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Akram Zaatari

1995 00:06:40 LebanonArabicMono4:3BetacamSP video

Description

An episode from a Lebanese TV series entitled "Image + Sound."  Each episode in this groundbreaking series is based on paralleling TV news images alongside staged events. This episode was shot in Gouraud St. in Gemayzeh in Beirut.

"Zaatari got his start in the freewheeling and somewhat rough-and-tumble world of Lebanese television in the mid-1990s. Zaatari was hired in 1995 as the executive producer of a morning television program for Future TV. Lebanon’s television industry had just been reorganized to curb the broadcasting excesses of the previous era; every party and militia across the political spectrum had set up its own station during the civil war. When the conflict ended, the government reduced the more than fifty channels to around ten. Future TV was one of the newer, more professional stations that aggressively recruited young creative types and gave them unfettered access to equipment, along with relative freedom to produce highly experimental documentaries. Zaatari’s earliest videos were originally screened as filler between the morning show’s segments."

— Kaelen Wilson-Goldie, Artforum, January 2010

Cast: Bassem Mughniyeh - Camera: Raed Khattar

About Akram Zaatari

Akram Zaatari is an artist who lives and works in Beirut. He has been exploring Lebanon's postwar condition through collecting testimonies and various documents, notably on the mediation of territorial conflicts and wars through television, and the logic of Resistance in the context of the current geographical division of the Middle East.

Co-founder of the Arab Image Foundation (Beirut), he based his recent work on collecting, studying, and archiving a particular collection on the Middle East, notably studying the work of Lebanese photographer Hashem el Madani (1928-) as a register of social relationships and of photographic practices.

In addition to his work as an artist, Zaatari is also the curator of the Radical Closure box set, which includes his work In This House.

Grand winner of the 17th International Contemporary Art Festival SESC_Videobrasil.

Represented in the Lebanese Pavilion at the 55th International Art Exhibition – La Biennale di Venezia.