“Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence,” states Huda Takriti’s film Refusing to Meet Your Eye (2022). This filmic exploration builds upon a black picture from 1969, which literally shows nothing because the photographer, hired by Palestinian hijackers, forgot to remove the cap from the camera lens at the critical moment. In this and other works on (post-) colonial conflicts in the Arab region, the artist deals with historiography and memory, and how they are defined by gaps. Gaps that occur by chance, as with the black images of the aircraft explosion. They are often owed to the fact that one narrative prevails over another due to disparate power relations or because the events are beyond words.
Huda Takriti focuses on highly personal as well as official national narratives and points out how the past manifests in the present through them. The artist fathoms relations between concealing and revealing, between narrating and interpreting, between original historical images and their (after-)effects in the here and now. By referring not only to documentation of past moments but also to instances where there are no recordings, the legacy of past events unfolds as a complex, entangled process. Photographic and other media images become actors who define—or transcend—the boundaries of what can be said about the past and what can be imagined of it. They are like eyewitnesses, ambassadors, migrants, speaking of something that is not immediately in front of our eyes; they migrate into different contexts and are at times uninvited guests who refuse to disappear from the public discourse. At Kunstraum Lakeside, Huda Takriti will realize a new project that delves into the artistic practice of her grandmother, who, due to war and exile, was forced time and again to set out and reinvent herself.
Press release from Kunstraum Lakeside
Image: Documentation of the working process. © Huda Takriti
