through europe - Palestine

Image as Target

Nathan Witt — Mon, 11 Aug 2014 12:17:16 +0000

This is where I was. Images taken not for their image; the file data from walking around the West Bank in 2012, a month before Pillar of Smoke started in Gaza, of spending weeks lying on my back looking at planes under the Jordan flight path, stupidly thinking they were drones. Or getting up at 5 in the morning to get a bus somewhere to go for a walk, either with people or without people. Of going to 5^th Century AD Greek Orthodox monasteries that ISIS would be burning today if they were there. Of badly avoiding being a tourist or NGO worker in one place and an interloping gentile in the other. Of not wanting to take any sense of identity with me, either as a colonial and especially as a privileged artist/ hired gun.

Images taken because of I have always distrusted the image and not because of the cultural value in critiquing the occupation of Palestine, or the cultural value in discussing remote controlled surveillance and targeted assassinations. Distrusting an image is one of the few rights that I have as a person and it is both my responsibility and job when I have to call myself an artist. Those positions are not immutable or fixed, and neither, I - or my emotions - are fixed. I wish I could be a better, more objective conceptual artist who is coolly detached from the shit of the world but that would be a lie. What is underneath the surface of an image or embedded into it is a part-rejection and a part-suspension of things, it started by rejecting the social pandemic of the question or assumption that in an image: quantity of labour equals quality of an argument. The social/ cultural obsession with production, labour, sheen and veneer... Now, the labour is in the data of an image.

A Modest Proposal (after Jonathan Swift)

Nathan Witt — Thu, 06 Feb 2014 11:42:51 +0000

Vandalised mansion in Aley, used as an IDF outpost during the 1982 Lebanon War.

This text started as a result of a workshop in June 2013 called On the Politics of Silence and Speaking by the Danish artist Sidsel Nelund and philosopher Nikita Dhawan at 98 Weeks, Beirut, part of Ashkal Alwan’s Homeworks 6. I have tried to incorporate Sidsel and Nikita’s ideas to my own disparate ideas and footnotes about conceptual art that are not necessarily about identity and representation and to tie in ideas from Jacqueline Rose’s The Last Resistance into some of my own ideas about Palestine, Israel and Lebanon - and finally two despondent scenes from Richard Linklater films.

I would like to discuss the legal ambiguity of other but it is such a large subject and it needs serious legal qualifications. Examining The Special Trial for Lebanon in The Hague, to the cases of Assange and Snowden and also the Protected Characteristics Act in relation to the case of JK Rowling’s moniker Robert Galbraith being leaked; they are all of great importance and hopefully to be addressed at a later date.

Zakira/Memory

Nathan Witt — Wed, 11 Sep 2013 16:18:57 +0000

This text comes at the time of great worry for the neighbouring countries of Syria as the violence threatens to spill over further and that there is a consensus to let Syria sort its problems out itself without foreign intervention. It is important to consider the fact that this following text exists as a result of illegal activity in neighbouring Israel that has continued since the second world war to present day and that any military intervention against Syria only serves Israel’s interests, either as a diversion for the continual expansion and even advancement further into the West Bank, or for any additional advancement that borders Syria, either for water or land, or for testing out military capabilities. I find it genuinely hard to see if Israel has any concern for its civilian population given its behaviour in international and regional affairs over the last 65 years and the State’s refusal to desist in both the advancement of settlements or further attacks and incursions into the West Bank, Gaza, Southern Lebanon, Jordan River or Golan Heights. An allied attack by the US, France - or Israel - on Syria is going to be catastrophic for the region’s stability. Watching Britain’s offering of televised democracy to pull out of military intervention was a tormenting relief that was almost surreal in both the immediacy of the decision and that the government was actually listening to the public.