Archeology, 2017
Pigment inkjet print gelatine-treated glass plate, soil, glass, metal, acrylic medium, steel mounts, floor-standing preservation flood light
ΕΜΣΤ Collection
Donated by the artist and Thomas Dane Gallery, London, 2025
Akram Zaatari is a Lebanese filmmaker, photographer, and archive curator. In 1997, he co-founded the Arab Image Foundation (AIF), with Fouad Elkoury και Samer Mohdad, with the aim of preserving and studying photographs from the Middle East and North Africa. His work is deeply rooted in a practice of collecting, studying, and archiving the photographic history of the Arab world—a practice he compares to that of an archaeologist. In this respect, Archeology references both the factual and emotional universe of archaeology. Zaatari has reproduced a document of the past—a glass photographic plate created in the 1940s at the historic Studio Anouchian, in Tripoli, Lebanon, where the fragmentary nude figure of an athlete can be discerned. He has reworked the original finding, which he discovered in a collector’s archives, enlarging it and overlaying it with materials that evoke archaeological excavation practices, as well as the stratifications of geological time. The work reflects on our multilayered relationship with the past: the fascination it exerts upon us, the awe with which we stand before it, and its central importance in our attempts to understand the present.
Archeology is part of the series Against Photography: An Annotated History of the Arab Image Foundation (AIF), in which the artist approaches the AIF collection as a site of excavation. Zaatari focuses on the materiality of images rather than merely on their content, treating film negatives and photographic prints as artefacts to be unearthed. He analyses both the deterioration, which he regards not as a problem but as a source of information, and the social contexts within which the photographs were produced. Zaatari’s archaeological method consists of ‘excavating’ images, focusing both on their circulation and production, and, above all, on the stories they tell, which he treats as a means of questioning dominant narratives. He is primarily interested in a historiography shaped by subjective experience and microhistory, aiming to foster a deeper sociological understanding of the Middle East and the identity issues embedded within the region.
Akram Zaatari was born in Saida, South Lebanon, in 1966. He lives and works in Beirut.
