159 | 2022

RAINER BELLENBAUM

Archival Images Between Transport and Transfer

The archive—once a means of transport that, like the biblical Noah’s Ark, was securely sealed to preserve selected material from the deluge of progress—now functions more openly and flexibly as a transfer pool for memory’s waves. Particularly media archives live off of reformatting collected material on a regular basis and updating it according to contemporary standards. For its part, when it doesn’t vanish altogether, the material to be saved conforms to this form of progress. Sometimes, in an effort to preserve the shape of the original material and thus its individuality and intrinsic spatiality, it makes sense to revive forms of transport that might seem obsolete. The works of Laura Horelli evidence this in a number of ways, playfully combining physical and mechanical movement with the transfer of photographic archival material from one medium to another.

Yet the questions that originally sparked Horelli’s interest in private and public archives remain. Particularly in that the Finnish-born artist learned very little from the very people she would have liked to ask about her family’s past connections to Nazi Germany—her mother and grandfather. The grandfather refused to discuss “certain things”1 in the family; Horelli was only ten when her mother died in 1987. Nonetheless, her grandmother was willing to talk—but the comments she offers in You Go Where You’re Sent (2003) regarding the images selected from photo albums remain at a safe distance from anything that could become politically awkward. The pictures document the grandmother’s cosmopolitan world: we see her as a Finnish gymnast at the 1936 Olympic Games in Berlin; as an anaesthetist on an ocean liner or in the hospital, tending to soldiers wounded in the war. More than anything, however, the photographs—black and white or colored, taken by herself or by reporters—document a life at her husband’s side, in diplomatic service: in Rio de Janeiro shortly after World War II, then in New York, Cologne, and later in Bucharest and Bern, when he became the Finnish ambassador there. A voiceover interview between Horelli and her grandmother conveys the markedly different locations, also identified by intertitles, into the symbolic space of the biographical. The fact that the two women are speaking English with an accent instead of their native Finnish lends a subtle ambiguity to this space and the perspectives it provides on private discretion and questions of personal responsibility.

Text contribution in Camera Austria International 159/2022, pp. 9–20.

HAJRA HAIDER KARRAR

Fragility of the Archive and the Generative Interstices in Abundance

Farewell is the silence which separates sound from echo.
Sound is broken up, while the echo is preserved by valleys and caves whose hearing is as keen as cosmic ears, and amplified, echo upon echo.

Echo is the instruction of the visitor to the passer-by, the
pursuit of bird by bird, the insistence of the conclusion on
extending the story. Echo is the name’s inscription in the air.¹

I

Seascapes—flashes of waves where the mist from the sea spray can be felt on the skin, the smell of the sea teases the nostrils, reminding of the grandmother who used to sell fish. The gentle roar of the waves receding and advancing with periodic crashes upon meeting obstructions can be heard—carrying those who knew the sea through its sound while shackled on the windowless second deck of the ship, and those on land, attired in black, who continue to mourn the ones lost on these paths. The sight, the sound, the smell—all reminders of the abundant presence of the ocean, and the stories it holds within.

There is an ebb and flow of images of the ocean mirroring its movement as they gently transition into different viewpoints, as if reminiscing about a journey taken long ago. These moving images are in dialogue with a series of Polaroid photographs that reflect similar views yet appear sharper and more recent, anchored by text and location references serving as tractable traces.2 There is a serenity in the consistent rhythm and an underlying fervor in the abundance of the sea that witnesses, and swallows, events and moments, capturing time and sustaining lives, dead or alive. Defying hierarchies, there are narratives to be discovered from the depth of this abundance, those that have been neglected and erased yet continue to be held by the elements.

1 Mahmoud Darwish, Absent Presence, trans. Mohammad Shaheen (London: Hesperus Press, 2010), p. 120

Text contribution in Camera Austria International 159/2022, pp. 21–32.

MICHÈLE COHEN HADRIA

Resistant Disseminations

Alessandra Ferrini’s historiographic investigations become art praxis as she works toward a synthesis of her reflections on the Italian colonization of Libya (1911–43)—unearthing its memory—and the transfer that she proposes of it into the field of art. But are these two disciplines so opposed to one another? Not so much, perhaps, if we consider that historians and artists both work with inexhaustible material. Still, the source of the link here between academic study and artistic sensibility is to be found rather in the way that the artist presents us with a powerful radical position, emerging from a profoundly ethical political consciousness.

As I scoured the Internet for information on her works, it was not long before I saw that her resort to archival research takes nothing away from the qualities of her work as a visual artist. Consider, for example, her white-gloved hand taking up silver negatives like so many pieces of withheld history waiting to be deciphered . . . Or this blue banner, on which she seems to have hastily pasted newspaper cuttings as if to induce an entropy, and at the center of which she handwrites, as if on a blackboard: My Heritage? (2020).

Ferrini transforms the flatness of the archival documents into tiny textual and iconic pieces, assembled onto the walls of open-plan rooms. In her exhibition Unruly Connections at the gallery ar/ge kunst in Bolzano (2022),1 she shines light on examples of literature stemming from unconventional and marginalized personalities that dared to defy Italian colonial fascism. The Conscript (1927), a novel written in the Tigrinya language by the Eritrean writer Gebreyesus Hailu (1906–1993), is one of the first examples of anticolonial literature.2 The author denounces the forced enlistment of the Eritrean Ascari into the Italian army in order to combat—the epitome of cynicism—the Libyan resistance.

Ferrini is also interested in Knud Holmboe (1902–1931), a Danish journalist who converted to Islam and became associated, in 1930, with the Senussi rebels in Cyrenaica who were fighting Mussolini’s army. Murdered under mysterious circumstances, he left behind a private diary titled Ørkenen Brænder (Desert Encounter, 1931), along with a series of photographs that document the abuse perpetrated by the fascist military. The 1929 book L’oasi. Romanzo arabo (The Oasis: Arab Novel) by the Italian writer Leda Rafanelli (1880–1971), a feminist and anarchist who also converted to Islam, is an ardent plea for anticolonialism, in the guise of the literary genre of a sentimental novel.

1 Unruly Connections, ar/ge kunst, Bolzano, May 13 to July 30, 2022, curated by Emanuele Guidi.
2 The artist commissioned professor Uoldelul Chelati Dirar with the translation of this text into Italian, which lays the foundation for this exhibition.

Text contribution in Camera Austria International 159/2022, pp. 33–44.

MITCH SPEED

Nothing Lasts Forever Until It Does

Poke around in photography’s proverbial body, and you’ll find existence and oblivion intercurling like the mazes of Byzantium. Banal events sometimes mirror this dynamic. Elif Saydam’s hard drive, for example, recently crashed. Like a calved iceberg, a big chunk of their snapshot collection just drifted away. Luckily there were survivors. Several photos had already been printed at the center of canvases and fabric mosaics.

Over the last few years, Saydam has been combining their photos with a fun, fine-brushed painting language. A new series opens photography’s existential dimension with weirdly festive recourse to this technique. Roughly speaking, the context is cosmopolitan city life, a thrilling, baffling, and exhausting cat’s cradle of humanity. Each photo is mounted like a navel within its respective painting. We see storefronts in the Berlin districts of Wedding, Neukölln, Kreuzberg, and Moabit, historically working-class Turkish and Arabic centrifuges, besieged for years now by global real-estate investment and its foot soldier, gentrification. The images are eerily gray—dead somehow like photocopies. Saydam at once obscures and amplifies this quality by embellishing them with potpourris of painted symbology. In the surrounding canvas, more freely painted color planes sometimes contain shapely hollows, which act as spotlights or portholes, framing the overpainted photos.

In these border regions, patterns spread like lichen. The Persian boteh or “paisley” motif becomes a Milky Way in blue night. Among Saydam’s signs and symbols, I saw:

Lemons strung like mistletoe.
The blue, white, and black Turkish nazar looking out from ribboned bouquets, with eyelashes made from vines.
Many pastel hearts, of the sugary Valentine’s Day variety.
Persimmons. Black and green apples.
Pointillist planets.

Saydam’s technique is a loosened-up take on Persian and Ottoman miniature painting, combined with a frothy Rococo vibe. These disparate influences hum together, emphasizing how this work is a fizz of insider–outsider diasporic energy (Canadian and of Turkish descent, Saydam has for years lived and worked in Berlin). Here a very quiet part of your mind might ask the familiar and interminable question: What is whose to use? The question traces an infinity loop and has infinite weight.

Text contribution in Camera Austria International 159/2022, pp. 45–56.