The exhibition really kind of starts
from an essay I wrote in 2008.
That essay was concerned with what I termed as a subtitle
"The archaeological imaginary in art"
and it was an essay that kind of
departed from an observation that many
contemporary artists today are
interested; not just in archives, not just
in history, but really in acts of
excavating in digging. My impression is,
in fact, that for most of the first
decade of the 21st century, one of the
dominant preoccupations of contemporary
art in a critical sense has been this
concern with history.
So in a sense this exhibition offers a survey
of that particular movement or that
particular trend or a particular
paradigm in contemporary art—something
that I've called "the historiographic turn."
The shovel that's referred in the
title is an illusion obviously to the
archaeological trade or the
archaeological paradigm and it's
important also to kind of stress that
this is an exhibition that is
concerned with history but that really
kind of narrows down that concern
through the lens of the archaeological
metaphor, but then on the other hand also
archaeology as subject matter as a topic
as the actual content of the work.
I'm very careful not to pretend to be an archaeologist.
I know what I do is not what they do.
I know that my archaeological projects
are not archaeology in the purest sense.
At the same time I think that there are
aspects that do overlap with how one
presents archaeology so – not so much what
archaeological science itself but rather
that place where it gets mediated for
the public so what I try to do is to
short circuit or go against the grain of
how archaeology is presented to the
public and to play with their
expectations of what archaeology is and
to disrupt the kind of official story
that we get told what archaeology is and
I think that this, much to my surprise,
has resonated a lot in the archaeology community
that wasn't really a community
I expected I would have such a strong dialogue with.
And so it rippled,
these projects, in ways that I didn't
anticipate and their layers of meaning
that I didn't anticipate, which is
what I always kind of hope for as an
artist that you make something even
richer than you imagined.
Another element that is really quite important in this exhibition
is this notion of research,
basically research of historical
materials and this notion that you know
the artist in a way explores, searches, unearths;
that the artist is kind of
engaged in the process of the discovery of
something that's been forgotten or
something that's been trampled over,
marginalized, cast by the wayside.
My passion is to go to these archives.
I love to see the actual document. It looks
like a watercolor rendering,
these beautiful script and these cotton rag.
I'm like infatuated with the objects.
So if I could photograph a
document, I put the photograph of the
document there so that the audience can
see the object, not just the information,
and so I think that sort of separates
what I do from what a historian does,
which is to sit down look at the
documents to read them to find in that
primary source an idea that might link
to another idea, and in my case I'm
trying to show exactly what's happened.
I try to unravel the history,
unpack it, and then present it.
Photography is super essential when you
think of archaeology because like it's
something has been under the earth for a
long time and then unearthed and that
moment when it comes to the Earth's
surface it has been shot, depicted by a
picture/photographic image, before again
being transported into a museum.
That moment when it's like I'm always
depicting it as this watch wrist of sand
that kind of – you have this sand that's
running and there is this archaeological
moment, and then the sand is gone then
you see this sculpture. You take a
picture and then the sand comes back in
but the sand is the museum collection
that – where it's stored in boxes for ages
and not any one can see it for a long
time unless it's exhibited, of course.
I noticed just this kind of growing enthusiasm
among a generation of artists,
you know, people born in the sixties, early
seventies that many of these
people kind of turned to history for
artistic inspiration. Of course this is
not new. Artists of all ages and
all eras have been in a dialogue
with history and art history but all of
a sudden so many artists were working
with 16-millimeter film or of
8-millimeter film like obsolete media;
the kodak slide carousel was going out
of production all of a sudden there was this
rush among the artist population to
kind of you know salvage it from oblivion.
All kinds of printing
procedures and photographic techniques
that were basically really on their way out.
Why do I use 16-millimeter film;
why am I attracted to this media?
I think to some extent art has become almost a
reservation for kind of things that
have become obsolete elsewhere and
there's also something else to be said
for 16 millimeter and that is that when
you are in a space with a film projector
it's always that projector at that
moment in that space and it is that copy.
What happens is that the copy slowly
wears down, so all the dust that is in the
museum, it settles on the film and it
actually changes the film a bit.
It becomes specific; it's always at that moment
and with that copy and that copy won't
look exactly like that anywhere else.
So I like that element of something specific.
And the last thing that I use a lot
is that the sound of the projector
is almost like a soundtrack so there's
no need for sound so to speak, there's such
a momentum in the projector itself, it's
almost like a like a train or narrative.
It just goes on and on and on
—a sense of urgency.
History is the discipline that studies the written
record of human civilization whereas
archaeology is concerned primarily with
material traces, with shards, and
that's an important factor to take into
account because the exhibition includes
a lot of photographic work and
film-based work. Those are artworks that have
a strong kind of documentary dimension
but there's also all of matter in the
exhibition—installations and
sculptural work. And in the selection of
those works I also wanted to remind the
viewer that archaeology is a materialist undertaking.
It kind of approaches history as a story that's
made up over actual stuff and there, of
course, archaeology and easily converge.
I can say that I've been always
very interested in the materials
themselves and I think that's also very
important about this exhibition.
It's about archaeology but it's not just
theoretical approach to the subject but
it also has to do with materials,
with the things you find, which are
rubbish, which are nothing, which have no
meaning, and finally it's us who try to
give meaning to this rubble and we try
to arrange it in a way or we try to do
something with it but at the end, it's
meaningless without our effort to make
sense of it. Also for me, it's interesting
to see how artists use these things in
order to transform matter in many
different ways. So I like that a lot
about their archaeological approach,
in the context of conceptual art,
they are two things that somehow collide
but complement each other.
I like to come to a place and explore it,
find things of interest to me, and then
research them both through books and
history and the internet and also
through people I meet and talk to . . .
start to blend ideas, but mainly what I end
up interested in is things that are kind
of hidden histories or maybe hidden
objects or things that become ambiguous.
I often work in abandoned buildings;
I try and use only the materials I find in
those abandoned buildings to make
sculptures and photo projects.
The layers to me are really important. To go into
an abandoned building and build a
pyramid for example out of the floor
tiles of the building—I'm building a
ruin within a ruin but one of the ruins
is thought of as a monument whereas the
other isn't thought of as something special,
it's thought of sadly.
Well for me, quite simply, art is a
critical force in society and in the
world at large. And there is, for sure, a
critical dimension in the exhibition and
when thinking about this subject matter
you're also struck of course by the
profusion of the prefix "re":
return, reconstruct, reimagine, recycle.
So it's always this returning
radius is kind of at the heart of the
exhibition's logic: this impulse to
look back in an attempt to also look forward.
Any form of imagination is
always a projective one, one that kind of
projects itself into the future.
That question of the past leading to the
future is something I'm very interested in.
It's a focus of a lot of my
projects in terms of looking at the
past, but not looking at it for the
purpose of nostalgia but looking at the
way that the past actually may presented
a prototype or blueprint for what
something could be right now.
So in a lot of the projects that I'm working on
that deal with the identity of being an Arab Jew,
as the son of an Iraqi-Jewish mother,
that kind of identity speaks a certain
amount of truth to power
—calling oneself an Arab Jew—
because it denies the
Zionist narrative of suddenly becoming
this thing called Israeli.
It recuperates a lot of those histories that were
hijacked or suppressed,
that speak to the centuries and centuries and
centuries, the millennia really, of
coexistence because I think if we're
only looking to the past for the sake of
a kind of nostalgia. And nostalgia is ok,
that means that we want to go home,
but we all know how impossible return really is.
Am I just an observer in this
movement that I chronicle?
I'm more than just an observer;
I'm a champion really of this art
movement because I think it's an
important one. It was an important role
in the way we kind of imagine art to
function in the world at large.
The historiographic turn in art also
needs its own historian and I'm happy to
be that person.
