Umbigo, April 2022

The current KW exhibition cycle intends to reflect on history and reality through the process of image construction. With three individual exhibitions split across the building’s different floors – a heterogeneous way of looking at group exhibitions – the interlocutors Oraib Toukan, Peter Friedl and Rabih Mroué assemble what in a way looks like a forum. As a whole, the three shows work as a game of proximity and distance. At each moment, language’s visual permeability, the function of the gaze and the construction of the gaze are present; same way as the moment of editing, from innocence to manipulation, conceiving in each personal story a political story.

Sill, the first impact is sound. On the ground floor, the entrance leads to a room where Friedl’s many diaries are displayed in a case, meticulously arranged, with measured distances between them, sealed. Behind, there is a huge pink flag of the Kurdistan Workers’ Party, collages, low light. Meanwhile, to the left, in one of the corridors, hundreds of photographs of playgrounds around the world are projected sequentially on the wall. On the other side, a room is filled with several stuffed animals that seem abandoned on the floor. In the adjoining room, a video shows a poem being read to an audience of children. Loud, frantic: “they thought it was a monster, but it was the king.” Over and over again.

Moving on to a huge room – with lots of drawings, videos, photographs – the space continues to place questions over answers. On two huge walls there are two sets of undated drawings, from Friedl’s childhood to the present day, arranged in a scrambled fashion. Facing them are several display cases with newspaper photo clippings, without information or caption. There is also a stage at the back of the room. And there is always sound; loud, boisterous: “they thought it was a monster, but it was the king.” There is a staging, theatrical atmosphere, on the edge of fun. The concern to underline a childish perspective is obvious, a certain naivety between the gaze and the image.

At the same time, the ongoing presence of violent references, images over sound that repeat the call, reinforces exhaustion as an important element. Friedl seems to leave us alone before a familiar problem: what reading can there be among the exhaustion of so many images? A reading that is more or less clear, that leads us or frees us from exhaustion? Seeing is also wanting, if we prioritise looking at what brings us closer? What space is left for that which pushes us away? How much of what we do not yet know are we willing to discover? How can we look fixedly at what pushes us away?

One of the virtues of this set of exhibitions is that the questions do not concern any particular work. Information through constant stimuli is an easily relatable phenomenon, but not necessarily an artistic one. Feeds, newspapers, reels, lives, comments, podcasts; the constant projection of scenarios simultaneously close and unreachable is such a common reality that its fragility, by habit, seems to have ceased to be questioned. It is as if images were always a direct and infallible representation of the objects referenced. On the other hand, the immediate familiarity of these issues in the current context is only an unfortunate coincidence.

This unfortunate context reinforces the problem, from the standpoint of violence. It is not just a question of innocence. We ask: is it possible to know through sight? Can seeing become knowing? Almost guessing this, Rabih Mroué seemed to sketch an answer, focusing on Lebanon, the backdrop of successive wars. For Mroué, the big question is how, in the midst of exhaustion, we can manipulate the sensation – and the idea – of violence. In this case, the actor-director constantly uses images of destruction as a reference. Depending on the narrative, he makes them the centre, familiar and direct, or else a mere unrecognisable element. Sometimes he photographs the photograph itself, projected onto drawings. He sees, he sees himself to be seen and he shows himself seeing himself to be seen, in a constant flexibilization of the image, always between real and fictional, figurative and abstract.

What stimulates the feeling of cruelty about an image? Oraib Toukan has an answer for that too, increasing the malleable terrain with two video works, separated by a curtain. This is part of his project on cruelty. Between editing, collage, archive, proximity or distance, war scenes – also exhaustion – reappear and disappear. Are we tired of Lebanon, Palestine? “The problem is that cruel images shut down the faculty of language altogether – you cannot formulate words about the cruelty seen. That is the point: to incapacitate voices and bodies from speaking and mobilising. Cruel images eclipse the life that sites of struggle seek, and their strategies for survival, which are often based on love of life. Cruel images instead dehumanise these sites as inhabitable and unbearable – their communities as accustomed to violence,” says Toukan. Here we no longer hear the sound.

Originally written in Portuguese. Translated and published by Umbigo