Akram Zaatari in Person

Akram Zaatari, curator of Radical Closure, is a video artist who lives and works in Beirut. In addition to his television work and his teaching, he is the maker of more than thirty videos and video installations exploring political issues pertinent to the Lebanese postwar condition as well as the representation of male sexuality.

(Here and Elsewhere). Ici et ailleurs explores cinema's ability to record history, particularly in situations of war. In 1970, at the instigation of Fatah (the Palestine National Liberation Movement), Jean-Luc Godard traveled to Palestinian refugee camps in Jordan, Lebanon, and Syria to produce a film on the Palestinian struggle, tentatively titled Jusqu'à la victoire (Until Victory). But after the attack on the 1972 Munich Olympics by the Black September group, the film changed direction. Completed in 1974 with the collaboration of Anne-Marie Miéville, the final work uses a mix of video and film footage to examine the fine line that separates struggle from terrorism, and ties what happens “elsewhere” to all that happens “here,” in the typical living room of a French family hooked on television. In the dominant discourse, “here” and “elsewhere” are kept safely apart; the radical nature of the film is in its stubborn emphasis on the “and.” It beckons a radical change in consciousness, in the articulation of our being in the world.