BETTINA STEINBRüGGE

Maryam Jafri: Silent Witnesses: Independence Day 1936–1967

The ongoing project “Independence Day 1936–1967” (since 2009) presents archival photographs of the very first day of independence of various Asian and African nations, such as Indonesia, India, Vietnam, South Vietnam, Ghana, Senegal, Pakistan, Syria, Malaysia, Kenya, Tanzania, Mozambique, Laos, the DR Congo, and Algeria. Her undertaking is an artistic study in which the involved southern-hemispheric countries are juxtaposed by example of this first day of independence. And the independence day is meant to be taken literally here, as becomes apparent through a comprehensive overview of all photographs compiled by Jafri. Here a twenty-four-hour cycle emerges that begins with a prologue and shows preliminary negotiations, the arrival of dignitaries at the airport, the respective stadium where festivities were held, the parades, the parliament, the official ceremonies, and finally the nation being oratorically addressed. This day is one of prolonged temporal interstice during which a territory is metamorphosed into a nation-state, or where this transformation is symbolically executed. “The power and authority over the ‘writing’ of a nation as well as the prerogative of interpretation applied to national identity also signify, in terms of nationalistic logic, control over the territory and the population of the nation in question.”1 In Jafri’s work, we see national memorial sites that are characterised by inconsistency and dynamism. Despite the inherent mutability of these places and systems, each picture of a nation is “frozen” and thus also instrumentalised through the act of it being photographically documented, allowing the nation to be represented to the outside as a stable entity. Most of these archival photos originate in the respective country2 rather than being culled from Western photo archives, for Jafri is explicitly interested in forms of self-representation, even if her staging devices are interchangeable regardless of global locus. Within the works, homogenised avenues for conveying state self-representations encounter individual nationalistic histories of development that we, if willing, can by all means detect. The heterogeneity of the individual histories—indeed, many of these independence days (and also the countries where this independence has been achieved) have little or nothing to do with one another—is rooted in the covert, disappearing beneath the surface in order to make space for general mechanisms of power consolidation, such as the formation of a specious sense of community.

Text feature in Camera Austria International 116/2011, pp. 9–20.

KATRIN MUNDT

Sven Augustijnen: A Vault to Which One Keeps the Keys

The point of departure in Sven Augustijnen’s essay film “Spectres” and the eponymous exhibition1 is marked by an unsolved, politically motivated murder: the execution of the first democratically elected prime minister of the Republic of the Congo, Patrice Lumumba, in the year 1961. Through this unsolved “case” the artist challenges us to question not only the functions and dysfunctions of personal memory and official historiography, but also the subconscious afterlife of historical guilt along with the processing and regulation thereof. … Augustijnen asks that we acknowledge the unbelievable persistence of a one-dimensional, normative construction of history before it dismantles itself under the pressure of a mounting plethora of contradictory evidence—entirely without its spokesman being ostentatiously exposed in the process. While Brassinne is still collecting evidence and interviewing witnesses, the “facts” already start working against him. Springing from this tension between stringency of narrative and contingency of events is a polyphony mirrored by the film through the formal juxtaposition of uncommented conversations, scrolling text with historical master narrative, and a commentatorial musical soundtrack which includes vocal passages from Bach’s “St John Passion”.

Text feature in Camera Austria International 116/2011, pp. 21–32.

AXEL JOHN WIEDER

Global Prayers: Imaginations of a New Order Through Redemption. Images of Faith

In recent years the theme of faith has undergone an intensive discursive boom. Religious motifs appear as media phenomenon and subject of vehement populist debates in the most diverse contexts: from the fight over caricatures of Mohammed, crosses in Bavarian classrooms, controversies about allegedly blasphemous art works, attacks on construction plans for mosques or religious cultural centres, all the way to violent militant conflicts and the intensification of internal security consequent to the attacks of 11 September 2001. At the same time, debates about the right faith in Europe and the US remain mostly related to Islam and have been intensified politically as the “battle of cultures” between fundamentalist-religious society and secular society. At a closer look, however, the phenomenon of new religious movements covers far more contexts. Since the 1970s, for instance, Christian neo-charismatic movements in Latin America, West Africa and more recently China have registered enormous growth. In the US as well, where the pentecostal movement has its roots in a revival experience during a service in Azusa Street in Los Angeles in 1906, the number of members is growing. In Mumbai in India, the Hindu nationalist movement “Shiv Sena” has been one of the most influential political forces for years and most recently provided the mayor of the city. In Jakarta in Indonesia, following the overthrow of President Suharto in 1998, Sufi groups, primarily young men from the middle class, have installed weekly multimedia shows to celebrate Mohammed’s birthday. In parts of Mexico there is a growing interest in a mysterious cult revolving around Santa Muerte, a saint in the figure of a clothed skeleton, which meanwhile also has a foothold in the US and played an important role in the television series “Breaking Bad”.

Text feature in Camera Austria International 116/2011, pp. 32–45.

JOCHEN BECKER

Global Prayers: Never Expect Power Always. Considerations on Light, Power and Religion

The all-illuminating light of the pentecostal church The Redeemed Christian Church of God (RCCG) near Lagos is said to be a phenomenal waste of electricity, where otherwise private generators have to supply the power to cover the gaps in the national energy supply. This remark by a visitor in conjunction with a preparatory globalPrayers.saloon in the Neue Gesellschaft für Bildende Kunst in Berlin suddenly brought the term “power” to our attention. For the exorbitance of the flooding light is inscribed at the same time with a demonstration of both religious and secular power.

Abundance — The light veritably overflows from under the roof of the gigantic industrial hangar, pouring itself over the surroundings like yeast dough. A power plant at the RCCG Camp—a small city with a university, banks, gated communities and fire department—guarantees the power supply to those who find access within the grounds of a “City of God”.
What is evident in the demonstrative waste of electricity is the power, wealth, enclosure and abundance of the largest Nigerian pentecostal church, which operates worldwide. The house of God is dominated by the even brightness of the electric floodlights and picture walls. The hall, through which one walks in both directions for about twenty minutes, is well equipped for night shifts as a factory hall of the religion industry. Services begin in twilight at six in the evening, when people come from their jobs. The breaking light of dawn ends the service.
During the night, life simply goes on. The faithful doze on a chair, if needed, or protect their privacy framed by four wooden benches placed together. Sitting, standing, praying, singing, vanishing and returning is all done without disruptions. The rite determines the form, everything else is taken care of under the artificially radiating roof. In the informal niches for eating and consumption, on the other hand, the “African night” descends, interspersed with occasional energy-saving lightbulbs, flames or the vertical flare of headlights from passing motorcycle taxis.

Text feature in Camera Austria International 116/2011, pp. 46–50.

ANNETT BUSCH

Michael Mrakitsch: Language in the Picture

The film-maker Michael Mrakitsch never made it easy for himself or anyone else. He was regarded as inconvenient, obsessed, arrogant, a “bogeyman of editors”. To the extent that he cleared his own path to reality for himself, Mrakitsch claimed unconditional authorship and arrogance counter to all political opportunism. What is often called obsessiveness probably describes nothing other than the arduous and consistent defence and assertion of an ethical relationship to image and sound in the midst of an apparatus ready to trade every form of morality for audience ratings. Michael Mrakitsch’s films made television history, a history of what was possible in television until into the 1980s, and his political strategy was to enlighten in the midst of predominant ideology, tele-vision specifically as seeing into the distance.

Text feature in Camera Austria International 116/2011, pp. 51–56.

WALID SADEK

A Time to See 4/4 The Present of Near-Blindness

A colour photograph by Mona Hatoum titled “Van Gogh’s Back” (1995) shows a hairy back lathered in a generous amount of soap made into patterns of elegant swirls reminiscent of the Dutch artist’s signature brushstrokes. A back, cumbersomely present, inscribed and weighted with the stigma of barbarity: body hair, a primitive cloak, remnant of a past existence. It is something we are supposed to shed and discard as we approach the visual standards of the erudite world exemplified by the nude models strutting down the catwalk in the closing scene of Robert Altman’s film “Prêt à Porter” (US 1994)—models dressed in a skin that is honed, polished and perfectly aligned with the conditions of erudition. Hatoum’s picture is a photograph of an uneasy corporeality made to stay by the caressing activity of hands and fingers. Protective of barbarity represented as difference, the lathering hands contend, as they caress the hairy back, that the bodies of the majority survive only when wrapped in the gauze of kindness. As high as this assertion ranks within an admirable and dominant discourse on Human Rights and a concomitant multi-cultural tolerance, it is undermined by an irresolution that belies the apparently welcomed otherness of an other empathetically recognised. For is the camera here a recording device to evidence successfully empathising with a rude corporeality or is it one of three contentious tenants of one particular temporality? In other words, is the photograph fulfilled by the intimate traces of two or is it occupied by the urgency of an unequal three: a victimised body, saviour hands and perpetrator camera?

Text feature in Camera Austria International 116/2011, pp. 71–72.