Light from the Middle East

So, as an attempt at reviving our wonderful blog, I thought I'd write about a photography exhibition I just saw - Light from the Middle East: New Photography at the V&A, running from 13th November 2013 - 7 April 2013. 

It was a great exhibition, focusing on Middle Eastern artists from 30 different countries and their use of photography to document, comment and subvert. It was curated into 3 sections, and I've picked out my favourite pieces from each. 

Recording: 

Ahmed Mater

Magnetism I

Photograuvre 

I absolutely loved this piece - at first glance it seemed to be your run-of-the-mill black&white epic pilgrimage shot, but it's actually a photo of a magnetic block drawing a sea of iron filings together. It brought to mind that toy I had when I was a kid - where you used a magnet to manipulate iron filings to give a cartoon man hair or a beard - the way the iron filings followed the magnet everywhere was a source of endless fascination. This unique recreation of the culminating moment of hajj makes an interesting commentary on the nature of religious pilgrimage where individuals are inexplicably drawn towards a single object in a sea of anonymity and singular, collective devotion. 

Reframing: 

Youseff Nabil 

Detail from The Yemeni Sailors of South Shields 

Hand-coloured gelatin silver print 

This was a series of 12 portraits depicting the last surviving Yemeni sailors who settled as ship-workers in South Shields, England. Nabil has hand-coloured black&white photographs in the style of 20thc. Egyptian portraiture. What struck me in particular was the exceptionally youthful way in which  Nabil has chosen to frame these elderly sailors, perhaps suggesting his romanticised nostalgia of their Yemeni cultural past, further elaborated in the juxtaposition of their dark Western suits against elements of traditional garb. 

Resisting: 

Nermine Hammam 

From the series Upekkha

Archival inkjet print 

After spending time working on a print show at my gallery (that just opened yesterday), and being exposed to amazing works by artists such as Sir Peter Blake and Joe Webb, I've come to really appreciate photo manipulation and collage as an artistic practice. Nermine Hammam takes photos of military personnel called in to disperse the recent 2011 uprising in Tahrir Square, and places them in postcard-like fantasy destinations in response to the desires they expressed to be anywhere but the site of conflict.  The striking high-resolution of the images shows a genuine resistance to the photograph's position as conveying the "truth," and blurs the distinction between reality and fantasy. By far my favourite series in the entire exhibition, Hammam's work is for me a perfect combination of medium, message, and visual impact. 

The exhibition showcased a wide range of photographers, techniques and styles, and with my growing interest in photography as a medium, was able to hold my interest despite the horde of people I had to jostle with to read the wall text (an understandable phenomenon for the V&A on a Sunday afternoon). I''m the first to admit that I've always been a bit of a snob to photography and prints as artistic practice, preferring installation and sculptural work, but being exposed to an in-depth study of photography/image theory, as well as learning more about the surprising array of techniques available in the photographic medium (both analog and digital), I'm quite happily on the path to conversion.