Against Photography An annotated history of the Arab Image Foundation
May 11–August 19, 2018
The exhibition has been co-organized by MMCA and the Barcelona Museum of Contemporary Art (MACBA), with the K21 Art Collection in Düsseldorf and the Sharjah Art Foundation as partner organizations.
In 1997, Akram Zatari co-founded the Arab Image Foundation with photographers Fouad Elkoury and Samer Mohdad. The AIF appeared as a new breed of institutional practice, an artists’ project “dressed” as an institution at a moment when Western institutions were beginning to seriously reflect on the scope of their own missions. Creating the Foundation enacted urgent and critical responses to a series of issues facing the image cultures of Lebanon, if not the Arab world. The reconstruction of imagery which took place in artists’ projects allowed for new interpretations of history as well as possible narrations to come. This project does not attempt to present an historical chronology of the AIF; rather, it is a subjective look at the Foundation’s activities and evolution over its 20-year histoy. The exhibition stems from the interest in this critical intersection between archive and artistic practices.
Akram Zaatari
Born in Saida, Lebanon in 1966, Akram Zaatari currently lives and works in Beirut. Zaatari’s represented Lebanon at the Venice Biennale in 2013. His work has been featured in numerous one-person and group exhibitions around the world, including Documenta13 in 2012.
