Landscape of Khiam

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    Landscape of Khiam, 2006
    Part 1 of Khiam project
    14 Photographic print on Dibond, 120 x 90 cm
  • The series of photos “Landscapes of Khiam 2006-2007” was taken over a year long period in the camp of Khiam after the war of July 2006.

    The detention camp of Khiam became a museum after it was dismantled in May 2000, following the withdrawal of the Israeli army from Lebanon. During the war of 2006, the camp was totally destroyed. In the middle of the ruins rise steel boards that depict the camp before it was demolished. Those boards rise among the new ruins and transform the camp into a museum once again.

    The artists photographed the 14 existing boards from the same distance and using the same protocol, but during the four seasons of the year. Set side by side, the boards recreate the topography of the camp but, strangely, give practically no information about the destroyed sites they are supposed to document. The Landscapes of Khiam allow the necessary critical distance in which to undertake a new articulation of the image.

    The extraordinary staging of that same destruction seems to be an installation without an artist. This set-up creates a temporal confusion and challenges our position as viewers, our relation to the image, to its “mise en abyme”, to the superimposition of an image onto the ruins of another, a temporality onto another, a reality onto another.

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