// literary & arts //
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Material Evidence: Syria,Ukraine...
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Amid a handful of storage lockers where they keep all your Columbia crap over the summer, amateur curator Benjamin Hiller has launched his debut with the exhibit “Material Evidence: Syria, Ukraine...What’s next?” tucked away in a dingy makeshift Chelsea gallery space. As soon as you walk through the black-washed facade, you’ve entered a war zone. Either this ambience is intended, or it’s just a convenient overlap of exposed piping and concrete floors and dim tawny lighting that contributes to the real rawness of the scene. The place uncannily reminds me of the Jerusalem Underground Prisoners Museum. In other words, it’s the perfect venue.
After passing an unimpressive table where the scarf-clad German-American opposition journalist-turned-curator sits all day to answer questions, the first display—and the most writing you’ll see throughout the whole exhibit—is a list of names of journalists from Syria and Ukraine who have died “in action.”
“As you can see we’re still adding to that list,” Hiller points out, referring to the recently pasted portrait of controversial deceased photojournalist Andrey Stenin and mentioning the upcoming commemoration of James Foley and some others. The Ukraine list is noticeably shorter than that of Syria—not saying much, since it’s a given that this list will continue to expand un-neatly beyond the lines. This is the only nominal tribute to journalists, but a clear and outright veneration of the craft at that; after all, these people are basically the firefighters of the media industry, going in when everybody else runs out, and the casualties are evident.
It doesn’t take much to figure out that this exhibit isn’t exactly a professional getup. It’s almost as if there was no time to let the bread rise—and a carefully planned and orchestrated exhibit would have been comical for conflicts so rapidly deteriorating. So it’s a curatorial “Exodus,” a departure from the neat and elite, and a total embrace of a basic, chaotic wartime mentality. The photos have been hastily printed on foam core (I checked surreptitiously), with scratches falling squarely across the subjects, sometimes in the most inconvenient places. I can’t quite tell if this grungy, wear-and-tear adds or detracts to the whole desolation effect. Are they tempting viewers to contribute more human damage to scenes way past destruction?
Apparently, the exhibit is part of a project to bring “journalistic truth” to light by encouraging conflict journalists and photojournalists to submit their collected “material evidence”—the raw content CNN chooses to scrap when photo-matching their headlines. Hiller notes that none of the photos are credited or identified to photographers, because many of their artificers are still scrambling on the battlefields, and that more photos are being added as the exhibit treks from Russia to Belgium to Germany to New York and then back to Russia. (Some fancy Met curator is shaking his head over detailed floor plans from a 27th floor office somewhere.)
While many of the images depict the macro consequences of the conflicts, the sheer physical devastation—there are many poignant personal moments: an outdated shop-owner peering through his magnifying glass over a just-finished Arab coffee, an “open-minded” American t-shirt-clad Syrian schoolgirl smiling hopefully from her desk, a profile of diverse audience members in a half empty Damascus opera house, and (presumably) ethnic Russian protesters bundled up in the Ukrainian cold, denouncing a brewing nationalism pregnant with deadly fascism.
The eerie brilliance of the exhibit lurks in the peculiar placement of certain “souvenirs” beside photographs of those same objects “in combat,” so to speak. A bullet-blasted plastic torso survives a Syrian scene where it had been used as a decoy to locate the origin of sniper fire. A remnant chair faces an earlier version of itself photographed behind sandbags, a militant’s shooting throne. The most head-turning of these is a bullet-ridden child mannequin face, staring, erect, standing guard before its photo. It had been photographed from such an apt angle so as to create an illusion, dwarfing its much larger surroundings—as if to magnify the dearest victim of this future-decimating conflict.
I had just discovered the treasured Umayyad Mosque this summer while cataloging a collection of Lionel Reiss photographs taken in the 1930s, some in Syria. Walking past a fleeting moment, a boy skipping through the still-intact mosque’s courtyard, you almost laugh at the naive beauty of an older world that cannot be retrieved. My first instinct: Don’t they realize they’re destroying irreplaceable landmarks?!—only to be overwhelmed by a deep mourning for a cultured, intellectual society forever losing the foundations of its rich heritage. Not to mention facing the daunting task of repair from nothing.
One photo displays a flattened soccer ball sporting an international array of flags, forgotten in an abandoned Syrian backyard. In a most ironic of scenes, glaring at the viewer is the Russian flag—a reminder of the ever-present entity driving both conflicts? It’s subtle and accidental, but too real, prompting the viewer to really grasp the photographer’s masterpiece, not as a simple documentation, but as an expert apprehension of coincidental, but sinisterly authentic “truths.”
Nothing is pretty here—except maybe the few fading faces of schoolchildren—but most of the true gore is carefully hidden away behind white-curtained compartments that engulf like shrouds, warning “18+” in stark red, as if being eighteen is much of a consolation for what you’re about to walk into, practically a pile of unidentified corpses, and the magnitude of conflicts far from over.
The capacity of collection is fascinating though—the capture of an image and then the painstaking preservation of the exact artifacts photographed, from a bloody flyer commemorating a “loyal shaheed” who died fighting in Assad’s army, to a neo-Nazi armband gifted by a Ukrainian guide, to a cardboard-duct-taped makeshift bulletproof vest and authentic Molotov cocktails snatched from the line of fire, as if to say “these things were there, see for yourself, we can’t make this up!” All of this seeming ridiculously relevant in a world that still harbors denials of major atrocities.
The clash of old and new is deafening—an image of a bunker floor riddled with bullet casings, not a spare corner to walk, complete chaos encircling a delicately laid Qur’an, left open to some forgotten passage, undefiled on a magnificently engraved almost-ancient bookstand; yet Syria comes off as an almost wordless conflict. The images of a collapsing Ukraine, though, are full of not recently extinct language: the red, white, and blue Russian flag emblazoned with a swastika declaring these “the colors of occupiers;” no shortage of rhetoric here.
Amid all this latent symbolism and buried history, there is a frustration—as far as first-world frustrations go—in the viewer’s gaze, which is deeply hampered by a kind of chaos of curation. The exhibit sports almost no clear description of events, of content, and of context. (I could only read some of the Russian and Arabic from my limited knowledge of both languages, but for a viewer who lacks those, there are basically no translations, requiring a complicated acrobatics to just imagine the rhetoric!) Some photos are accompanied by absolutely nothing but more gruesome, complex multi-variable photos and objects, and a few with a meager two lines or so. The English is bad, but even I forgave that; the lack of factual explanation though, what kind of evidence is that?!
In worlds where “militants” can pretty much refer to all parties, the ambiguity is agonizing, and almost makes the less-than-fully-informed viewer write off the whole exhibit as a bunch of disturbing pictures. But could that be the point? Perhaps “journalistic truth” is about appreciating the broad and inexplicably nuanced array of visual information at face value. The title of the exhibit asks “what’s next?” and the photos and artifacts challenge the viewer to put the pieces together himself.
The exhibit is open 10 AM - 7 PM, and admission is free.
// HANNAH VAITSBLIT is a sophomore at Barnard College and staff writer for The Current. She can be reached at [email protected]. Photo courtesy of www.material-evidence.com.
After passing an unimpressive table where the scarf-clad German-American opposition journalist-turned-curator sits all day to answer questions, the first display—and the most writing you’ll see throughout the whole exhibit—is a list of names of journalists from Syria and Ukraine who have died “in action.”
“As you can see we’re still adding to that list,” Hiller points out, referring to the recently pasted portrait of controversial deceased photojournalist Andrey Stenin and mentioning the upcoming commemoration of James Foley and some others. The Ukraine list is noticeably shorter than that of Syria—not saying much, since it’s a given that this list will continue to expand un-neatly beyond the lines. This is the only nominal tribute to journalists, but a clear and outright veneration of the craft at that; after all, these people are basically the firefighters of the media industry, going in when everybody else runs out, and the casualties are evident.
It doesn’t take much to figure out that this exhibit isn’t exactly a professional getup. It’s almost as if there was no time to let the bread rise—and a carefully planned and orchestrated exhibit would have been comical for conflicts so rapidly deteriorating. So it’s a curatorial “Exodus,” a departure from the neat and elite, and a total embrace of a basic, chaotic wartime mentality. The photos have been hastily printed on foam core (I checked surreptitiously), with scratches falling squarely across the subjects, sometimes in the most inconvenient places. I can’t quite tell if this grungy, wear-and-tear adds or detracts to the whole desolation effect. Are they tempting viewers to contribute more human damage to scenes way past destruction?
Apparently, the exhibit is part of a project to bring “journalistic truth” to light by encouraging conflict journalists and photojournalists to submit their collected “material evidence”—the raw content CNN chooses to scrap when photo-matching their headlines. Hiller notes that none of the photos are credited or identified to photographers, because many of their artificers are still scrambling on the battlefields, and that more photos are being added as the exhibit treks from Russia to Belgium to Germany to New York and then back to Russia. (Some fancy Met curator is shaking his head over detailed floor plans from a 27th floor office somewhere.)
While many of the images depict the macro consequences of the conflicts, the sheer physical devastation—there are many poignant personal moments: an outdated shop-owner peering through his magnifying glass over a just-finished Arab coffee, an “open-minded” American t-shirt-clad Syrian schoolgirl smiling hopefully from her desk, a profile of diverse audience members in a half empty Damascus opera house, and (presumably) ethnic Russian protesters bundled up in the Ukrainian cold, denouncing a brewing nationalism pregnant with deadly fascism.
The eerie brilliance of the exhibit lurks in the peculiar placement of certain “souvenirs” beside photographs of those same objects “in combat,” so to speak. A bullet-blasted plastic torso survives a Syrian scene where it had been used as a decoy to locate the origin of sniper fire. A remnant chair faces an earlier version of itself photographed behind sandbags, a militant’s shooting throne. The most head-turning of these is a bullet-ridden child mannequin face, staring, erect, standing guard before its photo. It had been photographed from such an apt angle so as to create an illusion, dwarfing its much larger surroundings—as if to magnify the dearest victim of this future-decimating conflict.
I had just discovered the treasured Umayyad Mosque this summer while cataloging a collection of Lionel Reiss photographs taken in the 1930s, some in Syria. Walking past a fleeting moment, a boy skipping through the still-intact mosque’s courtyard, you almost laugh at the naive beauty of an older world that cannot be retrieved. My first instinct: Don’t they realize they’re destroying irreplaceable landmarks?!—only to be overwhelmed by a deep mourning for a cultured, intellectual society forever losing the foundations of its rich heritage. Not to mention facing the daunting task of repair from nothing.
One photo displays a flattened soccer ball sporting an international array of flags, forgotten in an abandoned Syrian backyard. In a most ironic of scenes, glaring at the viewer is the Russian flag—a reminder of the ever-present entity driving both conflicts? It’s subtle and accidental, but too real, prompting the viewer to really grasp the photographer’s masterpiece, not as a simple documentation, but as an expert apprehension of coincidental, but sinisterly authentic “truths.”
Nothing is pretty here—except maybe the few fading faces of schoolchildren—but most of the true gore is carefully hidden away behind white-curtained compartments that engulf like shrouds, warning “18+” in stark red, as if being eighteen is much of a consolation for what you’re about to walk into, practically a pile of unidentified corpses, and the magnitude of conflicts far from over.
The capacity of collection is fascinating though—the capture of an image and then the painstaking preservation of the exact artifacts photographed, from a bloody flyer commemorating a “loyal shaheed” who died fighting in Assad’s army, to a neo-Nazi armband gifted by a Ukrainian guide, to a cardboard-duct-taped makeshift bulletproof vest and authentic Molotov cocktails snatched from the line of fire, as if to say “these things were there, see for yourself, we can’t make this up!” All of this seeming ridiculously relevant in a world that still harbors denials of major atrocities.
The clash of old and new is deafening—an image of a bunker floor riddled with bullet casings, not a spare corner to walk, complete chaos encircling a delicately laid Qur’an, left open to some forgotten passage, undefiled on a magnificently engraved almost-ancient bookstand; yet Syria comes off as an almost wordless conflict. The images of a collapsing Ukraine, though, are full of not recently extinct language: the red, white, and blue Russian flag emblazoned with a swastika declaring these “the colors of occupiers;” no shortage of rhetoric here.
Amid all this latent symbolism and buried history, there is a frustration—as far as first-world frustrations go—in the viewer’s gaze, which is deeply hampered by a kind of chaos of curation. The exhibit sports almost no clear description of events, of content, and of context. (I could only read some of the Russian and Arabic from my limited knowledge of both languages, but for a viewer who lacks those, there are basically no translations, requiring a complicated acrobatics to just imagine the rhetoric!) Some photos are accompanied by absolutely nothing but more gruesome, complex multi-variable photos and objects, and a few with a meager two lines or so. The English is bad, but even I forgave that; the lack of factual explanation though, what kind of evidence is that?!
In worlds where “militants” can pretty much refer to all parties, the ambiguity is agonizing, and almost makes the less-than-fully-informed viewer write off the whole exhibit as a bunch of disturbing pictures. But could that be the point? Perhaps “journalistic truth” is about appreciating the broad and inexplicably nuanced array of visual information at face value. The title of the exhibit asks “what’s next?” and the photos and artifacts challenge the viewer to put the pieces together himself.
The exhibit is open 10 AM - 7 PM, and admission is free.
// HANNAH VAITSBLIT is a sophomore at Barnard College and staff writer for The Current. She can be reached at [email protected]. Photo courtesy of www.material-evidence.com.