Issa Touma: Photo Festival in Time of War

 "It's almost an impossible situation but we wanted to go on 

because if we don't go on people will lose hope." 

~ Issa Touma.

Among the very first posts I wrote for this blog were several about a remarkable man - Syrian photographer and gallery owner Issa Touma (pictured above in an undated and unattributed photo). The issue then - half a dozen years ago - was persistent government interference with Touma's own work and with the photo festival he coordinates in his home city Aleppo. Of course, Aleppo has been in the news lately as the site of fighting between the troops of Assad regime and Free Syrian Army.  Yesterday CNN ran this report about Touma's efforts to mount the exhibition again this year despite the civil war going on around him. The festival web page is here. Even more impressive is that Touma is promoting "art camping," an attempt to bring culture and art and not just the basic necessities to people displaced by the war.

Issa Touma (2)

This post is an update on Issa Touma the Syrian photographer who runs the Le Pont Gallery in Aleppo. Among the first posts I made to this blog called attention to his troubles with Syrian authorities. His work prompted additional posts here and here. I e-mailed Issa recently and have received an update from him which I summarize here.

The gallery re-opened January 8th after having been shut down for nearly nine months. Within two weeks local authorities had come to close it down again, but they were stopped, in turn, by the Syrian Secret Pollice who assured Issa that he is free to pursue gallery operations. Issa seems skeptical - as he says "time will show every thing." Plans for the gallery include an exhibition (running from April to August) of six photographers including one of work by Niek Biegman (some of whose work can be found here and here).

Currently, however, Issa's "big project" is organizing what seems like an ambitious culture and arts series - including dance, art and photography exhibitions, lectures, music - with contributions from Muslims, Christians and Jews. Issa calls this project "Meeting with the Middle East" and indicates that it will begin April 206 and run through the end of 2007.

One of the primary reasons why the Syrian authorities find Issa Touma so "troublesome" is that he has run a series of photography festivals in Aleppo. He explaned to me that given the events of the past year he is pushing back the next iteration from Spring to September 2006. He seems to have many strong contributors. This installment of the festival will be incorporated into the "Meeting with the Middle East" series.

I think Issa Touma is a remarkable figure. He is stalwart in his activities and, while acknowledging how difficult his experience with the authorities has been, he insists that his tribulations have initiated a "positive movement inside Syria, its for the first time open conversation about the cultural problem in Syria." It turns out that his activities have brought this struggle to international attention. He tells me that in one week recently he had 23 visitors from abroad - including diplomats, journalists and artists from Austria, the Netherlands, the US and the UK - and admits that this entourage has kept him so busy that he sometimes is up all night working on the projects I mentioned above. Issa promises future updates. I will keep you posted as he sends them.

Issa Touma (3): The Comtinuing Saga of Government Interference with the Arts in Syria

This post is another update on Issa Touma (pictured above) the Syrian photographer who runs the Le Pont Gallery in Aleppo. Among the very first posts I made to this blog called attention to his troubles with Syrian authorities. I updated in a second post some months later and his work prompted additional posts here and here. This afternoon I received another email from Issa which I summarize below.

Late last month a Danish magazine published this interview with Issa complete with examples of the sort of art he is trying to promote in an exhibition called "Images of Syria" that just closed in Copenhagen . In that interview Issa remarks:

"In September 2006 I’m organizing The International Photography Gathering which is going to be a big event. The festival is a recurrent event each year, except for last year when my gallery was closed. I hope the government isn’t planning to cause any problems this time.

In 2004 during this festival, they tried to stop the activities by cutting the electricity. But a friend of mine brought his car to the exhibition and turned on the headlights which enabled us to continue the show. The works were then showed in the light from the car.

This year I will show about 1400 works of art and more than 70 artists are coming from 32 countries. I hope that everything will run smoothly. If the government tries to make interferences at the festival, it will be a big black spot on the governments head. Furthermore I don’t think that the famous artists who are coming can be shut up."

Well, these hopes have been disappointed as, apparently, the Syrian authorities have yet again interfered with the photo festival in Aleppo. In his email Issa describes a pattern of obstruction and harassment by various government agencies. He has been denied access to a public venue crucial to the festival by the Ministry of Electricity, most likely under instructions of the provincial Governor. Postal authorities have illegally impounded packages destined for Issa's gallery and then sought to impose excessive fees for handling and storing them. The Ministry of Culture has threatened to withdraw permission for performances of artists and musicians who participate in Issa's festival rather than in competing events at an official Cultural Center in Aleppo. All of this bad behavior seems clearly orchestrated to undermine the opening of the photography festival which is due to open in Aleppo on September 15th. Perhaps a little negative publicity will give the Syrian authorities pause.

The Political Landscape I

© Issa Touma

Here is a link to a recent npr story on Syrian photographer Issa Touma:

The photograph above is a picture of his, lifted from the npr gallery, that prompts questions about the link between politics and photography. This is a detail of a cityscape of Touma's home town of Aleppo. The photo was taken from above so as to reveal the satellite dishes that have proliferated on rooftops across the city.

As the npr commentary makes clear this is a political image. It does not, however, portray an "event" and so lacks some of the drama we find in, say, Josef Koudelka's famous photographic record of Warsaw Pact troops invading Prague in 1968. But nor is it as bleak and inert as the various environments Koudelka portrays in the images he later collected in Chaos (Phaidon, 1999). So how is it political?

One might think of this as an instance of "the political landscape" - a phrase on whose ambiguities I was prompted to reflect by the following passage:

"I think we often forget that battlefields are one kind of landscape and that most landscapes also are territories. That is to say, they have political as well as aesthetic dimensions; on the small scale they involve real estate and sense of place, on the large scale they involve nationalisms, war and the grounds for ethnic identity. Part of what is exciting about the artwork I have been attending too is that it portrays nature and landscape as not just where we picnic but also where we live and die. It is where our food, water, fuel and minerals come from, where our nuclear waste and shit and garbage go to. It is the territory of dreams, somebody’s homeland and somebody’s goldmine." (Rebecca Solnit, As Eve Said to the Serpent, University of Georgia Press, 2001, pages 10-11.)

Touma's landscape is political not in the sense that it captures some monumental battle or its aftermath; instead it is political because it reveals ongoing conflict between an authoritarian regime and citizenry. One might invoke here something like Jim Scott's "weapons of the weak." In so doing though we need not romanticize the situation and presume that what each household "tunes in" to is anything other than the mundane, commercial media about which we here in the west rightly complain. But we surely can see that resistance occurs largely out of sight, and thank photographers like Touma for revealing it to us and, more importantly, to Syrians who are sure to gain sustenance from the knowledge that many oif their neighbors too are looking beyond the range of official culture.

The exhibit that npr reported on is now at the Aperture Foundation in NYC.

Aleppo in Ruins

Smoke billows over shelled and destroyed buildings in Aleppo, Syria, 
where the Syrian army has brought in reinforcements to try to end the 
rebels' resistance. Photograph © Maysun/EPA/The Guardian.

Aleppo Rooftops. Photograph © Issa Touma.

 The top image appeared at The Guardian this week. It reminded me of the second image, taken by Syrian photographer Issa Touma and the subject of one of the very first posts I made here a half dozen years ago and about whom I posted here last week. As I've said here repeatedly Touma is an interesting fellow who, I hope, stays out of harm's way in the Syrian war. In my early post I pointed to the television dishes spread across the rooftops as so many sources of resistance to the authoritarian regime. The ruins of the city attest to the character of the regime and suggest how violent it has become as the resistance has been mobilized.

Issa Touma

This is Syrian photographer Issa Touma (I lifted the image from www.fotofest.org). Earlier today I posted an entry inspired by a picture by of his. It turns out that Syrian authorities are once again suppressing his gallery in Aleppo.

You can find details here: http://www.merip.org/touma.html.

Facing Authority?

I managed to get down to NYC this past weekend and saw a number of exhibitions that I will write about over the next few days. One of the shows was at Aperture - "Nazar: Photographs from the Arab World". I had mentioned this show in earlier posts regarding the work of Issa Touma. A number of terrific photographers are included in the exhibition. Among them is Randa Shaath who is chief photographer at Al Ahram Weekly. Shaath has done a series entitled "Under the Same Sky: Rooftops in Cairo, 2002-2003," on the everyday life that she could see from her high-rise apartment but that remained invisible from street level. Here is one I lifted from the web:

© Randa Shaath

The striking feature of the image is the juxapositon between "traditional" goings-on and the proliferation of satellite dishes. These latter, or course, are just the same as those Touma captures in his cityscape of Aleppo, Syria. The brief catalogue entry that accompanies Shaath's photos reads as follows:

"In traditional Cairo the roof was the place for relaxation. Families grew plants, kept pigeons, or looked at the stars. After 1920 the roof took on a new funciton. With the arrival of the high-rise and apartment complexes the roof became the living quarters for cleaners and concierges. In the 1960s, after the fall of the monarchy and the nationalization of considerable private property, a wave of migrants came from the countryside to the city. In the hope of a better life they joined others from their families who already lived on the roofs of Cairo. A rank growth of shanties on roofs was the result."

Here is yet another of Shaath's photographs. This one - of a man watching television - prompted me to think about the relationship of individuals to political and cultural authorities and especially the ways that such relations unfold in private as opposed to public spaces.

© Randa Shaath

More specifically, this image brought to mind other, more directly confrontational and arguably "heroic" interactions. In my earlier post on Touma's "political landscape" I invoked Josef Koudelka's pictures of Czechs confronting Warsaw Pact tanks in Prague, 1968. Shaath's image brought to mind yet another, more recent, and so probably more widely known picture.

© Jeff Widener/AP

Again, the contrast between these anonymous men - one in the relative privacy of his home, the other quite literally in the public square - seems to reiterate my perplexities about how politics is embodied in events and how we can think about the latter.