Documentary photographer and Magnum fellows to be exhibited in Jeddah

22/07/2014 TRIPOLI, LEBANON. 24 year old Diana from Damascus, distributes food from a pick up truck to Syrian refugees at Iftar time in Ramadan. From Our Limbo Series, untitled, by Natalie Naccache. CShow more

Next month, Athr in Jeddah is hosting an exhibition in collaboration with the Beirut-based Arab Photography Program (ADPP) called Memory for Forgetfulness. The show has been put together to celebrate the first cycle of grantees of an award given by the ADPP in association with The Arab Fund for Arts and Culture (AFAC), the Prince Claus Fund (PCF), and the Magnum Foundation (MF) for documentary photographers.

Reem Falaknaz, an Emirati and a staff photographer at The National is one of the photographers and her work The Place of Perpetual Undulation, that charts mountain life in the emirate of Ras Al Khaimah will be exhibited in the show. Other projects are Natalie Naccahe's Our Limbo, which takes a look at Syrian families that have relocated and are now living in the higher-class neighbourhoods of Beirut while Omar Imam's Live, Love, Refugee is a series of photographs documenting couples from Syria posing questions such as how have war, revolution and displacement affected intimate relationships between men and women? The essay includes documentary and fictional photographs based on the lives of Syrian refugees in Lebanon.

Other grantees include Amira Al-Sharif from Yemen, Eman Bedir from Egypt, Hamada Elrasam, Kuwaiti Faisal Al Fouzan and Moroccan Zara Samiry.

Oussama Al Rifahi, AFAC’s executive director explains that after the photographers were chosen, it was always the plan to facilitate exhibitions for their work. “The selected projects were chosen by our jurors for the criticality of the topics they address, and the innovative way in which the young documentary photographers have addressed them. We were interested from the beginning in having the projects shared with the widest audience possible, both within and outside the Arab region. The strategy we put in place to push those projects forward included both an online presence as well as physical exhibitions in galleries and cultural centres. We are about to launch an online portal that would showcase the work of these grantees, and we are planning a series of physical exhibitions in the region as well as internationally.”

The choice of Athr gallery space is a pertinent one as it is one of the few institutions in the region that focus on home-grown art as well as sustained public engagement.

Athr’s gallery manager Maya El Khalil says that the exhibition is part of their goal as facilitators with a responsibility to engage both artists and the public, to create dialogue and open minds to alternative discourses. “By teaming up with AFAC to showcase the work of selected grantees of the Arab Documentary Photography Program, we are fulfilling our commitment to expose our artists and public to ‘compelling non-stereotypical and unconventional visual documentation of important social issues and narratives relevant to the Arab region,’ as described by ADPP. The idea is mainly to raise the awareness of our young photographers to the power and versatility of creative documentary photography, and the role it can play in a context such as ours.”

The ADPP exhibition will open on September 9. After Jeddah, some of the works will be shown in Beirut in the upcoming edition of the Beirut Art Fair, in Amsterdam at the Prince Claus Gallery, and two of the projects will be exhibited at the Photoville festival in September, the largest annual photographic event in New York.

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