Akram Zaatari – Time Capsule, Kassel

A statement about speculation, photography, time and withdrawal.Focused on the artistic project conceived by Akram Zaatari for dOCUMENTA 13, titledTime Capsule, Kassel, this book is published as a postscript to the artist’s exhibition This Day at Ten / Aujourd’hui 10 ans atMagasin Centre National d’Art Contemporain de Grenoble, on the occasion of the seminar subsequently organized by the artist and Fondazione Donnaregina per le Arti Contemporanee in Naples as part of the program MADRESCENZA Seasonal Schools (Universit degli Studi di Napoli L’Orientale).
Inspired by an act of conservation that the founder of the National Museum in Beirut undertook on the eve of the civil war in 19756,Time Capsule, Kasselis, in the artist’s words, a statement about speculation, photography, time and withdrawalit’s a metaphor, more than it is an actual time capsule with a specific function and specific time to be opened. The fact that the artist chose the form of a buried treasure, or a record of the present that is hidden away with the hope it will be dug up and unpacked and reconsidered for the future, as Kaelen Wilson-Goldie writes in her essayOn Letters Lost and Found, is crucial to the time horizon at work in Zaatari’s thinking. It also speaks to the desires, arguments and anxieties that run throughout his practice, particularly with regard to the various meanings ascribed to photography and preservation; to the different ways of seeing contemporary art in relation to the social, political and economic conditions that produce it; and to a more general concern about blindness, about mis-recognizing or mis-using the kinds of images that circulate in times of crisis and unrest.