Alba Zari Archives | 1000 Words

Performing Histories / Histories Re-Imagined

Impressions Gallery, Bradford

Exhibition review by Anneka French

Co-curated by Impressions Gallery and Peckham 24, Performing Histories / Histories Re-Imagined features works by eight photographers who reframe official and personal archives to explore the abuses of organised religion and colonialism. As Anneka French writes, the exhibition’s diversity of influences underscores the role and value of the archive and, more crucially, the importance of radical approaches towards its reuse and interrogation.

Anneka French | Exhibition review | 1 August 2024

A statue of the Virgin Mary repeated across two photographs is a potent signifier of the power structures and abuses that inform and then I ran (2023). This suite of photographs, in which experiences of Emi O’Connell’s grandmother are re-enacted, is hung formally, with a central diptych of a blurred, brooding landscape flanked by figures in this same location. Described as ‘performative self-portraiture’, O’Connell re-tells parts of her grandmother’s story of escape from an Irish Catholic mother and baby home – often referred to as the Magdalene Laundries, institutions in which the devastating treatment of those confined is still coming to light – when she climbed from a window aged 16 and heavily pregnant with O’Connell’s father, who was subsequently forcefully adopted. O’Connell can be seen tenderly holding a sprig of cow parsley in one photograph. She can further be seen running, falling and twisting, her head bent and body crouched in distress, in images that are as strangely still, sensitive and beautiful as they are full of trauma.

The visible shutter release cable in O’Connell’s photographs is evidence of the reconstruction taking place and indeed, and then I ran embodies many of the core subjects presented in the wide-ranging and complex group exhibition Performing Histories / Histories Re-Imagined at Impressions Gallery, Bradford. The exhibition asks questions about the impacts of ‘official’ archives, be these institutional or familial, on (but not limited to) communities, bodies, memories and identities. Eight photographers here disrupt, re-make, re-present or reinterpret these narratives, finding meaning of their own and revealing new ways of looking at difficult things.

As with O’Connell’s photographs, the unfathomable impacts of and abuses by organised religion also occupy key roles in works by Alba Zari and Jermaine Francis. Zari’s Occult (2019-23) offers a partial picture of her own mother and grandmother’s life as members of a Christian fundamentalist sect now titled The Family International, in India, Nepal and Thailand. This is revealed through archival photographs, and comic strip-like drawings and text that highlight ways the sect drew in recruits through practices of sexual exploitation very much at odds with the smiling family photographs that Zari has layered on top of and tacked-up alongside these.

Francis’ Once Upon a Time: a bible, multiple protagonists and the propagation of gospel in racial time (2024-ongoing) is shown in and on vitrines arranged in the shape of a cross. The work itself is focused upon Anglian Church archives held by the Bodleian Library, Oxford, pertaining to historic missionary initiatives in the Caribbean. Underscoring the abuses of black people under colonialism and its continuing reverberations, Francis’ work, elements of which are placed beneath magnifying sheets, and including grey archive boxes, bibles and layered prints made up of collaged archival imagery and text, asks viewers to lean over, look closely and implicate themselves within the work and its contexts.

Also working with found archival imagery, Amin Yousefi’s Eyes Dazzle as They Search for the Truth (2022) uses protest photographs from the Islamic Revolution of 1978-79 in Iran. Specifically searching out people from the crowd who look (or seem to look) directly at the camera, these isolated individuals form a newly reassembled archive of gazes photographed through a loupe. Extracting individual people from the crowd, the work presented features a cluster of small prints alongside one very large photograph that centres the wary face of a young child, pinpointing his smallness and his humanity among the protesting throng.

Woman Wearing Ring Shields Face from Flash (2019-23) by Odette England is comprised of a large paste-up and a series of glossy prints. On the left, the photographs are of male photographers, prominent camera lenses and flashbulbs standing in place of eyes as their cameras obscure their faces. On the right are photographs of women refusing to be photographed, their hands in front of their faces and heads turned away. England’s work flags the potential abuses of photography itself – how it takes, snaps, shoots and captures through the violence of vocabulary hidden in plain sight – and of the subject’s own limited power in this dynamic. England’s work assembles vernacular images, forming a new archive of resistance that speaks to contemporary feminist dialogue and ongoing challenges to patriarchal perspectives that seek to control women in body and in image.

Eleonora Agostini’s and Tarrah Krajnak’s works touch upon further feminist concerns in connection with personal identity. While Agostini’s collection of photographs A Study on Waitressing (2020-24) pays homage to her waitress mother, her sore feet and the dual performances of in/visibility necessary to her role, Krajnak’s SISMOS79 (2014) explores her identity as an Indigenous transracial person who has experienced adoption and generational trauma. Composed of five large prints, Krajnak’s work combines broken mirrors photographed in conjunction with political and pornographic magazine pages from the year of her birth, offering a highly fragmentary personal and social perspective of this window in time.

Of all the eight photographers featured, Laura Chen’s work sits rather differently. Employing a dark sense of humour, Being Framed (2022) uses the rudimentary tropes of old-fashioned, analogue criminal investigations by police or private detectives popularised in film noir to develop a fictional case lead by avatar DCI Dean Wilson. Newspaper clippings, mocked-up case files, crime scene tape and a missing rabbit poster feature in Chen’s new archive. An image of a CCTV camera is positioned high up on the wall, while a footprint is playfully glued to the floor. Since Being Framed overtly refers to imagined or fictional events, it lacks the emotional and psychological force of other works on display.

The exhibition, which draws upon multiple international contexts and inputs, is co-curated by Impressions Gallery and Peckham 24, where it showed along with other projects and exhibitions in southeast London earlier this year. In Bradford, the exhibition’s diversity of influence, approach and subject makes for a challenging and, at times, uneven viewing experience but nonetheless it is one that serves as a useful reminder of the importance of the archive and, more crucially, of the importance of radical approaches towards it. ♦

Performing Histories / Histories Re-Imagined runs at Impressions Gallery, Bradford, until 31 August

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Anneka French is a Curator at Coventry Biennial and Project Editor for Anomie, an international publishing house for the arts. She contributes to Art Quarterly, Burlington Contemporary and Photomonitor, and has written and had editorial commissions from Turner Prize, Fire Station Artists’ Studios, TACO!, Grain Projects and Photoworks+. French served as Co-ordinator and then Director at New Art West Midlands, Editorial Manager at this is tomorrow and has worked at galleries including Tate Modern, London, and Ikon, Birmingham.

Images:

1-Untitled from Occult, 2019-23. © Alba Zari

2-Untitled from A Study in Waitressing, 2020-24. © Eleonora Agostini

3-Emi O’Connell, and then I ran, 2023.

4-Untitled from Once Upon a Time: a bible, multiple protagonists and the propagation of gospel in racial time, 2024-ongoing. © Jermaine Francis

5-Untitled, from the series Eyes Dazzle as they Search for The Truth, 2022. © Amin Yousefi

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Alba Zari

The Y

Essay by Ilaria Speri

The most disconcerting photographic moment in my life dates back to five years ago. My 87-year old grandmother was experiencing – we did not yet know – an early stage of senile dementia. One day I stepped in her apartment and I noticed that the armchair in her living room was surprisingly occupied, albeit with a black and white portrait of my grandfather, the one, which had been sitting on the television since his passing, was nicely accommodated onto it. A blanket covered him up to his nose, so that he could breathe, and a pillow softly held his head. She had literally put him to bed. From then on, any printed or moving image would become so ‘real’ to her, that in a few months she could no longer see the difference between a person and its reproduction – images had taken over.
Photographs are known to be an ideal means for building and preserving memories. Their power over our perception of the world is immeasurable. They provide strangers with an identity, and they help us remember those who have left. They comfort us in the blank spaces of someone’s absence – when we remember, or when we wait. They are proof of our existence. Among many other reasons, this is what makes humanity’s bond with photographs umbilical. We can’t do without them. And if this wasn’t enough, they are always available.

The Internet and new digital technologies have shifted immensely the ways in which we represent ourselves, multiplied by our existence on the web. Allowing us – by ‘simple’ means of images and coding – to bring back the dead with strikingly reliable results. A significant example, among others, is Cécile B. Evans’s video piece Hyperlinks Or It Didn’t Happen (2014), a poetic monologue on consciousness and personal data narrated by a digital copy of deceased actor Philip Seymour Hoffman, populated by spam bots, holograms, and rendered ghosts. Proof that the distance between the real and the virtual is wearing thinner and thinner.

Picture this. What if you were to track down the image of a person you know exists, but never met? This is what Alba Zari, born in Bangok in 1987, started thinking after January 4^th, 2014, when she found out that the man appointed in her memories as her father was not, as a matter of fact, her biological parent. An unexpected revelation made by her brother, with whom she was sure to share Thai biological origins. A DNA test confirmed the fact with an unquestionable 0% match. Zari was confronted with the sudden disruption of her identity and sense of belonging. She decided to assume the role of a detective, and started the private investigation that she conveyed in her project The Y, a title referring to the male chromosome of human DNA. What emerges is a medical-cum-conceptual visual report, which brings to the surface some of the most interesting features that make photography such a uniquely fascinating language.

Despite the autobiographical premise, the project is marked by an infrequent – as much as remarkable – capability of the artist not to take control over her own story. She leaves room for the puzzle to come together through attempts, failures and discoveries, rather than imposing an unnecessary – as much as painful, as the artist specified in a previous conversation – dressing of emotional involvement and storytelling. As a result, the series pays homage to a long history of medical and forensic photography, and of its transformation into artistic processes – from Duchenne de Boulogne and Adrien Tournachon’s famous electrophysiology experiments, up to Larry Sultan and Mike Mandel’s pioneering photo-book Evidence (1977). Travelling the world both physically and virtually, from Thailand to the United States to YouTube, Alba Zari’s work merges scientific reports, archival images, film negatives, personal relics, mugshot portraiture and 3D facial construction.

Once Zari obtained her birth certificate, she reached out to the man who had signed it, who, following colossal searches on the Internet, turned out to be homeless person living in Santa Barbara, California. In the series, the man appears next to her putative father and brother in sequences of 360° portraits – the kind used to determine facial traits in digital imaging. At the end of the journey, all she knew – and currently knows – is that her father’s name was Massad, and that he used to work for the Emirates Airlines. She analysed her family album, painting over a no-longer reliable fatherly figure, before turning to the process of exclusion deployed in physiognomic studies, a test based on her mother and grandmother’s traits as well on her own. Highlighted in a large-format self-mugshot, it quite clearly revealed that her nose, mouth and eyes bear a striking resemblance to those belonging to Massad. However, she hadn’t yet been able to find anything close to an image of the man himself.

Zari’s ultimate attempt sees the use of Make A Human, a software usually employed to design avatars in digital animation. Here, she created a digital identikit by applying her facial traits – those belonging to her father’s side – to a neutral digital model. In visual terms, what is most interesting about the renderings that today’s software can provide – as pointed out by Adam Broomberg and Oliver Chanarin in their unsettling series Spirit is a Bone (2015) – is that despite their plausibility they are designed to look straightforward. From every angle we look at them, their gaze bypasses us, pointing towards another dimension – one we have no access to. The complete absence of interaction, of human interconnections, marks the occurrence of a major transition in the notion of portrait itself, one which will no doubt require further explorations in the future.

Eventually, the project reaches an end with the nearest visualisation of the man the artist could achieve – an avatar of his presumed face. Only the web may still represent a lifeline for soon the 3D portrait will be released online and spread worldwide in a global open call to help with the ongoing process of identification. The results are unpredictable. In the artist’s words, the rest is about life. ♦

The Y is curated by Francesca Seravalle as part of a fellowship at Fabrica – The Communication Research Centre of the Benetton Group.

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Ilaria Speri carries out research, curation and production for exhibitions and publications. Since 2013 she has been part of Fantom, a curatorial group dedicated to photography, visual and sound arts. A correspondent at Il Giornale dell’Arte, she writes for magazines and artists books, and has collaborated with publishers such as MACK, Humboldt Books, Skinnerboox and Skira. She taught History of Photography at the Academy of Fine Arts in Bologna from 2014-17 before taking up the role of Curatorial Coordinator at Fotopub festival (Novo Mesto, Slovenia), for which she curated the first solo show of the collective Live Wild in 2016.