© Akram Zaatari, Courtesy the artist and Sfeir-Semler Gallery, Beirut / Hamburg. Installation view, The Uneasy Subject. 2011 MUSAC Museo de Arte Contemporaneo de Castilla y León.
Akram Zaatari explores how the internet fulfils the desire to perform for strangers
Dance to the End of Love is a dance piece based on YouTube clips from countries across West Asia and North Africa, including Egypt, Yemen, Libya, Saudi Arabia, United Arab Emirates and Oman. Zaatari chose material from 2005–10 of mostly young men performing activities that range from singing, dancing and playing music. They recreate scenes from sci-fi films or do stunts: special effects fireballs are hurled across the screen and jeeps are driven out into the desert in precarious positions.
Most of the performers filmed themselves with mobile phones and uploaded the low-res footage onto YouTube where millions of people around the globe could now see them. Zaatari said: ‘The web enables us to hear all those voices, all those desires screaming out from remote rural places, from villages and cities, wanting to be admired, loved, wanting to be heard and seen.’
The clips show how attitudes around masculine identities quickly spread and adapt to different settings and contexts. Cyberspace creates an audience and turns their performances into popular trends to repeat or re-enact. Zaatari completed this work at the beginning of a period of anti-government protests and uprisings, referred to as the ‘Arab Spring’ by western commentators. YouTube and other self-broadcast platforms played an important role in the political climate at that time.
During the Covid-19 pandemic, many of us have lived through moments of forced solitude, relying on the virtual world for connection. Zaatari’s work reveals a human desire to impress strangers. Reflecting on the resonance of this work today, the artist invites us to ask ourselves about that one thing we’d do when offered the opportunity to perform for the world.
Pipilotti Rist, Lungenflügel 2009
Presented across three screens, Lungenflügel (Lobe of the Lung) 2009 is an immersive video installation, lasting just over fifteen minutes. It depicts a luxurious valley in which the two main characters, a naked woman and a pig, wander. The human and the animal are put on the same plane, each appearing on one of the facing screenings, left and right of the central projection. The woman crawls on all fours, eating apples straight from the grass, in a choreography that very closely emulates the movements of the swine. As the work progresses, the footage becomes more abstract, filmed partly underwater in hues of vibrant red and partly in fields of brightly coloured tulips. Lungenflügel plays on kaleidoscopic colours and distortions, as well as the disproportionate relationship between the scale of the projection and the viewer’s body. The installation, which includes pillows and a carpet, encourages the audience to lie on the floor. This is the only position from which the work can be seen in its entirety. The work offers a non-human centric perspective of the world; its enhanced colours evoke the hues of the internal organs, while the title of the work refers to a portion of the respiratory system.
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artworks in Akram Zaatari
Art in this room
Pipilotti Rist
Lungenflügel
2009