Sage Dawson News: October 2011

Today writer and artist Laura Mallonee joins us to share about Lamia Joreige's Objects of War, a piece she recently saw at the Tate Modern. To learn more about Laura please visit her website.

Making Art From War: Lamia Joreige's Objects of War

“Artists haven’t replaced historians,” contends Beirut-based Lamia Joreige, “but they have taken [the responsibility] of providing an alternative discourse.” Joreige’s own body of work is as provocative as it is journalistic. In fact, her art exists where history, film and reportage collide. This hybrid art form is best exemplified in her four-part documentary film series, Objects of War.

Beginning in 1999, Joreige conducted interviews with people who lived through the Lebanese Civil War, which lasted from 1975 until 1990. The interviewees, seated before a camera, were asked to discuss an object that reminded them of the war. These video testimonies, along with their objects, became Objects of War No. 1.

By 2003, Joreige had recorded more stories, resulting in Objects of War No. 2. Then, during the 34-day war between Israel and Lebanon in 2006, Joreige felt compelled to interview more people, resulting in Objects of War No. 3 and No. 4. “These testimonies,” writes Joreige, “while helping to create a collective memory, also show the impossibility of telling a single history of this war.”

The Tate Modern, where I saw Objects of War, recently purchased the collective artwork. The four videos are displayed on large monitors in four corners of a gallery room, and in large glass cases each object is contained —as though it were a scientific specimen or literary relic — and labeled.

Viewers listening through one of the large headphones attached to the screen are confronted with first-person narratives that reveal loss, terror, and occasionally hope. The interviewees are nearly as different from each other as they are from the viewers — some are middle-aged Muslim women wearing head scarves, others are young men in graphic tees smoking cigarettes.

Their tones are angry, sometimes mournful or detached. They hold up battery packs, passports, radios, teddy bears and photographs. These items reveal the powerful role objects play in memory, serving as the spring-board from which the subject of war is approached. Ultimately, they show how impossible it is to define a singular, definitive history of any conflict.

Joreige has explained, “My work attempts to collect, record, erase, invent, forget, capture, miss and divert... in all my work, I point out the impossibility of accessing a complete narrative, thus underlining the loss, the gaps of memory and history... Only fragments of this history are recounted here, held as truth by those expressing them. The aim is not to reveal a truth but rather to gather and confront many diverse versions and discourses on the subject."

Wherever you live, the historic Middle Eastern conflict electrifies almost any room in which it’s discussed. Through Objects of War, Joreige introduces an empathetic, human element to the debate. Perhaps by looking beyond partisan interests to the kind of “alternative discourse” Joreige’s work offers, lawmakers, soldiers and citizens can begin to understand each other.

To watch an interview from Objects of War, click here.

All photos were found at Lamia Joreige's website.