Navigating the Fissures of a Remembering Past and an Amnesiac
Present: Contemplating Oraib Toukan’s Counting Memories
by Nat Muller
Memory doesn’t
remember but receives the history raining down on it.
Mahmoud Darwish,
Memory for Forgetfulness
The act of “remembering”, that is the action of
trying to recall a thing past, and the actual memory itself,
namely the mnemonic imprint and narrative of the recalled
event, seem to operate on slightly different planes, though
inextricably linked. Whereas “remembering” is
processual, and could be compared to the act of telling, and
trying to account and recount an event, the actual memory
itself could be seen as a momentary residual display of that
very act. In “Counting Memories”, Oraib Toukan
seems to question the perpetual tension between the process
and residue of memory, especially when that memory, whether
collective or individual, resists settling comfortably and
becoming just another entry within the annals of history.
The works included in this exhibition are marked by an insistence
of the artist to highlight the makeability of memory and forgetfulness,
and how the latter are inscribed within a socio-political
consciousness. This is a consciousness which defies a fixture
of meaning and image, in a region of the world where interpretations
and images become all too easily hasty ideological vehicles,
be that from the inside or from the outside. In addition,
the “body” of work here - all produced between
2006 and 2007 - brings memory back into the realm of the corporeal
and the material, where it is breathed, ingested, printed,
or even written on the body in what appears to be at times
a failed attempt to find meaning “proper”. Thus
memory becomes haptic: the body remembers. What the body remembers,
and what this means in the larger historical scale of things
is not clear from the onset. Are the motions we go through
when trying to remember something mere repetitions of habit,
or are they exercises in omissions? With a title like “Counting
Memories” Toukan seems to ironically suggest that even
if we could transform our memories in quantifiables, and do
away with their residual aura, then they would still be unable
to convey to us a sense of truth.
This is perhaps best exemplified by her “Icon Series”
(2006-7) photographs, where she tries to uncover a representative
iconography of Jordanian identity. The spaces she photographs
are mundane in their setting: shabby furniture and drab walls
featuring recurring references to religion, the king, Jerusalem
or natural landscapes. The pictures and portraits have become
decorative in their obligation. They have a presence because
somehow it is expected or required, and therefore emit a symbolism
that is depleted, if not mass-produced. At first glance this
iconography does not seem to yield anything memorable. If
anything, it insinuates that collective and individual identity
necessitate each other: only not in the unilateral and causal
relationship the iconographic display wants us to believe.
“Icon Series” shows much is to be found in the
singular instance when we remember why we perform certain
actions, rather than in the relics of a memory that is not
necessarily ours, and results more in a loss than in (re)gaining
anything truly meaningful.
The friction between meaningful amnesia and vacuous memory
is enacted obsessively in the three video works “Trying
to count memories without laughter’s disruption”
(2006), “Remind me to remember to forget” (2006),
and “One donkey and three phrases” (2007). Each
of these works could be perceived as a momentary snapshot
trying to contain history; a history which has burdened itself
with the Sysiphean task to remember itself ad infinitum until
it can make sense of itself.
All three works make strategic use of textual repetition,
wherein phrases are written and rewritten at different paces,
and even in reversal. Past, present and future blur into each
other, hence scrambling temporality, and rendering time indefinite.
This is especially vivid in the looped 3-channel video installation
“One donkey and three phrases”, 3 mirrored boxes
each individually show footage of a donkey eating away at
the phrases “I perceived a past”, “I remembered
a present”, and “I witnessed a future”.
Standing a few feet away the audience sees the one image of
the donkey eating the phrase, yet a closer look inside the
box, shows the kaleidoscopic defraction of the image, splintering
the time-space continuum. Whereas a linear reading of each
phrase carries a particular historical weight and momentum,
the multiplication of the mirrored image contest that. We
are invited to be voyeurs to the prism of history(s).
The split-screen video “Remind me to remember to forget”
illustrates haptic memory as enacted by the individual, but
also resonates through the body politic, where in some cases
induced amnesia becomes a survival strategem. It is no coincidence
then, that the repetitive writing of the phrase is coupled
to the act of breathing. The reflex of inhaling and exhaling
becomes simultaneous to the reflex of remembering to forget.
Even if the artists tries to develop a grammar of memory,
where the audience could guess the next letter, the continuous
erasure of the words, makes this impossible. It is as if the
performance of the speech act, where saying something actually
means doing something, is stripped of all power. “Trying
to count memories without laughter’s disruption”
operates in a similar vein, yet here the writing of text occurs
under the watchful gaze of a piercing eye, accompanying the
main projection. The eye is a witness to the act of writing,
yet an uncomfortable sense of surveillance creeps up as well,
as if we as spectators are being watched and made complicit
to whatever is being written. Not only does the writer bear
responsibility to the words she presents in making history,
but so do readers, even if time always seems to catch up with
reading, and “holding memories” becomes increasingly
difficult.
Holding a memory, inscribed on the body, is the subject of
the series of photographs “Man with tattoo” (2007).
Four photographs show respectively the back of a man with
a large tattoo comprised of a hand holding a dagger in the
shape of Palestine, a pair of eagle wings in the Palestinian
national colours, and the Palestinian flag. The word “Palestine”
is written in Arabic vertically on the man’s spine,
as if sub-titling the tattoo, and underlining the significance
of its symbolism. National pride, the desire for a Palestinian
homeland, and a resistance towards occupation are literally
grafted onto the skin, transforming it into a live site commemorating
the plight of the Palestinian people. This plight is a collective
one, as emphasised by the anonymity of the photograph’s
subject: he is faceless. In addition, the fact that the consequences
of the naqba have found little resonance on the global political
stage, and that the Palestinian people have found themselves
for decades in political and historical isolation - in the
dark, if you will - is echoed by the meticulous framing of
the image, and its usage of lighting. As the series of photographs
progress, dark shadows fall over the man’s body obscuring
his arms, clipping the wings of the tattoo, so that eventually
the only thing we can discern is a tiny Palestinian flag floating
in a black void. Functioning as a trope for fading memory,
and the forgetfulness of the world regarding the Palestinian
trauma, the series also correlate the gradual disembodiment
and dismemberment of its subject to the gradual territorial
loss of Palestinian land.
However, it is not only Palestine functioning as a pawn on
the political map of the world. Toukan’s work, especially
“The New(er) Middle East’ (2007), reminds us that
the whole region of the Middle East has for centuries been
subjected to foreign rule and partitioning, under the Ottomans,
the French and British mandates, and most recently the political
meddling and neo-colonialist stints of the United States.
On the stage of world politics, nations seem to be treated
like expendables: the contours of nation states are mutable,
regimes and their leaders are replaceable, as are political
ideologies and alliances. Fuelling the idea of a grand conspiracy
of the powers that be, Oraib Toukan offers a wry and playful
critique in the form of an interactive puzzle “The New(er)
Middle East” which allows us to re-organise the map
of the current Middle East by means of magnets representing
the nation states of the region. Whether we start out with
a blank territorial map with only Palestine and its “undetermined”
status as fixed and unmoveable, or whether we reassemble the
scenarios of our predecessors, the countries – stripped
from their political and regional context – become hard
to recognise and reduced to objects we can shift around in
our composition. We reshuffle our maps with humour and lightness,
since our moves appear to be non-consequential, yet with every
gesture we de facto do create an alternative vision and geo-political
blueprint of the Middle East, which remains umbilically linked
to a political history that cannot easily be dismissed. The
installation reminds us that the topography of our decisions
is never innocent, as much as no map is ever neutral.
Far less playful and much more solemn, if not monumental,
in tone is the installation “Good Morning Beirut”
(2006) which viscerally brings home how history repeats itself.
For many who had lived through the experience of the 1982
Israeli invasion of Lebanon, the 2006 Israeli war on Lebanon
conjured up painful memories and imagery. During the first
weeks of the war, the famous 1982 Handala cartoon of Naji
al-Ali “Goodmorning Beirut” circulated over the
internet and email, reinstating its actuality 24 years later.
With land, sea and air embargos imposed on Lebanon, and phone
lines often clogged, electronic communication became for many
the only link with the outside world.
Toukan created her own “Good Morning Beirut”
by simultaneously chronicling the mediation of war (she collected
the personal emails she received the first few weeks of the
war) and re-mediating the very subject matter she had archived
(reprinting the emails on a paper roll), hence fixing the
communication in time, and preventing its redistribution.
In other words, it is as if Toukan wanted to capture the residual
memory of 1982 and its 2006 iteration, and solidify it in
the hope history may not repeat itself again, and will find
closure. It is telling that for the first showing of the installation
in New York the artist laid out the paper roll for the audience
to unroll and read, sharing the intimate communication she
was receiving from friends caught up in a Lebanon under siege.
Yet for the version at Darat al Funun, almost a year after
the war, she grossly exaggerated the paper roll making it
impossible for the audience to further consult the additional
emails, and draped its pages across the floor and wall, making
the text at times illegible, begging a “reading-between-the-lines”
at multiple levels. The aesthetics, as well as the object
value, of the installation have changed as time has progressed.
The object-document of her private correspondence have become
part of the public domain, as a sculptural memorial which
finds its strength for a great deal in the unwritten pages,
and the unwritten histories.
The seemingly infinite roll of paper Toukan lays before us,
hints that still many rooms and walls are to be draped if
we only want to catch a glimpse of the lived experience of
war, and that no matter how many pages and memories we will
collect, it will only present us with part of the story. It
is perhaps through this lens that we have to read “Counting
Memories” as a whole, as an incomplete text, navigating
the fissures of a remembering past and an amnesiac present.
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