We have already mentioned Afghanistan where archaeological sites and museums have been looted since 199. In Iraq too, the Gulf War of 1990–91 and the UN embargo triggered organised plunder. The National Museum of Bagdad was ransacked in 00 in the aftermath of the invasion by an international coalition of troops from countries including the United States and the United Kingdom. American soldiers did not burn Iraq’s intellectual centres but they did not protect them, either – an indifference that gave carte blanche to criminal groups. To this professional vandalism was added another, more naive variety, perpetrated by mobs of looters spurred on by propaganda that incited hatred toward the symbols of Saddam Hussein’s regime. When museums and libraries – viewed as part of the old power structure – were burned to the ground, silence legitimised the catastrophe.

The Invisible Enemy Should Not Exist (007, ongoing) [Fig. 0, p.8–8] by Michael Rakowitz (°197), an American artist with Jewish-Iraqi roots, is a masterly example of an artistic practice that starts with an examination of cultural memory and the way that a conflict – in this case the invasion of Iraq – assaults it. The project unfolds as an ongoing series of sculptures that attempt to reconstruct the looted objects from the National Museum. The papier-mâché replicas are faithful recreations of archaeological objects, made using cheap packaging from imported foodstuffs from the Middle East and Arabic newspapers found in Europe and the United States. At the heart of this project, writes Stephanie Smith, is the core mission of most museums, the two basic acts – gathering things that seem worth keeping, and tending them for the benefit of others – that were thoroughly disrupted when an estimated fifteen thousand objects were looted from the Iraq Museum.

The title of The Invisible Enemy Should Not Exist is derived from the translation of Aj ibur shapu, the name of the ancient street better known as the Processional Way,

Fig. 1–1 Fernando Bryce, To the Civilised World, 01


which leads to the famous Ishtar gate, built around 7 BCE by Nebuchadnezzar II as a central feature of ancient Babylon. The German archaeologist Robert Koldewey excavated the original structure in the early twentieth century in what is now called Iraq, and the excavated part of the gate was taken to Berlin, where it was reassembled piece by piece at the Pergamon Museum.

In 009 Michael Rakowitz was invited to participate in the exhibition On Rage at the Haus der Kulturen der Welt in Berlin. Part of the plan involved exhibiting The Invisible Enemy Should Not Exist at the Pergamon Museum, but this did not work out:

At first approved by one of the directors, the plan fell through due to a scheduling conflict with one of the exhibition spaces, and another attempt to exhibit the works in front of the Ishtar Gate and along the Processional Way was met with resistance. It was a shame, as this would have been something of a ‘homecoming’ for the reconstructed artefacts, whose display along a recreation of Aj ibur shapu would have echoed the parade of many of the original statues that would have been carried on its path two thousand five hundred years ago during the Babylonian New Year celebrations.

During his preparatory investigation, the artist discovered a lesser-known piece of history relating to the Ishtar Gate, namely a project that Saddam Hussein had planned, involving a re-creation of ancient Babylon, built on top of the unexcavated ruins of the city. This drew protest from archaeologists around the world since the construction would certainly have caused damage to the original structures. However, near the ancient ruins of Babylon stands another reconstruction of the Ishtar Gate dating from the 190s, roughly two-thirds the size of the original as estimated by the German excavators, and intended to serve as the entrance to a museum that was never completed.

After his proposal had been rejected by the Pergamon Museum, Michael Rakowitz decided to extend his approach in The Invisible Enemy Should Not Exist to creating a replica of the replica of the Ishtar Gate. This new work is constructed from wooden beams and plywood and is once again covered with packaging from Arab food products available in Berlin. The resulting gate closely resembles The Invisible Enemy Should Not Exist both conceptually and in terms of the material used, and actually functions as the culmination of that project. The title of the work refers to an alternative spelling of the Procession Way’s Arabic name, Ay-ibur-sabu, which likewise has an alternative translation: May the Arrogant Not Prevail [Fig. 16, p.] [Fig. 9, p.8].

When you visit Ravaged: Art and Culture in Times of Conflict, you approach the sculpture from the rear, just as actors first see the back of the scenery when entering from the wings. This structure no longer provides the illusion of stepping into ancient Babylon but confronts us instead with the bareness of a ‘genuine’ Hollywood-style concept. In the words of Michael Rakowitz:

Like a child who has seen a ghost and re-enacts the scare with a bed-sheet, the imitation is made earnestly yet poorly. Still, the apparition appears, and haunts the Haus der Kulturen der Welt with the hopes of conjuring the museum the mus hu su dragons, lions, and bulls rendered in the tiles of the original – to free them from their mud-brick grave for an immediate return home to Iraq.

Fig. 16 Michael Rakowitz, May the Arrogant Not Prevail (detail), 010


A.P.

At the end of our walk through the long history of destruction and pillaging of cultural heritage, we arrive at ex libris (010–1) [Fig. 17, p.6–7] [Fig. , p.88] [Fig. , p.90] by Palestinian artist Emily Jacir (°1970). This marks the end of Ravaged: Art and Culture in Times of Conflict, while simultaneously returning us to our point of departure: the pillaging and destruction of books and libraries, the ultimate symbol of the destruction of culture and knowledge. Jacir was born in Bethlehem, raised in Saudi Arabia, educated in Italy and the United States, and currently lives around the Mediterranean. It was and remains a migratory existence, which probably helps explain the conceptual basis of her practice. Jacir uses ‘whatever medium I deem necessary to express my idea or concept’ and refuses to be governed by location-specific approaches in contemporary art.6

Emily Jacir’s work places great emphasis on the lives of people in Palestine who, because of the Israeli occupation, have been faced with the loss of their land and memories. More specifically, books, libraries and the question of translation recur throughout many of her projects. In Untitled (books) (000) [Fig. , p.9] , books from or about Palestine fill the space inside a doorway – with no visible support, solely held in place by the pressure between the two walls. Another work, Material for a film (007) [Fig. , p.88], tells the story of Wael Zuaiter, one of thirteen Palestinian intellectuals and artists who were killed by Israeli forces in 197 and 197. The artist used a . calibre pistol, the weapon that killed Zuaiter, to fire at a thousand empty books.

ex libris (010–1) commemorates thirty thousand books originating from Palestinian libraries, institutions and homes that were looted by Israel in 198. Six thousand of them are still kept and catalogued today in the Jewish National Library in West Jerusalem, labelled A.P. – which stands for ‘abandoned property’. Emily Jacir first learned about the existence of these A.P. books via an article by Gish Amit, Ownerless Objects? The Story of the Books Palestinians Left Behind in 1948, published in the Jerusalem Quarterly.7 The article was one of several in the same issue of the journal, in which various authors analyse the looting and the loss of Palestinian cultural and other property in 198. Amit writes about this untold story of the fate of the Palestinian books that were ‘abandoned’. The fact that they are deposited in Israel’s national library leads him to conclude that occupation and colonisation do not only culminate in taking over a physical space, but also in occupying cultural space, and by turning the victims’ cultural artefacts into ‘ownerless objects’ with no past. Amit implicitly asks the question that has not yet been dealt with by the affected Palestinians: how can these objects be restituted, not simply physically as property but also culturally, as embodiments of their heritage?

Over a period of nearly two years Emily Jacir used her mobile phone to photograph details from the A.P. books, which eventually gave rise to her installation ex libris. The presentation at museum M recreates the original exhibition space in the Zwehrenturm during Documenta 1 in Kassel. It is filled with numerous details – enlargements of her mobile phone photographs – arranged in such a way that they appear to be books in a well-stocked library or collection centre. From the space in which ex libris is exhibited at the top of the museum, visitors face the University Hall where the library was deliberately burned down in 191. So it is that local stories transcend themselves and join a litany of destruction and plunder that is as good as endless. This too makes ex libris an apt finale to Ravaged: Art and Culture in Times of Conflict. The visual link between the destruction of the First World War and a contemporary artwork – which itself offers a sensitive reflection on the looting and destruction of books in another region and another age – brings out the timeless and universal character of these bleak moments in history.

1 Bertolt Brecht, Lidingö, Sweden, Feb.–April 1940, transl. Sammy McLean. From ‘190’ in Michael Hoffmann (ed.), The Faber Book of 20th-Century German Poems, London, 00, 7–76. Quoted in Bernard Wasserstein, Barbarism and Civilization: A History of Europe in Our Time, Oxford University Press: Oxford, 009, 87

Walter Benjamin, ‘Theses on the Philosophy of History’, in Illuminations, Fontana Press: London, 197, 7 (Translated from the German Schriften, Suhrkamp Verlag, Frankfurt-am-Main, 19)

John Horne and Alan Kramer, German Atrocities 1914: A History of Denial, Yale University Press: New Haven and London, 001, 87–17

Sophie De Schaepdrijver, De Groote Oorlog: Het koninkrijk België tijdens de Eerste Wereldoorlog, Antwerpen: Uitgeverij Houtekiet, 01, 89

Mark Derez, ‘“The Oxford of Belgium”. Een kwestie van beeldvorming’, in Marika Ceunen and Piet Veldeman (eds.), Aan onze helden en martelaren… Beelden van de brand van Leuven (augustus 1914), Uitgeverij Peeters: Leuven, 00, 11

6 Rebecca Knuth, Libricide: The Regime-Sponsored Destruction of Books and Libraries in the Twentieth Centurie, Westport: Praeger, 00,

7 Sigrid Van der Auwera, Cultureel erfgoed in conflict- en post-conflictsituaties. Plunderingen en illegale handel in cultuurgoederen, IPIS-dossier 1, September 00, 9

8 Rebecca Knuth, op. cit.,

9 Boris Groys, ‘Art at War’, in Art Power, The MIT Press: Cambridge, Massachusetts – London, England, 008, 11–9

10 Adel Abdessemed, Conversation with Pier Luigi Tazzi, Actes Sud, Arles, 01,

11 Ibid., 7

1 Hanru Hou, ‘To Live Dangerously!’, in Adel Abdessemed Je suis innocent, Steidl: Centre Pompidou, Paris, 01, 1

1 Philippe-Alain Michaud, ‘Reality’, in Adel Abdessemed Je suis innocent, op. cit., 10

1 Kaelen Wilson-Goldie, ‘On Rupture’, in Frieze Magazine, No. 1, April 01

1 Adel Abdessemed, Conversation with Pier Luigi Tazzi, op. cit., 7

16 Hashim Sarkis, ‘Beirut, the Novel’, in Parachute 108, 00, 1

17 Sarah Rogers, ‘Out of History: Postwar Art in Beirut’, Art Journal, Vol. 66, No. (Summer) 007, 8–0

18 Mona Hatoum, ‘Artist’s Writings’, in Michael Archer, Guy Brett, Cathy de Zegher (eds.), Mona Hatoum, Phaidon: London, 1

19 Paola Yacoub, Michel Lasserr, ‘The Routine’, in Tamáss. Contemporary Arab Representations. Beirut/Lebanon 1, Barcelona: Fundació Antoni Tàpies, 00, 17–8

0 Mona Hatoum, ‘Interview with Claudia Spinelli 1996’, in Michael Archer, Guy Brett, Cathy de Zegher (eds.), op. cit.

1 Michael Hardt, Antonio Negri, ‘Preface’, in Empire, Harvard University Press: Cambridge Massachusetts; London, England, 000, iv.

Lamia Joreige, ‘Here and Perhaps Elsewhere’, in Suzanne Cotter (ed.), Out of Beirut, Modern Art, Oxford, 006, 18

Murakami Takashi, ‘Earth in My Window’, in Murakami Takashi (ed.), Little Boy: The Arts of Japan’s Exploding Subculture, Japan Society, New York: Yale University Press, New Haven and London, 00, 1–, 1

Kamiya Yukie, ‘Imaging Hiroshima’ in Jo Tollebeek and Eline Van Assche, Ravaged. Art and Culture in Times of Conflict, Mercatorfonds, Brussel, 1–18

‘Message from the Organizers’, in The 7th Hiroshima Art Prize: Cai Guo-Qiang, The Hiroshima City Museum of Contemporary Art, The Asahi Shimbun, 008,

6 Kamiya Yukie, ‘Not a conqueror or raider, but a traveller bearing fire’, in The 7th Hiroshima Art Prize: Cai Guo-Qiang, The Hiroshima City Museum of Contemporary Art, The Asahi Shimbun, 008,

7 Ibid. 1

8 Vivian Rehberg, ‘Mapping the History of the Present’, in Cosmin Costinas and Jill Winder, Mona Vat amanu and Florin Tudor, BAK: Utrecht, posteditions: Rotterdam, 009, 6–6

9 Mihnea Mircan, ‘Like Metal and Water: An Interview with Mona Vat amanu and Florin Tudor’, in Cosmin Costinas, Jill Winder, op. cit. 98–99

0 Leo Schmidt (ed.), The Wolf House Project. Traces, Cottbus, BTU Cottbus, Lehrstuhl Denkmalpflege, 001. Quoted at http://www.iba-see.de/wolf-house-project/my_wolf_house_projectbackground.htm

1 Fernando Báez, A Universal History of the Destruction of Books. From Ancient Sumer to Modern Iraq, New York: Atlas & Co., 008,

Els van der Plas, ‘Lida Abdul. A Beauty that Hurts’, in Renata Caragliano, Stella Cervasio (eds.), Lida Abdul, Prince Claus Fund for Culture and Development: The Hague, Hopeful Monster: Napoli, 007, 1

Sven Augustijnen, Spectres, ASA Publishers: Brussels, 011, 88

Op. cit., 196

Dario Gamboni, The Destruction of Art: Iconoclasm and Vandalism since the French Revolution, Reaktion Books: London, 1997, –

6 Nicola Lambourne, ‘Production versus Destruction: Art, World War I and Art History’, in Art History, Vol. No. , September 1999, 1

7 Ibid., –

8 John Horne, Alan Kramer, op. cit., 0–

9 Ibid., 78

0 Nicola Lambourne, op. cit., 6

1 Boris Groys, ‘On the Curatorship’, in Art Power, op. cit.,

Fernando Báez, op. cit. Stephanie Smith, ‘The Monkey

and the Stadium’, in Michael Rakowitz: Recent Projects on Baghdad and Montreal, SBC Gallery of Contemporary Art, Quebec, 009, 6

Michael Rakowitz, ‘May the Arrogant Not Prevail’, in Valerie Smith, Susanne Stemmler, Cordula Hamschmidt (eds.), Uber Wut – On Rage, Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Revolver Publishing by VVV: Berlin, 010, 99

Ibid. 6 T.J. Demos, ‘Desire in Diaspora:

Emily Jacir’, Art Journal, Vol. 6, No. (Winter, 00), 68–78

7 Gish Amet, ‘Ownerless Objects? The Story of the Books Palestinians Left Behind in 198’, in Jerusalem Quarterly, (Winter), 008, 7–0.

next spread Fig. 17 Emily Jacir, ex libris, 010–1

8 9art and culture in t imes of conflict a l'attaque !

It is as if the popular imaginary of our time were a uniform, glossy, plastified surface capable of absorbing and reflecting, capturing and disseminating [‘perceiver’ and ‘receiver’ in Haruki Murakami’s 1Q8] sensory stimuli of various kinds, whether visual or auditory – the other senses have been dramatically demoted in the current phase of human civilisation – ordered and arranged on the same conventional framework at a conceptual, narrative and sapiential level. This imaginary corresponds, coheres, and conforms to what is called ‘reality’, as in ‘reality show’. In turn, this supposed identification between the imaginary and the real, the ‘reality’, is a key trait of the times in which we live. We could trace its origins back to what in the 1960s was called the ‘civilisation of the image’. But it doesn’t seem to me to be quite the same thing. In the half-century since, something has happened.

In art, for instance – though other changes could be pointed out in other disciplines and forms of expression – certain media have gained full acceptance as art technical instruments. I am thinking in particular of photography, video, and film, which have taken on the same legitimacy as the original ones: sculpture, drawing and painting. This introduction and legitimation of new tools changes art; and I am referring here to the Western model of it, which has taken on an indisputably global dimension over at least the last three decades. I don’t mean in its essence, its raison d’être, so much as in its substance, in its presence, and in the forms – both qualitative and quantitative – this presence takes in the cultural sphere of our era.

With regard to what I was saying earlier about the relationship between reality and representation, the battle that has marked the history of photography ever since its genesis, the most noticeable points of conflict have been tempered. Photography, as a tool of representation, recognises and processes its own objecthood, its concreteness as an object, quite apart from its iconic and narrative scope as a channel for information and catalyst of emotion. And its counterpart, reality, is taking on the qualities of a ‘reality show’, to borrow this term from television jargon, turning itself into representation, albeit self-representation. Today fashion and advertising, first and foremost,

pier luigi tazzi

Knotsbut also film, television, and all of what we call mass media, are what create the canons around which this representation takes shape, and provide models to copy, forms of behaviour and lifestyles to adopt.

Adel Abdessemed set out on his artistic path at a point when this process had already been underway for some time. Adel is a Berber from the Aurès in Algeria, and thus, coming from a cultural context different from the Western one, though strongly influenced and conditioned by it [Algérie française, Albert Camus, Lili Boniche, Houari Boumediene], he soon grew aware of this constant, unrelenting bombardment of images, which he does not try to elude, but rather ‘feels’ on his own skin, ‘senses’ with his own skin; and which, unlike Europeans and Americans of his generation, he does not consider an objective status, a historically produced condition, which one can agree to or rebel against, accept or reject [Aut Aut: Either/Or], apocalypse or integration, resistance or adaptation, something to endure or to govern. These dialectic and typically Western oppositions do not mean much to him. Instead, he looks out the strength, intensity, energy, and substance involved. Ethics and politics may mark out the guidelines of modern living, but Adel Abdessemed, while not ignoring them, acts and reacts to what takes place on his perceptual horizon, which has not taken shape on his History so much as his personal and individual experience. As an individual not separate from his community, whatever this may mean. As a personality not split, according to the psychoanalytic model from Freud to Lacan, which subsumes the study and therapeutic, or orgastic, management of the human psyche, but produced by a kind of pathos and an impulse towards ecstasy, with all their strength [Gilles Deleuze, Jacques Derrida].

The iconosphere-in-progress created in his oeuvre spans the full spectrum of contemporary iconography: images out of art history, mostly but not exclusively Western (from Grünewald to American Minimalism, from medieval labyrinths to the logo-iconic neon introduced by Italian Arte Povera and conceptualism, from humanist and early Renaissance Florentine art to the American and European post-war neo-avant-garde); images broadcast by the mass media (photographs of conflicts, insurrections, executions, migrations, summit meetings, extreme societal and working conditions; television coverage of wars and major sporting events; art cinema (from Pier Paolo Pasolini to Bela Tarr) and Hollywood blockbusters. But also images of his family (wife, mother, daughters), his friends, the neighbourhoods he has lived in [Lyon, Batna, Berlin, Paris, New York]: the former as characters in micro-stories of timeless intensity, the latter as their film set. His own image is put into motion [Action!], rather than put on stage. Likewise, and in a much more dramatic manner, animals – ses semblables, ses frères – appear in his ‘actes’. And each acte is a crime, of which the artist becomes metteur-en-scene, witness and perpetrator, without any of these profoundly different roles prevailing over the others, masking them or justifying them. This creates a knot that is inextricable.

All of Adel Abdessemed’s work focuses on these knots, which undermine the uniform, glossy, plastified surface of the popular imaginary and bring about impasses more emotional than perceptual [We know what it’s about and there is no way to escape it]. He does not reveal what that phantasmagorical surface was attempting to cover so much as he makes its presence felt, from within.

10 art and culture in t imes of conflict a l'attaque !

In contrast to the ‘reality’ of the represented world, passively or consciously ‘impersonated’ according to rules and models that claim to offer certainties about everyone’s condition and destiny [Everyman], Adel Abdessemed offers the truth of feeling, touches the private world of the self and the other – a private world that is troubled, verwirrt – clashes with the diktats of global persuasion, the siren songs of satisfaction, the injunctions of the Molochs of power.

Countering power, pouvoir, with potency, puissance – the puissance of matter and emotion versus the power of intelligence, programs, projects, the project as the last resort of modernity – he calls for a truth that is not proclaimed [vox clamantis in deserto] but rather is generated time after time without reproducing itself.

And Cheval arabe is not an English stallion, just as a British racecourse is not a Berber fantasia.

top Fig. 18 Adel Abdessemed, Cheval arabe (1 – On Green Book, Vol. 1), 011

bottom Fig. 19 Adel Abdessemed, Cheval arabe (2 – On Green Book, Vol. 2), 011

the imposs ib i l ity of h i stor iogr aphyart and culture in t imes of conflict

the imposs ib i l ity of h i stor iogr aphyart and culture in t imes of conflict

Beirut has been the theatre of repeated destruction and restructuring, socially, economically and historically, without ever losing its special charm. The city’s unmistakeable appeal is fuelled by the diversity of its population – a blessing or a curse, depending on the local or geopolitical constellations. Certain media-formulated, cultural-theorist and artistic positions regarding Beirut’s history tend to be articulated nowadays in the relativistic jargon of postmodernism, allowing sensitive, potentially antagonising questions about socioeconomic conditions and power systems to be cloaked in a form that chiefly serves those with an interest in obfuscating history. Alternative, artistic reflections by the likes of Mona Hatoum and Lamia Joreige offer a deeper analysis of the problems, related to narrative history, of individual and collective memories and identities. The question thus arises of how we might grasp historically complex urban fabrics, shaped geopolitically, culturally and socioeconomically. Multi-layered Lebanese society, for instance, lacks consensus on any future development, and is without vision – especially in the face of globalised socioeconomic and geopolitical tensions that are by no means unique to the Middle East. The interpretation of history is also subject to structural power relations in (western) media and market democracies.1

Although the question of whether history is contingent, beyond human control, or man-made, has to remain unanswered here, it is nevertheless convenient to recall certain epistemological implications when dealing with determinism, history and truth. Historiography is the supposedly neutral documentation of multilinear, sequential changes in cultural evolution; of mutually occurring changes between artefacts (‘material culture’ – science, technology); and the related accumulation and transmission of knowledge in a complex interplay between individual and collective history within social organisations, with special reference to survival-pertinent socioeconomic structures. Historiographical insights need to be based on other scientific disciplines (such as anthropology, psychology and philosophy) capable of identifying cultural and anthropological markers that shape identities during enculturation. These markers include religion, language, cuisine, geography/urbanism, and identity derived from individual biographies and common history, music and folklore. The acknowledgement of empirically testable

bariaa mourad

Memory and Identity in Beirut: The (Im)possibilities of Artistic Historiography

prev ious spread Fig. 0 Lamia Joreige, Beirut, Autopsy of a City, 010

oppos ite

Fig. 1 Aerial view of Beirut, 197 / 7

7the imposs ib i l ity of h i stor iogr aphy

reality structures of the world and human history, allied with contextual and independent methodological scholarly analysis and a sceptical, realist approach may discern the power relations and interests that lie behind key, modifiable anthropological markers like the ‘superstructure’ – i.e. its rules and laws, the economy, etc. – and also historiography.

Imperialist expansion from the late nineteenth century onwards merged the world into a single historical space, faced with war, conflict and exploitation, in which it was undeniably clear that vertiginous, ‘measurable’ technical and scientific progress, and/or the dubious socio-political transformations that accompanied it, did not necessarily translate into ethical progress. This was especially the case with the kind of pontification and selective quotation from the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) that certain powers continue to practice globally today. It goes without saying that some ‘primitive’ or traditional folk ethics were based on high, empathetic humanitarian standards long before this. One wonders which ethical goals techno-scientific civilisation actually pursues, and how people in contemporary societies can still accept justifying discourses designed to ‘manufacture consent’ for an unequal status quo – a social order that is globally and objectively disadvantageous for many. World history is still apparently influenced by perceptions of fate, including the mission of certain (elected) people based on mysticised ideological presumptions of orthogenetic or teleological historical tendencies. Some individuals, groups and ultimately nations are permitted to play an influential role by virtue of their chance global strategic position. Some scholars like Eric Hobsbawm, Howard Zinn and Hubert Christian Ehalt have also tried to recount history from the perspective of those who have little say in historical hermeneutics, even though they often significantly impact historical processes.

What Mona Hatoum and Lamia Joreige show artistically is that when historiography is made aware, this is not so much about the events of the past directly, but about subjective – not to mention mythicised, ideologically tainted and nowadays mass-mediatised – interpretations, regardless of the realities revealed by a serious academic approach. Beirutis are chiefly engaged in two parallel yet different processes of collective identification. The first is anthropological, in accordance to some degree with the Lebanese state’s ‘political integration policy’. This uses anthropological markers to reconcile identity, such as music (e.g. Fayrouz), cuisine, urbanity and geography, and a common ancient (Phoenician) history. Anything but religion… Lebanon is home to some twenty religions, a fact that underlies a second logic of identification, which may function to create a powerful identity difference and lead to exclusion of the Other. When religion is made the basis of social and political organisation, it also develops a curious creative capacity, in that it produces collective yet ‘exclusive’ identities, even though the latter are recognised as belonging to the same nation. The coexistence of these two logics of identification in a country that is politically constituted on tribal sectarianism gives rise to a fragile equilibrium of multiple Lebanese identities. Individual identification processes are therefore informed by family/clan and class affiliations. Middle Eastern Christianity and even more so Islam and Judaism are – unlike (modern) Christianity elsewhere – still belief systems that are more tribally and family-orientated. The core concern is not with market democracy or consumer individualism, but with the well-being and perpetuation of the extended family. Potential conflicts are superposed

Fig. Bateau de guerre TurqueFig. L’escadre Française à Beyrouth (Syrie) le 1. Nove. 1899 Fig. U.S.S. Brooklyn à Beyrouth, 1903 – 1904

8 9the imposs ib i l ity of h i stor iogr aphyart and culture in t imes of conflict

culpabilities. It was only after the unspeakable human rights violations of the Second World War that Europeans sought to overcome their differences through a common interpretation of their history. Paradoxically, the reinterpretation of events as inexplicable catastrophes and the substitution of ‘enemies’ for ‘raisons d’état’ and the ‘higher values’ of new (geo)political agendas – as illustrated notably in the case of Germany after 19 – also had the side-effect of enabling the worst human-rights violators to reintegrate seamlessly in their societies’ power institutions, to enjoy indemnity, and to continue to work for decades until their recent retirement. The historiography of imperialist and colonial human rights violations by European powers likewise remains shrouded in legitimising myths.6 Lebanon itself, for instance, is still a geostrategic hot spot. It is difficult, therefore, to find an independent way of coming to terms with history.

Ravaged cities and disaster politics,7 a permanent state of alert (the ‘War on Terror’) or war (Iraq, Libya, Syria, etc.), and conflictual ‘urban zoning’ as a new form of social engineering, are in no way unique to Beirut. Ubiquitous pauperisation in a political climate that is uncertain and repressive (e.g. Orwellian surveillance) have always been essential elements of a society’s fascistic degeneration, much to the delight of the lucrative surveillance/security industry and warfare state, and their ‘military metaphysics’, including the military-industrial complex that Eisenhower was already warning about years ago.8

While so-called ‘surpassing disasters’ often have premeditated (geo)political agendas serving certain interests and apt to spin out of control, historiography also frequently depends post factum on those with the power and interest to claim sovereignty over the hermeneutics of history. Historiography embedded in cultural heritage programmes and art exhibitions in an international academic context might thus play an important role in supporting an alternative or complementary, more scholarly account, and possibly a humanist reconciliation of history.

1 Noam Chomsky, Necessary Illusions: Thought Control in Democratic Societies (Cambridge MA: South End Press, 1989).

Ibid. Eric Hobsbawm, Bandits (London:

Penguin, 1969); Howard Zinn, A People’s History of the United States (New York: Harper & Row, 1980); Hubert Christian Ehalt, Geschichte von unten (Vienna: Böhlau, 198) and other works.

Bariaa Mourad, ‘Beirut: An Itinerary Art Exhibition’, in: Anthropology of the Middle East, Vol. 8, No. 1 (New York, Oxford: Berghan Journals), p. 19–7.

The perpetrators of the Distomo and Sant’Anna di Stazzema massacres, for instance. See also Luca Baldissara and Pablo Pezzino, Il massacro: Guerra ai civili a Monte Sole (Bologna: Il Mulino, 009).

6 Chomsky, Necessary Illusions.7 Jean Ziegler, La haine de l’Occident

(Paris: Albin Michel, 008).8 C. Wright Mills, The Power Elite

(New York: Oxford University Press, 1986 [196]).

and exacerbated, moreover, by a special geopolitical situation and by the same severe socioeconomic conditions as everywhere else.

In her work Beirut, Autopsy of the City (010) [Fig. 9, p.0 ] [Fig. 0, p.–], Joreige attempts to trace history by means of ‘intensive research through textual references that range from travelogues to historians’ accounts and archaeological hypotheses, which lead us to understand that there are many gaps and missing elements in the history of Beirut, including contested incidents, myths and long periods that remain obscure and unknown, from the city’s earliest settlements until today.’ Her project uses a range of material from archival images to contemporary photographs, texts, sounds and videos, to explore possible reconciliations in the context of an incomplete and incomprehensible history, while at the same time integrating a fictionalised narrative. This may be illustrated by her fictive representation of the harbour, which simultaneously embodies different periods of history. It is neither a past image nor a present one, therefore, but one that reflects a time that is non-linear. Elements of this image disappear, while others appear almost imperceptibly; yet it remains suspended between appearance and disappearance. In one image, for instance, a ship from the nineteenth century floats in a photograph of the coastal waters from 190, under a menacing skyline from the eighties. Lamia’s work refers to the impossibility of historiography in a context where the dice have yet to be cast to determine who will eventually triumph in the political struggles, but where many of the same protagonists of war are still actively involved in politics and the ‘production’ of history.

Mona Hatoum’s work seems more concerned with the traumatic relationships between the interactive formation processes of individual and collective memories and identities. Bunker (011) [Fig. , p.10–11] [Fig. , p.0–1] represents a strange urban landscape: a ‘city’ of modular steel, of the kind used in the construction industry, resembling several empty and abandoned architectural structures. The artist shaped an apocalyptic scene by cutting and burning, in reference to buildings scarred by the war in the city of her youth. She evokes landmarks in the war-torn and devastated Lebanese capital Beirut, such as the Holiday Inn, now a hundred-metre-high ruin that, due to ongoing disputes, still dominates the upmarket city centre. Once a symbol of the hopes held out by Beirut’s utopian modernism, it became a contrasting and involuntary symbol of the dystopian reality of the civil war, allegorically expressing not only the physical situation of city dwellers, but also their breached collective psyche. This dialectic serves as a metaphor for the circular and paradoxical state of construction and destruction, life or death. Bunker denounces an aggressive military heritage and challenges a collective traumatic memory, since it refers also to non-military buildings – and to the entire downtown area, in fact – which different groups and militias used as bunkers during the Libanese civil war. As visitors to the exhibition walk among the steel skeletons of these miniature buildings, each with its own scorched and perforated patina, we remember the violent conflict that has burned its way into both the surfaces of the physical buildings and the individual and collective psyche of the city. The use of steel in this piece by Hatoum perhaps illustrates the weight of history incarnated in both the representative material and in Beirut’s urban realities.

Europe’s great historical conflicts were likewise followed for many years by completely different and selective national narratives of war histories and

next spread Fig. Mona Hatoum, Bunker, 011

0 1the imposs ib i l ity of h i stor iogr aphyart and culture in t imes of conflict

destruct ion in creat ionart and culture in t imes of conflict

Cai Guo-Qiang came to Japan from China in 1986. This was quite some time after the Cultural Revolution when artists were again able to travel overseas to study, Cai being among the first wave of these artists. Then in 199 he moved to the United States, establishing a base in New York from where he now engages in artistic activities all around the world.

asada ak ir a In your speech at the award ceremony, you said with a touch of your unique humour but at the same time unequivocally something to the effect that it was only natural for you as a human to oppose war and detest nuclear weapons, but that as an artist, or in other words as someone who ought to test the limits and boundaries, simply mouthing such an obviously correct interpretation wasn’t good enough. I’d like to take this opportunity to express my respect for the courage and understanding of the citizens of Hiroshima, who not only chose as the recipient of this year’s Hiroshima Art Prize an artist who condemns explosions with explosions, but also allowed him to carry out in a city once reduced to ashes by an atom bomb and showered with ‘black rain’ a daring performance entitled Black Fireworks (008) [Fig. 10, p.–] [Fig. 9–0, p.6–7], as well as to once again praise your ability to foster such understanding throughout your long cooperative association with the people of Hiroshima to manage to pull off the performance itself.

ca i guo - qiang The reason I was so keen to have a discussion with you is that I think you understood that my work goes beyond the single dimension of war and peace and can see the various other viewpoints it represents. The fact that you just introduced me as a Japanese artist fills me with great sense of warmth and moves me deeply. I’ve always enjoyed the support of the Japanese people, and in fact it was on a Japan-US exchange programme that I went to the US. The aspect of my work that’s been most heavily influenced by Japan is the great importance I place on materials and form. For example, if creating a piece in which a wolf runs into a wall and collapses, a Chinese artist would probably express it violently and terrifyingly with lots of blood dripping everywhere, but I’d concentrate on the

asada akira

Art: The Critical Point of Creativity and Destruction – Commemorative Conversation with Cai Guo-Qiang

Fig. 6 Cai Guo-Qiang making gunpowder drawing Black Fireworks: Project for Hiroshima, 008

art and culture in t imes of conflict

beauty of the wolf and the poetic feeling of the lines, and show the wolf getting up and running away after collapsing. I’d show the critical point where terror and beauty intersect. I’m interested in showing more of the aesthetics and philosophy behind the work. The idea that the distance from reality embodied in the work, or the aesthetic distance, is important is something I learnt after coming to Japan.

asada ak ir a Events are central to your work, but also important are their traces, which you prepare for with great care. With the current trend toward being satisfied with simply creating sensational events, the ambiguity of your work, by which I mean the fact that it’s undeniably violent but at the same time tinged with an incredible beauty, seems to be all the more important.

ca i guo - qiang Art shouldn’t be real. For example, if an artist actually committed suicide or blew something up, it wouldn’t be art, would it? After all, the thing that’s interesting about art is that although it’s not real it seems as though one is looking at something that captures the essence of the world. So it requires imagination. Even when dealing with very real subject matter such as social problems, there’s more room for art to survive if there’s a slight distance between the reality and the art.

I’d like to introduce some of the works I’ve created to date. At an exhibition at New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art in 006, for six months I produced a single black cloud at noon each day. The image of war in the twentieth century is of something dark that goes on for a long time producing numerous casualties over a wide area every day. But in the twenty-first century, the way wars are fought has changed. Casualties suddenly appear as people go about their daily lives peacefully and happily. Ambulances, fire engines, and other emergency vehicles soon arrive, media helicopters fly around in the sky, but several hours later the scene is in perfect order again. Coffee shops, bars, and other businesses reopen and carry on trading happily in the sun as if nothing happened. As opposed to the twentieth century, when the atom bomb was the most destructive thing imaginable, in the twenty-first century terror can be inflicted simply by wielding a knife, setting off a small amount of explosives, or blowing up a car. We’ve gone back to this kind of guerrilla-like, incredibly primitive approach. So my starting point for this project was this kind of sudden sense of unease in the midst of the peace and quiet of the twenty-first century.

asada ak ir a Whereas up to the twentieth century wars between states were all-out wars involving the total mobilisation of entire nations, in the Cold War and post-Cold War periods, with the exception of localised proxy wars, such wars can no longer be waged. At the same time, in the age of terrorism, as you said, threatening incidents erupt in the very midst of our everyday lives like small black clouds, police, firefighters, and rescue teams arrive in no time, and then quickly disappear as if nothing had happened…

Cai Guo-Qiang, The Century with Mushroom Clouds: Project for the 20th Century Realised at various sites in the United States, February–April 1996, approximately seconds each explosion, 1996

top Fig. 7 Realised near Manhattan, New York City, 0 April 1996

bottom Fig. 8 Realised at Nevada Test Site, 1 February 1996

6 7destruct ion in creat ionart and culture in t imes of conflict

ca i guo - qiang Also, no one knows who the enemy is. Today’s wars are the same as today’s art in that they’re extremely non-transparent and involve an antagonist whose identity is unclear. Both the targets and the concepts have become unrecognizable and complex. Anyone can become an artist, and people’s statuses are uncertain so that we have artists becoming curators and so on. Exhibitions are being held not just in art museums but here and there throughout the city, while terrorist attacks are also occurring in the middle of peaceful cities. It used to be that wars broke out somewhere along an international border. The way wars were waged was also largely predictable. Today we’re faced with situations in which knives may be more frightening than atom bombs. Billions if not tens of billions of dollars are spent on security checks to find these knives. We don’t know who’ll turn into an enemy or when, and the present chaotic state of affairs in which so much is uncertain looks set to continue with no end in sight.

left Fig. 9 Cai Guo-Qiang, Black Fireworks: Project for Hiroshima, 008

Realised at Motomachi Riverside Park, Hiroshima, October , 008, 1pm, 1'a bove Fig. 0 Cai Guo-Qiang, Black Fireworks: Project for Hiroshima, 008


top Fig. 1 Mona Vat amanu & Florin Tudor, Wall, 008

bottom Fig. Mona Vat amanu & Florin Tudor, Praful/The Dust, 006

Sigmund Freud once remarked, quoting Lord Palmerston, that dirt is ‘matter in the wrong place’. By the strict standards of museum conservation and decorum, Mona Vat amanu and Florin Tudor’s Dust Square (008) [Fig. , p.61] is precisely that: a disturbing, rectangular accretion of dirt in the white cube, neither sanitised, nor symbolically elevated. To the same extent that we cannot imagine an incandescent grey, dust resists metaphorical transposition, and the work makes full use of the matter-of-fact insensitivity of its material. The Square is – to the same extent that it pictures – dust, rather than dust as a stand-in for something else. If a ‘story’ can be wrested from this strange, tangible after-image, it might either be that a now-indiscernible object has been pulverised against the wall, in an operation whose vehemence was strangely proportional with its methodical nature, or that an object has been removed from sight, revealing the dust that had been breeding behind it: a layer by whose density the duration of that withdrawn presence can be measured. The ‘story’ might just as well be the anamorphic co-presence of these distinct figures of imagination invited by the work. Dust Square is a remnant, metonym or euphemism for an equation of tensions, obstructions and violent dislocations that museum space cannot accommodate as such: its contaminated detritus, the registration of an unknown object as entropic process, of not knowing as breakdown.

I would like to describe Dust Square as an almost-contact image, drawing upon – and making abstract – a crucial tradition in the European theory of pictures. A contact image is the unmediated impression of an object onto a receptive surface, such as the sweat and blood-soaked face of Jesus on Veronica’s Veil – the first, non-manufactured icon, and the foil by which icons were more than representations, endowed with the preternatural capacity to affect the viewer in ways other than visually. The Turin Shroud is another contact image – so disputed it earned the name of ‘fifth gospel’. Experiments in early or recent photography dispense with the camera and test the capacity of objects to transfer their shapes directly to paper, to impregnate a surface with a kind of visual kinetic energy. Fusing resemblance and identity, what they show and what they are, these images arise through physical continuity between model and support, and turn

mihnea mircan

A Trace of an Imprint of a Ruin


top Fig. Mona Vat amanu & Florin Tudor, Dust Square, 008 bottom Fig. Mona Vat amanu & Florin Tudor, Dust, 007

the support into a figure. Unlike simple mimesis, the model in contact images is not depicted but imprinted – etched, in a sense – into the picture plane. These are diaphanously sculptural marks, as the surface records the three-dimensional pressure of the model, its live, mobile, messy immediacy.

If the contact image corresponds to the plenitude of its object and circulates – between picture plane and viewer or worshipper – an energetic charge, the almost-contact image in Dust Square has wreckage and convulsion as correlates. This close-range quasi-imprint corresponds to its object’s vulnerability, its erosion and curtailed history: it arises in an interstitial space delimited by ruined object and wall, with the migration of dust as conjunctive tissue. This story of collapse – told in such generic terms that any metaphorical link to the disasters and ruins of the modern and contemporary is both allowed and voided – is recounted in the accumulation of minuscule, foul particles, clinging to the wall as a shadow, without light source and without object.

Dust is the catastrophe of every project, that which everything built – in bricks, categories or ideological imperatives – incorporates and temporarily homogenises, and that which will clog veins and choke voices. Dust is never lost, as we know from Vladimir Nabokov’s endearingly stuporous Pnin. One of the characters in Nabokov’s 197 novel has a speck of dust removed from his eye and then cannot make peace with the ‘dull, mad fact’ that this ‘black atom’ still exists somewhere. Professor Pnin’s flight from communist Russia, his furious attempts to make sense – or a home – of America, work in tandem in the allegorical economy of the novel with the exacerbated memory of that volatile speck of dust, the numb obstinacy with which it still exists. This allegorical articulation could also be an entry point to Vat amanu and Tudor’s work, to resonate its tense, vibrating silence. The artists’ practice often reflects on how ideologies sediment in minds and souls, on processes via which the push and pull of modernist doctrines have both written a spasmodic history and delineated a vacant territory – of negative unity – for contemporary selves. A place where we lead political existences that are at once anaesthetised and revolted, anomic and allergic to utopia, exhausted and fretful.

The ways in which contradictory ideological movements warp around – and co-produce – the monuments, mausoleums and wastelands of this history is a recurring preoccupation in the artists’ work, and so is, aptly, their recourse to the medium of dust. While never really lost, dust is also never really there: falling off categories, zero-unit of both doing and undoing, dust is both threshold and quicksand. The author of a documentary on the industry, politics and anti-material workings of dust, Hartmut Bitomsky says: ‘The diameter of 0.1 millimetres. That is the brink above which the world becomes visible for the naked eye.… They speak of a dust grain. They speak of a film grain. It is the smallest visual unit in which the film stock itself becomes visible. Film material is nothing but dust adhered to a transparent film base. Film: that is dust lighting up in the darkness of a movie theatre.’ We might understand the Square as a film-still from the uncountable multiplicity of dust, its modes of aggregation and dissociation, from its swirl out of scrutiny, shape and function, its absolutely provisional and perennial nature. A still from the clumping of infinitesimal ruptures becoming visible, surfacing: overtaking the design of which they were to become a part.

Dust never really goes away, but builds up quietly on the carcasses of new objects and new paradigms. There is no apocalyptic imagination without dust as glue in the narrative of global gridlock, as emblem of definitive demise.


The artists’ take on the endless malleability of dust, on the way it fractures origin and ownership, in projects that explore ideological brutality in its architectural and affective ramifications, sometimes translates into what critic David Riff has termed ‘a Stakhanovism of immaterial labour’. Such is the case of a 006 filmed performance Praful / The Dust (006) [Fig. , p.9] where dry soil from the former site of a chapel, part of a razed monastery – of which there are many in Bucharest’s communist urbanistic dramas – is carried by Tudor in his pockets to the place where the chapel had been transplanted, hidden from the new ceremonial axes of the city. This transaction of dust, a secular rite of recuperation, dislodges and confuses soil from the two places, as if a historical dust storm were obscuring their topographic separation and moral incompatibility. As part of their contribution to the 007 Romanian Pavilion at the Venice Biennial (Dust, 007), the artists installed bags of cement sand as one would hang pictures in gallery, pierced so that the bags would dribble inert dust over the duration of the exhibition. The protracted fall of the concrete sand functioned as a monumental hourglass, counting loss and the dead time between the ‘then’ and ‘now’ of political proclamations and their materialisation as architectural ruins-in-waiting. Alongside works that use other unstable materials like rust (the myriad splinters of a rusting Iron Curtain, perhaps) or poplar fluff (possibly the epitome of formlessness), the artists gauge historical position or significance on strange scales and with strange counterweights. The trivial, unruly nature of their stuff, hovering between dissolution and coagulation, captures the echo of machines grinding away, actual machines or political mechanisms, industrial or post-industrial, human or post-human. Machines whose constant abrasion produces dust as omnipresent by-product, and to whose vitality ever-larger amounts of dust testify.

Fig. Mona Vat amanu & Florin Tudor, Rite of Spring, 010

6 art and culture in t imes of conflict

dorothee dupuis

Targeted Bodies

When the Bamiyan Buddhas in Afghanistan were destroyed by the Taliban in March 001, they had already been front-page news all over the world for weeks. Experts of all kinds – historians, philosophers, politicians and intellectuals, both Afghan and international – fiercely denounced the barbarism of religious fundamentalism. Then, after the statues had been dynamited, silence. Public opinion turned to other matters, other emergencies. The people of Afghanistan continued to struggle on a daily basis with fear, warfare, censorship, survival and mourning.

The incident took place the year that Lida Abdul finally decided to move back to Afghanistan, where she had been born almost thirty years earlier. Abdul made her name through performances (often documented in video) depicting in a personal way the complexity of her multiple identity: a young American female artist with exotic looks, born of Afghan parents who had fled the Soviet invasion of their country in the late seventies. She focused in her work on the condition of women in her native country, and on testing the limits of her own female condition in the West. Her early performances also evoked notions of memory, genealogy, history, religion and exile. Adbul used her body’s presence as a sign of resistance and resilience, as a personal, engaged testimony in favour of freedom and tolerance against oblivion and violence.

She can still be seen as a protagonist in White House (00) [Fig. 6–8, p.6], the first video she made in Afghanistan after moving back there, but she no longer features in her later videos. White House establishes the base for her subsequent filmic practice: a documentary style, use of local Afghan people as actors, minimalist aesthetics, and narratives stripped to their essence. In her films, Abdul stages simple choreographies with a highly symbolic charge. They feature groups of silently absorbed local men or children, performing enigmatic actions in hieratic landscapes and settings chosen as much for their political connotations as for their significance in terms of the country’s history.

Clapping with Stones (00) [Fig. 1, p.7] [Fig. 9–1, p.66] shows a succession of fixed planes in a mountainous Afghan landscape, narrowing progressively to focus finally on the empty niches where the Bamiyan Buddhas stood before they were destroyed. A group of men is gathered below one of the gigantic recesses. Dressed

Fig. 6–8 Lida Abdul, White House, 00

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simply in black, they slowly bend down to pick up some stones. They then start to tap the stones together, making a dry, yet gentle sound. The camera observes their gestures, attitudes and faces as they perform this basic, yet profoundly symbolic gesture. It then moves slowly away from them, the planes growing larger and larger, until a last shot of the Afghan mountains fills the screen, followed by a fade to black. Abdul, who has stated her admiration for the aesthetics of Iranian avant-garde cinema,1 seeks to create realistic films advocating resistance through peaceful actions, which remind the distraught western viewer of the serene nature of original oriental culture. Beardless, quiet young men – looking anything but aggressive – are shown here in a symbiotic mourning process, in which nature and civilisation might seemingly have cohabited forever, had it not been for the violent action of the Taliban. The monumental void of the niches carved from the reddish cliffs symbolises the long disappeared religious tolerance of the region formerly known as Gandhara.

Representing absence, being present, but unseen: Lida Abdul talks frequently of the awkwardness of her presence as a visual artist in Kabul. She unceasingly questions the very meaning of art in such a context, where all are ‘artists of survival’. The presence of Abdul’s body in her art in the United States seemed to reflect the irreducible alterity of the immigrant’s persona. Back in her native land, it is as if the very obscenity of her presence there obliterated that need for self-representation. As if the solidity of her position no longer had to be questioned, creating space for her real subject – the Afghan people’s resistance to violence, obscurantism and despair.

My personal symbol of oppression right now as a convinced feminist, is the shocking proposal by Spain’s conservative government to strongly restrict existing abortion rights in the country. The new law would take us all the way back to 198, when you had to prove rape or a danger to the mother’s life (not even deformity or genetic disease on the part of the foetus!) to be legally allowed to abort. As the weeks pass, I anxiously check the media for news of the proposed law’s progress, the demonstrations organised by opponents, the views of feminist intellectuals, the reaction of Spanish public opinion, and that of other European countries, presidents, ministers, and so on. I talk about it to the people around me, few of whom seem to know about the proposed changes. I am surprised to discover many people view the woman’s right to abortion as negotiable. Something I took for granted as an established fact turned out not to be. Not at all.

Art is one powerful way to fight the dismal ideologies, oppressive values and behaviours promoted by the conjunction of corporations and ruling elites: it can offer fresh, challenging, progressive representations capable of shaping a new reality for today and tomorrow. To choose a point of view, to define and create a space for freedom of speech and thought, to occupy it, to fill the void left by destruction and hate with meaning and peace: this is Lida Abdul’s response to the unspeakable yet over-represented violence of war and fundamentalism in her native land. Abdul wants to offer Afghans and the world another vision of themselves, of their culture, of the acts they can choose to perform.

As a curator, writer and intellectual, I, like Abdul, am offered spaces to speak out and to defend the values I believe in. I hope the anti-abortion bill in Spain does not pass, saving the lives and futures of many girls and women. The ‘targeted heritage’ in today’s Europe is indeed not so much objects, artworks or buildings, but rights, minds and, yes, bodies. I hope we keep in mind what artists like Lida Abdul are fighting for: freedom and equality of rights and perspectives – whether you are a Spanish girl or an Afghan woman.

oppos ite

Fig. 9–1

Lida Abdul, Clapping with Stones, 00

1 http://www.ibraaz.org/interviews/

Lida Abdul, ‘Los Angeles to Kabul to Balkh’, in: Gagarin, 00, no. 1, –7.

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I was fascinated by the fact that history can be entirely rewritten within a few months by the same journalists, including Pierre Davister and Jean Van der Dussen de Kestergat. We see both of them in Brassinne’s photographs – the latter is actually sitting on the damaged monument with a camera round his neck. Davister was more camera-shy, but he was the one who paved the way for Tshombe’s return as prime minister of the Congo by interviewing him in early 196 for the magazine Pourquoi Pas?, in which the erstwhile President of Katanga was exonerated of Lumumba’s murder, and through Tshombé’s July 196 visit to Stanleyville – Lumumba’s stronghold – where he actually laid a wreath on the new memorial!

rona ld van de sompel You noted in A Prior#14 that the first victim of war is always truth and that journalists and documentary makers are always the first to manipulate reality. Here at M, Appelle-moi Pierre comme je t’appelle Joseph (01) [Fig. 1, p.8] [Fig. , p.7–7] , your new creation takes as its starting point journalist Pierre Davister’s involvement in the Congolese crisis. How would you define your position as an artist in relation to historians, on the one hand, and the media on the other? How, in other words, does your artistic practice relate to history? Does it focus on some kind of recovery of truth – by exposing fictions or correcting mistakes, for instance? Or, to put it less forcefully, by clarifying contradictory interpretations or setting them against one another?

Fig. Sven Augustijnen, Spectres, 011

ronald van de sompel

There Will Be No Paradise Interview with Sven Augustijnen

rona ld van de sompel Your interest in monuments was initially aroused by your absorption in the social and urban reality of Brussels, the city in which you live. You can see the Cinquantenaire Park from your window and you walk past the statue of Leopold II every day. The presence of nineteenth-century monuments within the cityscape led you to Belgium’s heritage as a colonial power, which culminated in your work with the film Spectres (011) [Fig. , p.1] [Fig. , p.69]. During the making of the film and the book of the same title, you were allowed access to the picture archive of Jacques Brassinne de la Buissière, who was a young diplomat in Congo when Patrice Lumumba was murdered. In it you stumbled on a photograph of the half-destroyed monument to Lumumba taken during the recapture of Stanleyville in November 196. In the exhibition Ravaged: Art and Culture in Times of Conflict, you take the history of that monument as your starting point for a new creation. What were your primary motives, and what is the significance of that monument?

sven august i j nen The monument plays an important symbolic part in the history of the recapture of Stanleyville in November 196, as this involved settling scores with the rebels who had massacred people there in August 196. Coalition troops destroyed the monument, which had been set up by the République Populaire du Congo in May 1961. Before independence, incidentally, there was another monument – a bust of Leopold II – at the very spot in Stanleyville where the first monument was erected in honour of Lumumba.

The reason I wanted to research the material again is substantially indicated in the conversation I had with Brassinne for the book Spectres. I questioned the dating of a photograph showing the then prime minister Moïse Tshombe visiting the still intact monument with a few journalists in his wake. The photograph was in a set showing the Ommegang operation, so Brassinne assumed they had all been taken during the recapture of Stanleyville on November 196. We now know that the Tshombe picture does not date from November but from July 196, prior to the occupation of the town by the rebels. This is also clear from the fact that we encounter Jacques Brassinne and his friends in front of a damaged monument a bit later in the series.

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sven august i j nen I contacted the daughter of Antoine Gizenga, a founder of the République Populaire du Congo, who informed me that her father attended the inauguration of the monument. But she didn’t know who built it or who made the painting. The different photographs also raise certain doubts: were there several paintings, was a dummy with a photograph of Lumumba’s face used at some point? As to who actually blew up the monument, I hope to have some news for the opening of the exhibition!

rona ld van de sompel How do you view the relationship between these gruesome events and the monument and its destruction? And how is the relationship with the broader time frame explored visually in your presentation?

sven august i j nen There obviously is a relationship – not only between the atrocities and the destruction of the monument, but also with the disposal of Patrice Lumumba, Maurice Mpolo and Joseph Okito’s bodies. Two years ago, after a screening of my film in Brussels, I told Cuauhtémoc Medina – a colleague of yours – that two Belgians, the Soete brothers, had dismembered the corpses of Patrice Lumumba, Joseph Okito and Maurice Mpolo. I detected both astonishment in his reaction, and a certain pleasure in his acknowledgment of ‘this transcultural act’. We exchanged emails after our meeting, and he suggested that I should reread Ryszard Kapuscinski’s The Soccer War,1 particularly the section on spirits. Though many Belgians at the time, and no doubt also today, were horrified by stories of dismembered corpses, the practice is easily explained by the transcultural example in question. It harks back to the belief in spirits inhabiting the body, and ‘the necessity of destroying the corpse, particularly if the corpse belonged to an enemy whose spirits can later avenge him’. It is this very mutilation or total destruction, paradoxically, which arouses the desire to be reconstituted, resurrected, returned or transfigured. Hence, the concept of ghosts and spirits.

rona ld van de sompel As you said, there was once a monument to Leopold II on the site of the Lumumba memorial, and now there is a ‘Monument des Martyrs’ there. The place seems like a silent witness to a never-ending cycle of destruction and reconstruction of monuments…

1 Ryszard Kapuscinski, The Soccer War (London: Granta Books, 1990). Medina and Augustijnen discussed the French version of the book, Il n’y aura pas de paradis : La guerre du foot et autres guerres

et aventures (Paris: Pocket, 00), which takes its name – as does this article – from another essay in the collection, ‘There Will Be No Paradise’.

Kapuscinski, The Soccer War, p. 19.

sven august i j nen A passage from A Prior #14 that may be more important is the one about Montaigne: ‘and it is said that even our laws are legitimate fictions upon which the truth of their justice is based.’ If the foundation of the law itself is fiction, it then follows that it is interpretable and transformable. This understanding of the law further complicates the notions of the ‘just’ or a ‘just case’ or the ‘legitimate’. You can also look at history and truth, at the role of the journalist and the photographer from that perspective. I am often asked from the vantage point of more traditional documentary cinema what my position is, my point de vue. I mostly reply that I don’t have one. But it probably lies in what I just mentioned: the fact that everything is a truth through its phenomenological value and through showing it, whether it is visual, linguistic or intertextual. I certainly don’t mean to make everything relative, though: quite the contrary it sharpens your take on things.

rona ld van de sompel Appelle-moi Pierre comme je t’appelle Joseph features in a section of the exhibition focusing on the destruction of monuments not as collateral damage, but as the target of deliberate destruction. Are there indications that this was also the case in Stanleyville?

sven august i j nen It’s hard to call it anything other than ‘deliberate’ when dynamite is used. Especially when similar memorials to Lumumba, Okito and Mpolo were also destroyed in all the other cities in the République Populaire du Congo.

rona ld van de sompel The research method you employed for this new creation corresponds to some extent with the one you apply when making a film, but there are differences too. In Spectres you offered a forum to a real protagonist, and his story forms the basis on which to construct a metanarrative. You gradually develop a personal relationship with that character, which you then play off against the narratives of the other characters. Your involvement – you even talk at times of ‘complicity’ – expresses itself in your cinematography. Does a similar dynamic arise when you work with archive materials as such?

sven august i j nen It’s hard to tell, as I’m still in the thick of the creative process. In principle, the power of a film is that you can identify strongly with the character: there is sound and movement; it is an experience that is strongly based on our daily experience, or reinforces it. I have to say that some of the photographic material I found from the sixties still seems very fresh and contemporary. Possibly because these are negatives that had never seen the light of day, or because of the way in which the photographs were taken and I attempt to appropriate them. Or simply because of the contemporary relevance of the images in themselves. By which I mean to say that involvement can also come about through other strategies.

rona ld van de sompel You initially stated that there was considerable uncertainty concerning the destruction of the monument. According to some sources it was destroyed by Mobutu’s ANC troops. Now you’re saying it was blown up by Europeans after all. Did this become clearer in recent months? Are there other events that were cleared up during your research process?

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Fig. Sven Augustijnen, Appelle-moi Pierre comme je t’appelle Joseph, 01

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of Western civilisation itself. It’s interesting to note how German public opinion, influenced by propaganda in the press or in statements by intellectuals, stressed the great racial betrayal of the European peoples implied by the use of colonial troops against the Central Powers. Not out of compassion for those troops, but because it was a sign of moral corruption and an affront to Germany. Of course, in doing so, they didn’t fail to point out – justly, although the Germans behaved equally badly in Namibia – the hypocrisy of the British above all, given the violent British colonial policy in India, for example.

I’ve incorporated a series of pamphlets and magazines from that period, as well as postcards that carry images of the destruction. These were produced mainly in France and Belgium, the countries that made the greatest use of victimisation as a propaganda strategy. And in fact the German policy of destroying towns and monuments – the atrocités allemandes – was quite real. I’m interested in the mass circulation of such pictures, a totally new modern aesthetics of ruins – not of ancient ruins but contemporary ones.

octav io zaya Your meticulous drawings of documents and publications typically present a new angle on history and a series of networks or relationships, such as those you explain in relation to the other texts – press releases, advertising, tourism, caricatures, etc. – that help unmask the official discourses of the power structure. At the same time, the disparity between the original documents and your selections and reproductions shows how we constantly reconstruct history. In this respect, what is your take on the propaganda of that era?

fernando bryce As we know, the First World War was the first conflict in which destruction and death took place on an industrial scale. But it’s interesting to note that, especially at the beginning of the war, when aggressive nationalism prevailed even at the Second International, and when the socialist and workers’ parties were backing their respective governments, it was the destruction of monuments – and not of human lives, the traditional currency of war – that came to symbolise barbarism. It was only later that revulsion over the massacres spawned revolutionary opposition to the war itself.

In spite of their abusive caricatures of the enemy, the Allies won the propaganda war in part because it was difficult for German propaganda to remove the stain of the systematic destruction of cities and of emblematic places like Leuven and Reims. The Allies – who destroyed cities too, but not in such an emblematic manner – successfully hammered away at the subject of Reims and Leuven, at malevolent German militarism and the barbarism it represented.

octav io zaya Is there a procedure or premise through which you decide which documents, texts, or images you regard as important enough to use, or is the choice determined by the dynamics of the investigation itself?

fernando bryce As you’ve suggested, my work is like a network of quotations and indications made with pictures and texts, one that would hardly be able to operate the way a historian would use them in a written discourse, in terms of either the manner or the end result. In my historiographic ambition – which is not that of an artist or a philosopher of the pictures, but of an empirical bricoleur of archival documents – I always try to make sure that no major aspects are excluded.

octav io zaya In a broad sense, we might say that all of your work makes up a kind of critical archaeological documentary and visual investigation of the vicissitudes of history, as well as of the creation of history itself. The occasion that brings us together, a group show in Leuven called Ravaged: Art and Culture in Times of Conflict, places you once again on familiar terrain. The central theme of the show is cultural atrocities, and you were commissioned to create something very specific within the category of ‘propaganda.’ What have you been investigating and from what perspectives?

fernando bryce I was commissioned to address the propaganda related to two very specific events of the First World War: the destruction of a good part of Leuven – notably its university library – by German troops, and the partial destruction of Reims cathedral, also by the Germans. Obviously I don’t intend to confine myself to pictures and texts relating exclusively to these events. Instead, I’m putting the material I’ve found into context using newspaper front pages about the events, which also provide general information about the conflict, and period advertisements related to technical innovations, photography and tourism. This is in addition to the potent world of political cartoons, which use humour to depict the enemy in a negative manner. There are, for example, some very funny cartoons mocking the German Kaiser.

I also plan to include excerpts from intellectual manifestos of the time, in which the French, Belgians, and British, using two types of argument, charge the Germans with committing acts of barbarism, which placed them beyond the pale of the ‘civilised world.’ The first argument casts doubt on the German concept of Kultur, identifying it with militarism and as being in open opposition to the laws of war that the bloodless Belle Époque had achieved through the Geneva and Hague Conventions. The second, more benevolent, argument contrasts the ‘authentic German culture’ of the poets and philosophers with the barbarity of imperial German militarism.

Naturally, German intellectuals defended themselves, issuing a famous ‘Manifesto of the Ninety-Three,’ which justified militarism as self-defence against the perpetual siege of the German nation by its enemies, and thus as a defence

octavio zaya

Re-Producing History Interview with Fernando Bryce

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fernando bryce I’ve been reading about the war, but particularly about the Western Front, which is what interests me, and the business of the ‘German atrocities’. There’s some primary source material that will be included in the series, along with texts like the ‘Manifesto of the Ninety-Three,’ but also the findings of the various investigative committees set up by the Allies during the war, like the famous report on the atrocities by Lord Bryce – an illustrious ancestor of mine, I like to imagine – who was British Ambassador to Washington for a long time. Although he was a liberal, who had an appreciation for German culture, he was also a loyal patriot. I will probably include the cover of the report and excerpts from its introduction. It’ll be amusing to see my own surname mixed up in the story.

I’ve been reading an interesting historian named Alan Kramer, who with John Horne co-authored a book entitled German Atrocities, which focuses specifically on the actions of the German army in Belgium. It’s very thorough and includes an interesting discussion of the ‘franc-tireur myth-complex,’ which was the initial pretext used to justify the destruction. The Germans claimed that the Belgian civilian population wasn’t respecting the laws of war and that their troops had been illegally attacked by irregulars and snipers. This claim has since been proved baseless, but it was used as the pretext for the harsh ‘reprisals.’ The myth of the franc-tireur had a real origin in the actions of French guerrillas in the Franco-Prussian War of 1870. German troops, having been warned of this danger by their officers before invading neutral Belgium, fell prey to a collective hysteria in which every stray gunshot was taken as the work of a sniper, and which led to systematic reprisals against the civilian population. It also represented the Prussian ideological terror of a ‘people’s war’ inspired by the French Revolution and the Republic. At the same time there was another ‘mythic complex’ related to reports that the Germans were cutting off the hands of children. According to Kramer this had a colonial origin in the actual amputations that were administered in the Congo to the enemies of Leopold II.

octav io zaya In the course of your research for this series, have you uncovered any parallels with the present? After all, your work is important because sometimes it helps us – and at other times obliges us – to examine our own era with new eyes.

fernando bryce There are always parallels, because in spite of the discontinuities and ruptures, our present is the product of a historical process in which imperialism and colonialism are key features of the world. When you view all this material from 191, you can’t help also seeing our present retrospectively. My modest contribution is to review the pictures and documents of this history and present them in a different way, through drawing – a manual technique understood as a reflexive and paradoxical practice.

Thus, for example, there is a news item from the international wire services reporting that the good Karl Liebknecht, from the left wing of the German Socialist Party, the SPD, who had voted in the Reichstag against funding the war, had travelled to Belgium to verify the damage done by his compatriots and publicly criticised it.

I also wanted to include advertising from the time, insofar as it reflects the culture of contemporary capitalism. German advertising is interesting because it always indicates a very ‘organic’ sense of what the theories of the time understood by ‘culture’. The reactionary Teutonic form of modernity versus British imperial liberalism and ‘eternal France’ with its amalgam of imperial Republicanism and Catholic traditions; German technology; the nascent motion picture industry; the focus on bodily health – all were clichés at the service of imperial nationalism. The drawings alluding to these aspects accompany the ones depicting ruins and news reports of the disasters of war.

octav io zaya Apart from your trip to Leuven and your research in the university archives, how did you approach this subject?

Fig. Fernando Bryce, To the Civilised World, 01

78 79Fig. 6 Fernando Bryce, To the Civilised World, 01Fig. Fernando Bryce, To the Civilised World, 01

80 81Fig. 8 Fernando Bryce, To the Civilised World, 01Fig. 7 Fernando Bryce, To the Civilised World, 01


‘There is no document of civilisation which is not at the same time a document of barbarism’ – thus spoke Walter Benjamin in the famous seventh paragraph of his widely commented-upon Theses on the Philosophy of History. The German-Jewish philosopher did not live to see his essay published, as it was left in a state Benjamin himself considered unfinished when he committed suicide while trying to cross the Franco-Spanish border in the last days of the summer of 190. Benjamin was born in 189 in Berlin, a city he last laid eyes upon in 19, when he moved to Paris to escape the Nazi stranglehold on German cultural life. It is therefore not improbable that he witnessed the festive inauguration in 190 of the reconstruction at Berlin’s fabled Pergamon museum of the Ishtar Gate, which guarded the entrance to the ancient Mesopotamian capital of Babylon, excavated by the German archaeologist Robert Koldewey between 190 and 191. Indeed, it may well have been the inspiration for the aforementioned bon mot.

The Benjaminian dialectic of barbarism dressing up as civilisation (and civilisation unveiling itself as barbarism) is at the heart of much of Michael Rakowitz’ work, feeding the fire of the American artist’s creative indignation – rage. Über Wut (‘On Rage’) was, incidentally, the telling title of an exhibition organised at Berlin’s Haus der Kulturen der Welt in 010, for which Rakowitz conceived May the Arrogant Not Prevail [Fig. 16, p.] [Fig. 9, p.8] – a plywood remake of Babylon’s Ishtar Gate, covered with the colourful paper wrapping of the Mediterranean foodstuffs and consumer products familiar from some of the artist’s earlier signature projects. In its original presentation at the aptly named ‘House of World Cultures’ – an American gift to the people of West Berlin dating back to the height of the cultural Cold War – the archway of Rakowitz’ Ishtar Gate marked the entrance to the exhibition in a manner reminiscent of the original’s grandiose placement in the Pergamon Museum a mere two kilometres away. This prompts a reflection upon the many threads that tie together the history of empire, colonial expansion and the birth of modern museum culture: the very notion of the museum as the repository of civilisation is well-nigh unthinkable without the barbarousness of colonialism – and in this sense Rakowitz’ work appears solidly anchored in the tradition of institutional critiques, of art’s interrogation of its institutional frameworks.

dieter roelstraete

Michael Rakowitz: May the Arrogant Not Prevail

Fig. 9 Michael Rakowitz, May the Arrogant Not Prevail, 010

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prev ious spread Fig. 0 Michael Rakowitz, The Invisible Enemy Should Not Exist (Recovered, Missing, Stolen Series), 007–ongoinga bove Fig. 1 Michael Rakowitz, What Dust Will Rise?, 01

Yet the more direct reference in Rakowitz’ Potemkin-village-like gateway (the visitor’s first glimpse of the structure inside the Haus der Kulturen der Welt revealed only its bare-bones backside – the scaffolding that supports a brightly coloured front – covered with Arabic script and Pepsi Cola logos) is actually to a scaled-down reconstruction of the original Ishtar Gate. This was first built near the ruins of Babylon, one hundred kilometres south of present-day Baghdad, sometime in the 190s as the proposed entrance to an archaeological museum that never materialised. During the most recent Iraq War this somewhat sorry monument served as a perennially popular photo backdrop for US soldiers – many of whom, we may assume, had passed through the military base that was controversially built within spitting distance of the ruins of the ancient city of biblical renown. Today, this Babylon is best remembered as the symbol of all worldly evils (as in the ‘Whore of Babylon’) and the site of divine retribution – the Babylon spoken of in Revelation, 18, which many around the world (and an overwhelming majority in the Middle East in particular) have come to identify with US hegemony and the concomitant culture of global capitalist decadence: a culture that has wrought so much senseless destruction around the world, and among ancient histories and local traditions that are hardly among the least.

Approached from its inglorious rear, Rakowitz’ rickety gate deftly subverts the entwined myths of original objecthood (a remake of a remake does not return us to the real thing) and imperial permanence: much more than a portal to an imaginary past, May the Arrogant Not Prevail [Fig. 16, p.] [Fig. 9, p.8] is really a gateway to a post-imperial present of shattered nations, uprooted populations – Rakowitz is of Iraqi-Jewish descent: his mother was born to a family of Baghdadi Jews forced into exile shortly after the end of the Second World War – and age-old cultures in tatters.

Through its narrow passageway, the narratives of a sizable number of Rakowitz’ recent projects converge, many of which have the destruction of the world’s heritage (‘collateral damage’) as their primary subject: the looting and ruination of the National Museum of Iraq in Baghdad, which is at the centre of what is probably his best-known work, The Invisible Enemy Should Not Exist (007, ongoing) [Fig. 0, p.8–8] ; the bombing of the historical libraries of the German city of Kassel in the Second World War and the demolition of the Buddhas of Bamiyan at the hands of the Afghan Taliban, which together make up the core of What Dust Shall Rise (01) [Fig. 1, p.86], first shown at Documenta 1 in 01 ; and the pillaging of Saddam Hussein’s palaces after the fall of Baghdad, which eventually led to the arrival of a set of presidential tableware in Rakowitz’ native New York, where Saddam’s monogrammed dinner plates became integrated in the appropriately-titled Creative Time project Spoils.

Rakowitz remakes, recycles, returns: his is an art, in essence, of restoration, confident that the crushing arrogance of time will not prevail, and heedful that we should be reminded at all times of Benjamin’s timeless insight: that there are no documents of civilisation – and that includes works of art, even Rakowitz’ own – which are not at the same time documents of barbarism.

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eva scharrer

Abandoned PropertyInterview with Emily Jacir

Emily Jacir’s ongoing practice is concerned with silenced historical narratives, resistance, movement and exchange. She follows the threads she uncovers to the very end, from the collective experience to the individual person, and makes visible what is invisible�often leaving things unfinished and inviting us to continue them. In her installation in the Zwehrenturm of the Fridericianum in Kassel, she created a register of fragmentary traces and intimate notes. They might have seemed cryptic to us, but Jacir translated them and put them on billboards in public spaces in the German city, significantly changing the scale of personal inscriptions left by the owners of what had been labelled as ‘Abandoned Property’.

eva scharrer What led to your project ex libris (010–1) [Fig. 17, p.6–7] [Fig. , p.88] [Fig. , p.90]; where did it start?

emily jac ir There are several different paths that led me to ex libris. One was the research I was doing on the situation in Mamilla Cemetery in Jerusalem. This cemetery is going to be the site of a facility called the ‘Museum of Tolerance’ being built by the Simon Wiesenthal Center of Los Angeles in partnership with the Israeli government. Part of the cemetery is being destroyed, and hundreds of human remains desecrated. It has been a burial ground since the seventh century. Before that, it was the site of a Byzantine church. Generations of Jerusalem families are buried there. I was on the site a lot, photographing the various monuments, gravestones and other structures, like the ancient pool there. During the British Mandate it was declared a historical site and later an antiquities site.

In conjunction with this research, there were site visits to Kassel and especially the visit to the Murhard Library, where the librarian spoke to us about the books that were destroyed when the Fridericianum, housing the library of the Landgraves of Hesse-Kassel, was bombed in 191. He also showed us the remains of books that were severely damaged but had survived. ‘Sixty to eighty bombs hit the Fridericianum, but not one bomb hit the tower,’

top Fig. Emily Jacir, Material for a Film (detail) (Wael Zuaiter’s 1001 Nights), 00–07 bottom Fig. Emily Jacir, ex libris, 010–1

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he said, and this really stuck in my mind. The manuscripts that were hidden in the tower survived.

I was also doing a lot of research on the Hesse region during the period when it belonged to the American zone of occupation. In particular, I was absolutely fascinated by the work of the Monuments, Fine Arts and Archives officers and their efforts at the Offenbach Archival Depot, where the biggest book restitution project in history took place. On 1 May 196 Offenbach was designated as the ‘sole archival depot’ in the American zone of occupation for the handling of looted books and archives. (Offenbach, incidentally, was the centre of European typography at one point.)

eva scharrer How did you first learn about the A.P. (Abandoned Property) books in the Jewish National Library in Jerusalem?

emily jac ir I first learned about the A.P. books in 008 from an article I read by Gish Amit. It was published in the Jerusalem Quarterly, under the title: ‘Ownerless Objects? The story of the books Palestinians left behind in 198.’ After that, one of my closest and dearest friends Munir Fakher Eldin and I spent many long hours together at the library and in deep discussions regarding the books. Our talks revolved around the idea of custodianship, preservation, restitution and the relationship between books and land, especially ‘Absentee Property’. Munir, who is an academic, pointed to what these books have meant to generations of Israeli scholars, and how the library not only acts as a host for these books, but utilises them as intellectual property.

eva scharrer You returned to the library several times over the course of almost two years to do research with your cell phone. Can you talk about your experience there? What were the findings that struck you most?

emily jac ir What was interesting was the way my relationship to the books shifted during the process of working. During the very first visits I was focused on documenting inscriptions in the books, particularly the names of the owners. But slowly, as I worked over the course of many visits, I became more interested in the small traces left behind in the books… stains, scribbles, marginalia, scraps of paper. I used to leave the library covered in dust and it felt as if that dust had coated my lungs and insides as well. I noticed 74-ח or 75-ח stamped in most of the books, which I asked the librarians about, but they did not know what the stamps were. I think they may be military cataloguing of some sort, perhaps.

eva scharrer Books, libraries and the question of translation recur in many of your projects. I am thinking especially of Untitled (books) (000) [Fig. , p.9], where books from/about Palestine filled the space of a door, without a shelf, held in place only by their pressure between the two walls, and Material for a Film (007) [Fig. , p.88], where a copy of the Thousand and One Nights was pierced by one of the thirteen bullets fired into Wael Zuaiter, the Palestinian intellectual and translator, who never managed to fulfil his dream of translating this book from Arabic into Italian. In your work, books become surrogates for people, for untold stories. What kind of collective picture do the A.P. books provide?

Fig. Emily Jacir, detail from ex libris (A.P. 4561), 010 –1

9 9a .p.art and culture in t imes of conflict

emily jac ir I know that individual owners have gone back over the years to try to get their books back, though to no avail. You can find memoirs and pieces written by some of the owners in which they refer to those books. There is the story of Khalil Sakakini’s daughters coming to the library to see their father’s books. At one point there was an appeal to have his books transferred to the Khalil Sakakini Cultural Center in Ramallah. With the release of Gish’s academic work, there is a discussion in Israel regarding these books. I also know that the Institute for Palestine Studies, for example, is interested in building archives to collect and preserve Palestinian intellectual production, and it is simply a matter of time in my opinion that the issue of the A.P. books will be addressed. I have heard that the Legal Center for Arab Minority Rights in Israel is looking at a way to take up the issue in a legal framework. There is also a film by the Israeli filmmaker Benny Bruner that has just been released this month, which I have not had a chance to see yet. So yes there are several discussions happening on several fronts.

Palestinians cannot access these books. The books should be restituted and repatriated to their owners. I am not sure if what happened at Offenbach will have a chance to happen in the case of these books. Let’s go back to the case of Mamilla, despite international law, United Nations resolutions and legal obligations, the Israeli Supreme Court has ruled in favour of construction of the museum. The right to protection of cultural heritage and cultural property as guaranteed by international human rights instruments such as the UNESCO World Heritage Convention, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR), the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR) et al. is never implemented when it comes to the case of Palestinian objects, books, religious sites, cemeteries. On the other hand, the books are sitting in the National Library of Israel, a readymade memorial, polluting and perhaps haunting the system.

emily jac ir I think the A.P. books can only point to individual stories. For me, an acute detail is that these books were selected – a selection chosen by the coloniser for particular purposes. I would love to be able to know which books were deemed unimportant and not worth collecting or preserving. Which books were designated as insignificant and irrelevant? Which ones were discarded? What happened to the books that were in English, Italian, Spanish, etc.? Which books bypassed the ‘A.P.’ designation and became part of the library’s general collections?

eva scharrer Did you know some of the original owners?

emily jac ir Yes, I know the families of the owners of some of books in the library. I also found books from the school where my grandfather taught… a book with an inscription written by one of my fathers’ elementary school teachers Asaf Wahbe Effendi…

eva scharrer Do you see a chance that what happened in Offenbach with the Archival Depot could also happen in Palestine? Is there awareness, or a public discussion about the restitution of Palestinian books?

Fig. Emily Jacir and Anton Sinkewich, Untitled (books), 001

97

Adel Abdessemed, Cheval arabe, (1 – On Green Book Vol. 1), 011

Book, resin, iron wire Private Collection, BelgiumCourtesy Christine König

Lida Abdul, Clapping with Stones, 00 16mm transferred to dvd, 16:9, '00"Courtesy Giorgio Persano Gallery

Sven Augustijnen, Appelle-moi Pierre comme je t’appelle Joseph, 01 Mixed media, variable dimensions Courtesy the artist and Jan Mot, BrusselsWith the kind permission of the children of Jean Van der Dussen de Kestergat and the Library of Foreign Affairs and the Africa section of the Library of the Federal Public Service Foreign AffairsCommissioned by M – Museum Leuven Fernando Bryce, To the Civilised World, 01

Drawings, ink on paper, dimensions variableCourtsey Barbara Thumm Gallery, BerlinCommissioned by M – Museum Leuven

Cai Guo-Qiang, Black Fireworks: Project for Hiroshima, 008 Gunpowder on paper, 0 × 0cmCollection of the artist

Cai Guo-Qiang, The making of gunpowder drawing: Black Fireworks: Project for Hiroshima, 008 Digital file, '8"Videography and editing by Araki Takashisa Collection of the artist Explosion event realised at Motomachi Riverside Park near the Atomic Bomb Dome, Hiroshima, October 008, 1pm, 1' Black smoke shells Commissioned by Hiroshima City

Mona Hatoum, Bunker, 011

Mild steel tubingParts: El Murr, Hallway Bldg. I, Starco I, Markasi Bldg., Straco II, Sports Club, Hallway Bldg. II, Chamber Bldg., Omar Bldg., Cube Bldg., Angle Bldg. IICourtesy the artist and White Cube Part: Bourj IIICourtesy the artist and Galerie Chantal Crousel, Paris

Emily Jacir, ex-libris, 010–1

Installation Photographs taken by cell phone Commissioned and produced by Documenta 1 with the support of Alexander and Bonin, New York, Alberto Peola Arte Contemporanea, TurinSpecial thanks to Yusef Nasri Suleiman Jacir and Munir Fakher Eldin

Lamia Joreige, Beirut Autopsy of a City, 010 Mixed media (Photographs, texts, videos) chapter 1

A History of Beirut’s Possible Disappearance, 010 Photographs, texts and videoschapter

Beirut, 1001 views, 010 Animation, 16', video (in loop), black and white, silent Based on photographs from: The Arab Image Foundation, The Fouad Debbas Collection and An Nahar Documentation Centre Beirut Effects: Sandra Fatté (Djinn House)chapter

Beirut 2058, 010 Animation, 9'6", video (in loop), colour with sound Effects: Sandra Fatté (Djinn House)Commissioned by Mathaf, Doha for the exhibition Told, Untold, Retold Courtesy of the artist

Michael Rakowitz, May the Arrogant Not Prevail, 010

Middle Eastern food packaging, cardboard, wood98.6 × 9 × 9cmCommissioned by Haus der Kulturen der Welt, BerlinCourtesy the artist and Lombard Freid Gallery, New York

Mona Vat amanu & Florin Tudor, Dust Square, 008

Cement, concrete dust, 0 × 60cmCourtesy of the artists

Exhibition / List of Works

Contemporary Reflections

l i st of works

98 99art and culture in t imes of conflict l i st of i llustr at ions

[Fig. 6, p.] Cai Guo-Qiang making gunpowder drawing Black Fireworks: Project for Hiroshima, 008

Courtesy of the Hiroshima CityMuseum of Contemporary ArtPhoto: Seiji Toyonaga

[Fig. 7–8, p.] Cai Guo-Qiang, The Century with Mushroom Clouds: Project for the 20th Century, 1996

Realised at various sites that includeNuclear Test Site, Nevada; atMichael Heizer’s Double Negative(1969–70), Mormon Mesa, Overton,Nevada; at Robert Smithson’sSpiral Jetty (1970) Salt Lake, Utah;February – April, approximately seconds each periodGunpowder and cardboard tubesCourtesy Cai StudioPhotos: Hiro Ihara

[Fig. 9, p.6] Cai Guo-Qiang, BlackFireworks: Project for Hiroshima, 008

Realised at Motomachi RiversidePark, Hiroshima, October 008,1pm, 1'Black smoke shellsCourtesy of the Hiroshima CityMuseum of Contemporary ArtPhoto: Seiji Toyonaga

[Fig. 0, p.7] Cai Guo-Qiang, BlackFireworks: Project for Hiroshima, 008

Gunpowder on paper, 0 × 0cmCourtesy of the Hiroshima CityMuseum of Contemporary ArtPhoto: Seiji Toyonaga

[Fig. 1, p.9] Mona Vat amanu &Florin Tudor, Wall, 008

Installation view Stroom Den HaagCourtesy the artists

[Fig. , p.9] Mona Vat amanu & Florin Tudor, Praful/The Dust, 006

Courtesy the artists

[Fig. , p.61] Mona Vat amanu &Florin Tudor, Dust Square, 008

Installation view ZachetaNational Gallery of Art, WarsawCourtesy the artists

[Fig. , p.61] Mona Vat amanu & Florin Tudor, Dust, Vacaresti, 006

Double channel film, '6"Installation view VeniceBiennale 007

Courtesy the artists

[Fig. , p.6] 9 Mona Vat amanu & Florin Tudor, Rite of Spring, 010

Film, 7'1"Courtesy the artists

[Fig. 6–8, p.6] Lida Abdul, White House, 00

16 mm film transferred to dvd, '8"Courtesy Giorgio Persano Gallery

[Fig. 9–1, p.66] Lida Abdul, Clapping with Stones, 00

16 mm film transferred to dvd, 'Courtesy Giorgio Persano Gallery

[Fig. , p.69] Sven Augustijnen, Spectres, 011

Courtesy the artist

[Fig. , p.7–7] Sven Augustijnen, Appelle-moi Pierre comme je t’appelle Joseph, 01–1 Courtesy the artist and Jan Mot, Brussels© Claude Dewit Commissioned by M – Museum Leuven

[Fig. , p.76] Fernando Bryce, To the Civilised World, 01

Drawing, ink on paper, × cmCourtesy Barbara ThummGallery, Berlin Commissioned by M – Museum Leuven

[Fig. –8, p.78–81] Fernando Bryce, To the Civilised World, 01


[Fig. 9, p.8] Michael Rakowitz, May the Arrogant Not Prevail, 010

Middle Eastern food packaging, cardboard, wood98.6 × 9 × 9cmCommissioned by Haus der Kulturen der Welt, BerlinCourtesy the artist and Lombard Freid Gallery, New YorkPhoto: Thomas Eugster

[Fig. 0, p.8–8] Michael Rakowitz, The Invisible Enemy Should Not Exist (Recovered, Missing, Stolen Series), 007 – ongoingMiddle Eastern packaging andnewspapers, glue

Variable dimensionsCourtesy the artist and Lombard

[Fig. 1, p.86] Michael Rakowitz, What Dust Will Rise?, 01

Commissioned and producedby Documenta 1 with thesupport of Dena Foundationfor Contemporary Art, Paris, andLombard Freid Gallery, New YorkCourtesy the artist and LombardFreid Gallery, New YorkPhoto: Roman März

[Fig. , p.88] Emily Jacir, Material for a Film (detail) (Wael Zuaiter’s1001 Nights), 00–07

Multimedia installation, threesound pieces, 1 video, texts, photos,archival material This work was devised in partwith the support of La Biennaledi VeneziaPhoto: David Heald

[Fig. , p.88] Emily Jacir, ex libris, 010–1

Installation, public project and bookCommissioned and producedby Documenta 1 with thesupport of Alexander and Bonin,New York and Alberto Peola ArteContemporanea, TurinCourtesy of Alexander and Bonin,New YorkPhoto: Emily Jacir © Emily Jacir

[Fig. , p.90] Emily Jacir, detail fromex libris (A.P. 4561), 010–1.Installation, public project and bookCommissioned and producedby Documenta 1 with thesupport of Alexander and Bonin,New York and Alberto Peola ArteContemporanea, TurinPhoto: Roman März © Emily JacirCourtesy of Alexander and Bonin,New York

[Fig. , p.9] Emily Jacir and AntonSinkewich, Untitled (books), 001

Dimensions variable,language variablePhoto: Michael Stravato

[Fig. 6, p.108–109] Pierre Alphonse and Pierre Emile Arnou, The libraryof Leuven after the fire of 1914Courtesy University archivesKU LeuvenPhoto: Bruno Vandermeulen

[Fig. 1, p.–] Pierre Alphonse and Pierre Emile Arnou, The library of Leuven after the fire of 1914

Courtesy University archivesKU LeuvenPhoto: Bruno Vandermeulen

[Fig. , p.10–11] Mona Hatoum, Bunker (detail), 011

mild steel tubing structures,dimensions variableCourtesy the artist and White Cube Photo: Hugo Glendinning

[Fig. , p.1] Map of Leuven showing the damaged areas, drawn up during the First World War for the city counselPhoto: Bruno Vandermeulen

[Fig. , p.1] Sven Augustijnen, Spectres, 011

Courtesy the artist

[Fig. , p.1] Fernando Bryce, To the Civilised World, 01


[Fig. 6, p.16] Adel Abdessemed,The sea, 008

Video projection, 0'10" (loop),colour, soundCourtesy Adel Abdessemed,ADAGP Paris

[Fig. 7, p.16] Adel Abdessemed,Salam europe, 006

16km of barbed wire, 60cm × 00cmCourtesy Adel Abdessemed,ADAGP Paris

[Fig. 8, p.0] Mona Hatoum, Witness, 009

Porcelain biscuit9 × .0 × .0cmCourtesy of the artist andGalerie Chantal Crousel, ParisPhoto: Florian Kleinefenn

[Fig. 9, p.0] Lamia Joreige, Beirut, Autopsy of a City, 010

Courtesy the artist

[Fig. 10, p.–] Cai Guo-Qiang, Black Fireworks: Project for Hiroshima, 008

Realised at Motomachi RiversidePark, Hiroshima, October 008,1pm, 1'Black smoke shellsCourtesy of the Hiroshima CityMuseum of Contemporary ArtPhoto: Seiji Toyonaga

[Fig. 11, p.] Mona Vat amanu & Florin Tudor, Dust, Gryzbowska 51, 008 Performance (Another City, Another Life, Zacheta – National Gallery of Art, Warsaw) Courtesy the artists

[Fig. 1, p.7] Lida Abdul, Clapping with Stones, 00

16 mm film transferred to dvd, 'Courtesy Giorgio Persano Gallery

[Fig. 1, p.8] Sven Augustijnen, Appelle-moi Pierre comme je t’appelle Joseph, 01–1 Courtesy the artist and Jan Mot, Brussels© Claude Dewit Commissioned by M – Museum Leuven

[Fig. 1–1, p.0] Fernando Bryce, To the Civilised World, 01


[Fig. 16, p.] Michael Rakowitz, May the Arrogant Not Prevail, 010

Middle Eastern food packaging, cardboard, wood98.6 × 9 × 9cmCommissioned by Haus der Kulturen der Welt, BerlinCourtesy the artist and Lombard Freid Gallery, New YorkPhoto: Thomas Eugster

[Fig. 17, p.6–7] Emily Jacir, ex libris, 010–1

Installation, public project and bookCommissioned and producedby Documenta 1 with the

support of Alexander and Bonin,New York and Alberto Peola ArteContemporanea, TurinCourtesy of Alexander and Bonin, New YorkPhoto: Roman März © Emily Jacir [Fig. 18, p.1] Adel Abdessemed, Cheval arabe (1 – On Green Book Vol.1), 011

Book, resin, iron, wire,Book: 17. × 1.7cm, horse:. × 1cm, total height: 17cmCourtesy Christine KönigGalerie, Vienna

[Fig. 19, p.1] Adel Abdessemed, Cheval arabe (2 – On Green Book Vol. 2), 011

Book, polyurethane foam, iron wireBook: 17. × 1.7cm, horse: . × 1cm, total height: 17cmCourtesy Christine KönigGalerie, Vienna

[Fig. 0, p.–] Lamia Joreige, Beirut, Autopsy of a City, 010

Courtesy the artist

[Fig. 1, p.] Aerial view of Beirut, 197/7

Courtesy Library MinistryTourism, LebanonPhoto: Fulvio Reuter [Fig. , p.6] Bateau de guerre TurqueThe Fouad Debbas CollectionPhoto: Dimitri Tarazi

[Fig. , p.6] L’escadre Francaise a Beyrouth (Syrie) le 1. Nove. 1999

The Fouad Debbas CollectionPhoto: Dimitri Tarazi [Fig. , p.6] U.S.S. Brooklyn a Beyrouth, 190–0

The Fouad Debbas CollectionPhoto: Dimitri Tarazi

[Fig. , p.0–1] Mona Hatoum, Bunker, 011

mild steel tubing structures,dimensions variableCourtesy the artist and White Cube Photo: Hugo Glendinning

List of Illustrations

101ack now ledgements

This book was published on the occasion of the exhibition Ravaged: Art and Culture in Times of Conflict, M – Museum Leuven, 0 March – 1 September 01

In collaboration with KU Leuven, the ‘Cultural History since 170’ Research Group and University Archives

With the support of the Flemish Government, the City of Leuven and Visit Flanders, and made possible in particular by Mayor Louis Tobback and Alderman for Culture Denise Vandevoort

The organisers would like to thank the City of Leuven, the artists and lenders and everyone who contributed to Ravaged: Art and Culture in Times of Conflict.

ArtistsAdel AbdessemedLida Abdul Sven Augustijnen Fernando Bryce Cai Guo-QiangMona Hatoum Emily JacirLamia Joreige Michael Rakowitz Mona Vat amanu & Florin Tudor

LendersAntwerp, private collection Belgium, private collection Bruges, Musea Brugge, GroeningemuseumBrussels, Collection Belfius BankJan Mot, Brussels / Mexico CityBrussels, Musée royal de l’Armée Brussels, Musées Royaux des Beaux-Arts de BelgiqueBrussels, Musée de la Ville de BruxellesGhent, Sint-BaafskapittelKortrijk, Stedelijke musea – BroelmuseumLeuven, Kunstpatrimonium KU LeuvenLeuven, Stadsarchief Leuven, Universiteitsarchief KU Leuven Liège, Musée de l’Art wallon de la Ville de Liège

Namur, Musée provincial des Arts anciens du NamuroisTervuren, Royal Museum for Central AfricaCopenhagen, Statens Museum for KunstBerlin, Deutsches Historisches MuseumKarlsruhe, Staatliche Kunsthalle KarlsruheBlérancourt, Musée franco-américain du Château de Blérancourt Douai, Musée de la ChartreuseLille, Musée des Beaux-ArtsOrléans, Musée des Beaux-Arts, loaned to Vizille, Musée de la Révolution françaiseParis, Galerie Chantal Crousel Paris, Musée CarnavaletRennes, Musée des Beaux-ArtsTroyes, Musée des Beaux-ArtsTurin, Giorgio Persano Milan, private collection Rome, Museo di RomaRome, Palazzo Barberini, Galleria Nazionale d’Arte AnticaVenice, Gallerie dell’AccademiaAmsterdam, Amsterdams MuseumAmsterdam, RijksmuseumRotterdam, Museum Boijmans Van BeuningenThe Hague, Kunsthandel Hoogsteder & Hoogsteder, private collectionBirkenhead, Williamson Art Gallery and MuseumLondon, Imperial War MuseumLondon, National GalleryScarborough Museums TrustNew York, Brooklyn MuseumNew York, Lombard Freid GalleryStanford, Stanford University, Hoover Institution

InstitutionsAntwerp, Extra City KunsthalBrussels, Auguste Orts Berlin, daadBerlin, Haus der Kulturen der WeltHiroshima, Hiroshima City Museum of Contemporary ArtNew York, Cai StudioParis, le peuple qui manqueVienna, Kunsthalle WienWarsaw, Zacheta-Narodowa Galeria Sztuki

GalleriesBerlin, Galerie Barbara Thumm Brussels, D+T PROJECT GalleryBrussels, Jan MotLondon, White CubeNew York, Alexander and Bonin New York, Lombard Freid GalleryParis, Galerie Chantal CrouselTurin, Giorgio Persano Vienna, Christine König Galerie

Special thanks to: Fran Bombeke, Anton Boon, Koen Brams, Binna Choi, Johan De Smet, Lynn de Mey, Elham Etamadi, Reem Fadda, Johan Grimonprez, Yukie Kamiya, Tjaša Knez, Midori Matsui, Cuauthémoc Medina, Naeem Mohaiemen, Linde Raedschelders, Raqs Media Collective, Lisa Rey-Galiay, Els Roelandt, Valerie Smith, Janneke Van Den Heuvel, Arno Van Roosmalen, Aranea Vos, Jade Zoghbi

Acknowledgements

10

Curator Contemporary ArtRonald Van de Sompel

Curator Old MastersEline Van Assche

Scientific CommitteeJo Tollebeek (KU Leuven, chair)Koenraad Brosens (KU Leuven)Luc Delrue (M) Mark Derez (KU Leuven, University Archive)Goedele Pulinx (M)Marjan Sterckx (UGent)Tom Verschaffel (KU Leuven)Eva Wittocx (M)

Veronique Vandekerchove was a prime mover behind Ravaged: Art and Culture in Times of Conflict and curator of M – Museum. She died suddenly on January 01. M would like to dedicate the current exhibition and publication to her.

Exhibition ArchitectureONO Architectuur

Lighting ConsultantChris Pype Production Team M – Museum Leuven:

General DirectorLuc Delrue

Executive Assistant Hannelore Vandezande

Head of Contemporary Art Department Eva Wittocx

Head of Contemporary Art Exhibitions Lore Van Hees

Assistant Curator Valerie Verhack

Assistant Contemporary Art ExhibitionsLore Boon, Tine D’Haeyere

Head of Production Tom Van Camp

Production Assistant Kristof Vande Walle

Head of Old Masters Department Peter Carpreau

Head of Old Masters Exhibitions Hélène Verreyke

Assistant Old Masters Exhibitions Goedele Pulinx

Head of CollectionsMarjan Debaene

Registrar Ko Goubert

Collection AssistantEline Sciot

Collection KeeperEve Van Dael

Head of Communication and Education DepartmentIsabel Lowyck

Head of CommunicationAnnelies Evens

PressAnnik Altruy, Veerle Ausloos

WebmasterStan Spijkers

Museum EducatorsKatrien Eckelmans, Marthy LochtThalassa Van Driesssche

Museum Mediator Anne Liefsoens

Events Stéphanie Jager

Head of Visitor Services and Bookshop Astrid Grunwald

Administration M-bassadors Lutt Clijsters

Reception Lutt Clijsters, Carla CuyversSabine Leemans, Flory Vloebergs Public Attendants Petra Delancker, Alex Emenogu Gunnar Machtelings, Monique Poleunis

Head of Finance, Personnel and Administration Department Ilse Steen

Head of Finance and Administration Carine Van Dyck

Accounting AdministratorIngrid Reggers

Personnel Administrator Hilde Engelbeens

AdministrationCindy Hermans

Administration of Temporary Staff, Project Staff and VolunteersSyd Uten

Technical Coordinator Maarten Janssen

Museum TechniciansWilly Covens, Hans SchoetersJeroen Wynants

MaintenanceYounes Ahajtan Aourfat

Exhibition

colophon

10colophon

M – Museum Leuven L. Vanderkelenstraat 8 000 Leuven, Belgium + 16 7 9 9 [email protected] www.mleuven.be EditorRonald Van de Sompel

Editorial AssistantsLore Boon, Lore Van Hees

AuthorsAsada AkiraLuc DelrueDorothée DupuisMihnea MircanBariaa MouradDieter RoelstraeteEva ScharrerPier Luigi TazziRonald Van de SompelEva WittocxOctavio Zaya

Previously published: Eva Scharrer, ‘Abandoned Property: An Interview with Emily Jacir’, Mousse Magazine, no. (June 01) 9–9

Asada Akira, ‘Art: The Critical Point of Creativity and Destruction’Excerpt from a previously published conversation, in The 7th Hiroshima Art Prize: Cai Guo-Qiang, The Hiroshima City Museum of Contemporary Art, The Asahi Shimbun, 008, 0–

TranslationJohn Arblaster (Preface) Johanna Bischop (Knots)Philippe Hunt (There Will Be No Paradise) Dwight Porter (Fernando Bryce: Re-producing History)Simon Shrimpton-Smith (Out of the Libraries Emerge the Butchers)

Copy Editing Ted Alkins Chris Kearin (Fernando Bryce: Re-producing History)

Graphic Design Sara De Bondt studio

Published byMousse Publishing www.moussepublishing.com

Print Artigianelli Spa

Every effort has been made to trace all copyright holders. It has not been possible, however, to securely identify the origin of every document reproduced here. Anyone wishing to assert their rights in this matter is requested to contact the publisher.

All rights are reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without prior permission in writing from the publisher. © 01 Mousse Publishing, M – Museum Leuven, the artists and the authors

ISBN 978886790

Catalogue

next spread Fig. 6 Pierre Alphonse and Pierre Emile Arnou, The Library of Leuven after the Fire of 1914

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