Caption

Still image, Akram Zaatari, This Day (Al Yaoum), 2003

Video, color, sound

86 minutes

Courtesy of the Artist and Sfeir-Semler Gallery Beirut / Hamburg

Synopsis

The outcome of a three-year long research on the circulation of images in the Middle East, This Day is at once an extroverted voyage in geography and an introverted voyage in memory [the recording of everyday]. It uses video and photography to communicate the states of mobility and closure in the contemporary divided geography of the region.  This Day is like an image-lab, where the video maker studies the rushes of his initial inquiry against photographs of that geography to depart and explore the video maker’s immediate environment monitoring key urban elements in post-war Beirut. Major circulation arteries, traffic lights, urban reconstruction, and flight circulation over the city become main elements in a present loaded with memory of a past war. In his own workspace, the video maker revisits the first images, notes, and sound recordings from the Israeli invasion of Lebanon in 1982 contrasted with other invasive images, in an attempt to understand the mechanism of image production in the state of war. In the lingering context of the Arab-Israeli conflict, invasions proceed through the bias of military songs, propaganda images, forced closures and divisions; they find in television and the Internet their only means to circulate.