When viewing the Queens International 2016, it seems impossible not to consider the exhibition against the backdrop of a vanishing environmental commons brought about by rampant forms of privatization and development. Collectively, the works in the exhibition produce something akin to a structure of feeling1, toggling between the specificity of each work and their collective illumination of what it means to produce art under the global conditions of our social and political moment.
Manal Abu-Shaheen’s photographs sharpen this focus, confronting the viewer with the hyper-development of an urban environment. At first glance, these elegant images appear digitally constructed, as if they were renderings, their composited compositions evocative of a retina display of windows within windows. And though these seemingly synthetic environments could easily appear to be any number of congested, aspiring global cities, Abu-Shaheen’s titles reveal that these pictures are in fact documentation of Beirut, Lebanon.
In documenting forms of display, Abu-Shaheen’s work recalls the early 20th-century photographs of Eugène Atget and his investigation of modernity through Parisian shop windows. In Atget’s images, the reflective storefront window is an architecture instrumental in the construction of desire, producing perceptually ungrounding effects. Similarly, in Abu-Shaheen’s work, figure/ground relationships are destabilized by images of commerce. In Hotel Window. Beirut, Lebanon (2016), an empty hotel room is surveilled by a building advertisement bearing the face of a white male model. Framed by windows and billowing curtains, his voyeuristic gaze simultaneously looks over the city below and into the intimate space of the bedroom, collapsing interior and exterior space. If Atget’s work documents the intersection between modern urbanism and visuality, Abu-Shaheen’s takes this principle a step further. It is not only Beirut and the bedroom that are surveilled by this domineering male gaze, but the viewer of Abu-Shaheen’s work as well. Here, familiar branding and advertising function not only as colonial forms of western patriarchy and ideology, but as “vigilantism under color of the law”2; supraideological systems that shape both the look of global cities and the subjects who inhabit them.
We might compare these images to the artist Mark Tribe’s series Plein Air (2014), which presents speculative images of massive areas of land untouched by human activity. However, unlike the romance of landscape painting and photography, the images of Plein Air’s are formed through large-scale assemblages of algorithmic data, inviting the viewer to imagine an inconceivable time before and after human civilization. Tribe’s work envisions a tabula rasa. In a sense, Plein Air is thus a utopian invitation to speculate about what the Earth might have looked like before land enclosures, hydraulic fracturing, and capitalist development, giving the work an almost sublime quality. Indeed, Tribe’s Plein Air assumes a type of perspective that has become increasingly synonymous with militarized visuality, geopolitics, and 3-D entertainment—the vertical perspective of a floating spectator, drone, or aircraft.3
There is productive and perhaps unresolved tension in the way these two projects position how visual art interacts with existing structures of power. In Beirut, the corporate infrastructure of images appears at once artificial and naturalized, while the bump-mapped landscapes of Plein Air exist within a drone-surveilled, uncanny valley. In an increasingly financialized world in which globalization exacerbates uneven development rather than creating conditions of uniformity, these projects offer alternative forms of visuality generated by these conditions, ways of seeing that might lead toward a perception of resistance.
1. Williams, Raymond. Marxism and Literature. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977. Print
2. Human rights lawyer Muhamad Mugraby’s description of Solidere in The Daily Star (Lebanon). Ohrstrom, Lysandra. “Solidere: ‘Vigilantism under color of law.’” The Daily Star (Lebanon), Aug. 6, 2007.
3. Steyerl, Hito. The Wretched of the Screen. Berlin: Sternberg, 2012. 21. Print. Ibid. 24.
Alan Ruiz is a participating artist in Queens International 2016.