» TASWIR Projects @ IBRAAZ

Window(less) Monads

It is obvious that social media and online communication, exchanging, updating, posting, (re-)producing, and disseminating knowledge in real-time conversations, not only provide current venues for knowledge exchange, but rather become themselves subject to artistic and theoretical investigation: digital infrastructures, their epistemic architectures, modes of temporality, velocities, the infinities inscribed in their space, their materiality, ways of archiving, undoing and overwriting identities, tracing individual and collective memories, their (in)determinacy in modes of (re)presentation, oscillating (hi)stories, and so on. How does the texture of this emerging ‘flat surface’ multi-verse, deep-time palimpsest, made of a zillion layers, facets of reflection, each an idiosyncratic centre of the universe, become hospitable to sharing knowledge? How do these universes-in-universes, windows’ monads, whose modes of representation and image-making (TASWIR) are all undoing the Copernican revolution together with claiming ‘the world is flat’, actually speak to and communicate with one another? How does the specific kind of contemporaniety created by such epistemic revolution, in and out of three-dimensional space, in and out of the poetic imagination of the users, in and out of the bloodshed in human history – how does this poetry of the flat-world-revolution create, share, present, archive, and project its agenda in public? How does this question change the artistic, poetic, scholarly, philosophical, mathematical, political imagination?

Poetry of the Revolution – Plea for a Radical Belatedness, for Anarchy, and Idiosync

rasy

These questions are destined to lure curators and other agents among the new epistemic architects into a megalomaniac effort and exhaustion: proving an astonishing (angelic, medieval) quality of ubiquitous presence driven by a dizzying speed, curators and other creative epistemic agents increasingly play a dominant role in the current resetting of how knowledge is produced. In all seriousness, we find among the proclaimed tasks of the curator a call for ‘global meta-curating’, for reimagining entire cultural histories, reinventing the museums, re-linking the arts and sciences, rethinking spectatorship, providing ‘intergenerational perspectives on recent developments across Africa, the Americas, Asia, Europe, and the Middle East’, wanting to grasp the ‘inner logic of contemporary art processes.'[7] Exuberant with the contagious jouissance of arriving just ‘in time’, of keeping up to speed in order to get to see (and to define) what is contemporary in the arts, these panoramic undertakings seem oddly imperial in scope – ironically so, as most of its agents are indebted to much post-colonial reflection and a huge network of genuine relations to literally all corners of the world.

Beginning at the Beginning, Again

I myself am quite intimidated by the speed of this market for curators and epistemic architects. In order to speak about the painful belatedness of the TASWIR project, its untimely idiosyncrasies driven by a quite personal facet of what Jalal Toufic names ‘the withdrawal of tradition past a surpassing disaster’,[8] and about its rather anarchic foundations – what were called ‘non-foundations’ by medieval Jewish and Arabic thinkers when discussing matters of creation and ‘miraculous beginnings’ – it will prove helpful to begin at the beginning again; possibly with the conversation at the Beirut theatre with Walid Raad about untimely arrivals/beginnings. It is impossible to know what triggered that laugh at the end of our conversation, but one possibility, so I thought afterwards, was that we might have laughed about the work Missing Lebanese Wars (1989).

Walid Raad, Notebook volume 72: Missing Lebanese Wars, dates: 1992, plate: 132. Courtesy the artist

Missing Contemporary Art

What we see here are the notebooks of Dr.Fadl Fakhouri, leading historian of the Lebanese Wars, and a member of the Atlas Group who spent his time collecting clippings from the Lebanese newspaper Annahar during the war, showing racehorses near the finishing line, with handwritten notes and calculations on each race. According to Walid Raad, the notebooks record a strange practice among Lebanese historians during the Lebanese Wars: Fakhouri and his colleagues were avid gamblers, who spent every Sunday at the race-track, submitting their bets.[9] However, their bet was not on the winning horse, but rather on ‘how many fractions of a second the photographer would expose the frame before or after the horse crossed the finish line’. Curiously, the photographers never caught the horse online. It seems that photography, documentation, archiving, TASWIR, is all about the inbuilt differential that separates communication online from being contemporary: the contemporary is still forthcoming, or else is falling short. TASWIR – representation/image making – thus faces the paradoxical task of documenting the story of that differential, a story of resistance to going online.

The TASWIR Project / working off-line

In order to imagine a redeeming future, however – and this is where the problems of TASWIR begin – one must also think of a bottomless past, written in white ink on white parchment, a past of the future onto which one inscribes ever-recurrent acts of intervention. In order to know that these interventions, our interventions, disruptive revolutionary moments, spreading into a zillion directions that are indeed miraculously free from the progressive timelines prescribed by European historiographies (whose call of ‘not-yet!’ to the colonised still echoes in the former west), a detour is necessary: a detour that takes time, a detour offline, a detour via nothingness, a crazy detour via the extensive archives of non-linear, atomist, anarchic, amazingly associative, forgotten, withdrawn, pre-colonial traditions of splintered, fractal thinking, mainly in the so-called middle ages, the early days of Kalam, the days of rabbinic midrash, masters of Hadith, Persian poetry, Islamic mystics, Sufis, and Kabbalists. This is the detour that the TASWIR project envisions developing and exposing. To anticipate these traditions yet again – together with Freud’s psychic archive, Walter Benjamin’s Arcades Project, Hélène Cixous’ White Ink, Judith Butler’s Antigone’s Claim, Walid Raad’s Artists’ Index, Aby Warburg’s Mnemosyne Atlas, and so on, means to touch upon the agenda of TASWIR projects, still forthcoming, in constellations that make up the topography of the TASWIR project.[11]

Detour via some Rabbinic Thinking/ Ways apart from the Curator’s market

In order to work out the agenda of TASWIR, we need to learn how to thread the strings of our questions through the depth of time, proving the simultaneity of diachronic references, showing the contemporaneity that is forthcoming in the vicinity (not only) of the TASWIR project. The detours of TASWIR take us through venues far from the curator’s market. Here I submit to the reader just one venue to imagine, one venue to begin with, one venue among many, taken from the cloudy field of ‘white ink’, which is one of the nine topoi of the topography of TASWIR.

copyright A.S. Bruckstein Çoruh

“How TASWIR Projects is Missing Contemporary Art: Plea for a Radical Belatedness”

A.S. Bruckstein Çoruh @ IBRAAZ 004