Gabriella Choueifaty
WORKS
2006 (2018–2024)
Installation, in collaboration with Mia Baraka
Exhibited at ArtLab Gallery, Beirut, as part of CATAPULT.visual’arts (British Council Lebanon, 2022)
Photo: Laetitia El Hakim
EXHIBITION TEXT:
A thousand suns in the dark is an optical research on darkness in the context of Lebanon. It concerns the relationship between technique, aesthetics and politics within photography; and addresses the specific ways of seeing that pertain to the Lebanese space; which embodies both impossibility (of projecting a future) and imminence (of the past wars to become fully present again). It proposes work which has been produced entirely in the dark and reflects on darkness as a distinct perception and a generative space, implying inversely and concurrently, that light is overflowing and matter ever-changing. The presented works expose different kinds of light and matter directly on photosensitive paper, looking to extract from the depth of an existent image, a new transformed one, that was longing to appear.Today, the Lebanese state is unable to ensure the necessary production of electricity needed by its people. In order to make up for the shortages, they must supply themselves with generators from the private sector, paying two distinct electricity bills, still getting a minimum of ten hours of cuts per day. With the perpetuation of sectarian wartime, the economic collapse and the bomb, dark times only seem to get thicker while the fuel gets scarcer, and the bankrupt state delivers less and less, taking more and more. To its dwellers, Lebanon is starting to feel like a black hole, where despair, anger and anxiety become everyday more palpable, as they wait for power to be restored.
The analogical photographic printing process happens in the case of chromogenic prints in pitch darkness, and in the case of black and white, in the red light, called the safe light. While photography presupposes the existence and mediation of light; this project stemmed from a desire to create in between the electricity cuts and expose the real conditions of photographic production here. Devising specific ways of seeing and creating in the dark, these new images try to show what kind of light, knowledge and life a darkness-all-over can produce. The creative process becomes sightless body movements that are driven by the urgency to work within darkness to generate light. This work hence uses the loss of visibility as an aesthetical force, a power to see and create by means of blindness.
We choose to deconstruct this technique in order to find ways to create by fitting ourprocess to our context and subverting the shortcomings of our surroundings . To reveal the phosphorescence of darkness, we use handy and autonomous sources like lighters, matches, a phone’s flash or a battery lit spot. We handle matter that is abundant, elementary and available, like soil, eggs, water or rocks, to find images that were not given to our naked eyes. While there is no operation of capture nor framing, while it is not about immortalizing a sight we would like to see linger, or look at again and again; this practice is about creating a new image, surprising other, out of one that has washed out; an unexpected and unrecognizable double, distilled from its shadows and imprints. This new object that is now, rises from the trace of a matter and a light that is cut in half, filtered, casted in motion, enlarged or brushed. It seems it can only be seen once it is cracked open and dissected, when its lines are broken.
It happens that when one enters the world of photography printing, one enters an inverted world. The greens will be reds and the reds will be greens. The yellows will be blues, and the blues will be yellows. And indeed, a non-exposed paper will remain white, immaculate canvas emanating light. White is thus the absence of light, while the black is too much of its presence, as an overexposing light will darken the surface and the paper will become black. The paper in itself, is a sensitive matter. So sensitive in fact, that any source of light will be too bright and entirely burn it, leaving us with blank black screens, where nothing has been revealed. We had to engage in operations of dimming, occulting and shading, for an image to be able to appear. As a restrictive environment can open unexpected realms, it is within the intimacy of this lightproof space that we are able to look twice. In this darkness, feeling matter, feeling light, touching it, shaping it, digging holes in it, gives our bodies a way to grow into, through this performative photography, an eye of its own. The sense of touch becomes a way to see what is not available for us to look at, to find what is concealed within our surroundings, like an intuition based on experience, like a certainty based on the unknown.
This gesture and its way of creation, becomes an attempt to reveal the implicit, playing with a light that is not seen but felt, turning a sensation into a perception. We explore the spectrum, going from darkness to light and travelling the opposite distance; reaching the juncture where they both meet in color. In the interval between black and white, lies the invisible range from which we bring out the visual occurrences that now exists on the paper. This practice is therefore an attempt to pin the floating images that are present all around us5 but have escaped our eyes. According to a Bergsonian thought, things are luminous by themselves and the universe is but an infinity of latent images, of photographs which have been taken and shot in all things and for all points, waiting to be revealed to the eyes.
The process of analog is not a nostalgic one. It is not defined by its struggle against the capitalist instrumentalization of the digital medium. It is simply today, a way of resistance against this gravity that is pulling us down, this context that is stealing our time, that is interrupting us while we are trying to go on. It is simply today a way of remaining in presence. It is simply today, this subtle and quiet joy that fills us in between the four walls of this dark room, where for a few minutes, while waiting for the image to appear, in the dark, we are dancing.
Text by Gabriella Choueifaty
Edited by Mia Baraka
August 23, 2022