Landscapes of Khiam
- AboutLandscapes 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 at the location of the prison camp of Khiam after the 2006 Lebanon War. When the South of Lebanon was liberated from Israeli occupation in 2000, the Khiam detention camp was dismantled and turned into a museum. During the 2006 Lebanon War, the camp was totally destroyed by Israeli airstrikes. In the middle of the ruins, steel boards display photographs which depict the camp before it was demolished. Rising from the ruins, the boards transform the camp into a museum once again. Set against the backdrop of the ruined prison, the boards recreate the topography of the camp but, strangely, give practically no information about the destroyed sites they are supposed to document. Their staging seems to be an installation without an artist. This set-up creates a temporal confusion, challenging our position as viewers, and our relation to the image. With the superimposition of an image onto the ruin of another, a temporality is imposed onto another, and so is its reality, creating a “mise en abyme.” Over the period of one year, Hadjithomas and Joreige returned to the site of Khiam for each of the four seasons and photographed the 14 boards from the same distance and using the same protocol. The photographic series they produced, Landscapes of Khiam, allows for the necessary critical distance in which to undertake a new articulation of the image. - Other installations
