Exhibition Duration: 30. January – 28. February 2015
Alfred Tarazi, who used to be Artist in Residence at the Krinzinger Projekte in 2011, is showing his first solo show at Galerie Krinzinger with the title THE SENSELESS REALM in the Galerie im Parterre.
The 19th century panorama, an early cinematic technique born out of historical painting, informs the artist’s new works, constructed as continuous landscapes of assembled archival images from the Lebanese Civil War (1975-1990).
The five large moving panoramas in the exhibition allow the viewer to move frame by frame through the visual repertoire, recounting gruesome tales of the conflict. While these spurious stories are believed to be true, there are no extant visual accounts for them; therefore, the exhibition emerges as an approximation to historical reconstruction. The apocryphal narrative reconstruction of each story is performed through re-staged images of the war belonging to the same period. At the heart of this artistic intervention lies an epistemological question: What specific type of knowledge is acquired in the exercise of war? Might this knowledge be transmitted in the same distinct manner of Memory? In this archaeology of knowledge, excavating through thousands of harrowing images of destruction, desolation and horror, is there any claim to the authority of Truth? How could there otherwise be a transmission? As the sole vehicles of witnessing, are images only opinions or do they propose other modes and models of understanding?
