AKRAM ZAATARI, ‘Time Capsule, Kassel’
TIME CAPSULE, KASSEL
Size: 24 x 28 cm
Pages: 160
Published by Mousse, 2014
Focused on the artistic project conceived by Akram Zaatari for DOCUMENTA 13, Time Capsule, Kassel is a postscript to the artist's exhibition This Day at Ten / Aujourd'hui à 10 ans at Magasin – Centre National d'Art Contemporain de Grenoble, on the occasion of the seminar subsequently organized by the artist and Fondazione Donnaregina per le Arti Contemporanee in Naples as part of the program “MADRESCENZA – Seasonal Schools” (Università degli Studi di Napoli L'Orientale). Inspired by an act of conservation that the founder of the National Museum in Beirut undertook on the eve of the civil war in 1975–6, Time Capsule, Kassel is, in the artist's words, a statement about speculation, photography, time, and withdrawal—it's a metaphor, more than it is an actual time capsule with a specific function and specific time to be opened. The fact “that the artist chose the form of a buried treasure, or a record of the present that is hidden away with the hope it will be dug up and unpacked and reconsidered for the future,” as Kaelen Wilson-Goldie writes in her essay On Letters Lost and Found, “is crucial to the time horizon at work in Zaatari's thinking. It also speaks to the desires, arguments, and anxieties that run throughout his practice, particularly concerning the various meanings ascribed to photography and preservation; the different ways of seeing contemporary art to the social, political, and economic conditions that produce it; and to a more general concern about blindness, about misrecognizing or misusing the kinds of images that circulate in times of crisis and unrest.”