Future Backgrounds brings together the contemporary geographies of Israel/Palestine with photographic styles that emerged as a result of British and French Imperial rule in the nineteenth-century. This exhibition considers what interests photographers about these distant places, and how their images have shaped and reshaped various ideas about the Middle East. Focusing on the use of backdrops and landscapes, the work pays close attention to how photographic backgrounds inform the fantasy of the exotic.

Since the mid-nineteenth century, professional studio photographers have often used backdrops to create realistic yet imaginary settings for their sitters. Figures have been positioned in front of the backgrounds, surrounded by props and drapery, making the scene more believable and meaningful. At the turn of the twentieth century amateur photographers also began travelling with easy-to-use cameras, capturing images of friends and family against scenes to bring back home as souvenirs. Whether captured in the studio or outdoors, the photographic background has quietly shaped people’s views of foreign lands.

Among other objects, my installation features backdrops depicting examples of flora imported to Israel to recreate the country’s landscape for political reasons. Point-and-shoot disposable cameras and digital line drawings are used to explore how the simplification of photographic processes further blurred the boundaries between actuality, representation and the imagination.

I also enter into dialogue with black-and-white archival images of non-European botanical specimens, zoology and pictures of Victorian subjects in exotic dress. Displayed as a slideshow, these images were captured more than a hundred years ago by Captain H. W. Brook, an Imperialist soldier, amateur photographer, and one of my current objects of research.

This text explores the political use of family portraits in Assaf Shoshan’s Territoires de l’attente (Waiting Territories). Made along the geographical terrain of the Israeli state, Territoires de l’attente is a photographic series that features human-made landscapes associated with precarious living conditions created by the past or present interventions of armed forces. The series depicts sites that relate to the grand ideological and historical narrative shaped by the Israeli state about its establishment, its wars and treatment of the Arab residents who remained after the establishment of the state of Israel in 1948. In isolating these landscapes from the rest of the geographical terrain currently occupied by the Israeli state, Shoshan portrays them as sites whose physical conditions raise questions about Israel’s policies and attitude towards its non-Jewish inhabitants.

I argue that Territoires de l’attente’s underpinning concern for the circumstances and wellbeing of non-Jewish inhabitants is enhanced by three family portraits inserted into the series. They show Sudanese asylum seekers who recently fled their country and travelled to Israel as they believed the state of Israel might possibly offer them convenient means to start their lives anew. Depicted in compliance with the convention and visual vocabulary of family photography, I suggest that the asylum seekers’ performance, visualization and frequent transgression of the ideological trope of nuclear family kinship remind the viewers of the politics of ethnic exclusion that sustain the absolute rule of any nation-state. I therefore argue that these images do not only record another chapter in the history of nomadic and displaced populations in the region. Rather, they also echo the political forces that prepare individual subjects to endure the troubled existence imposed upon them in the name of any state.

This article is concerned with the production of domestic familial knowledge in connection to the modern Israeli State’s geographical terrain. Considering the period stretching from the establishment of the Israeli State in 1948 to the present day, it focuses on a case study of a family album of pictures portraying Israeli subjects in a landscape that is concurrently perceived as the home of the Palestinian as well as the Jewish-Israeli peoples. By attending to Palestinian and Israeli historical accounts that investigate the Israeli State’s ideological administration of landscape, alongside the theorisation of vernacular photography and the methodologies often used to unpack such imagery, I demonstrate how landscape-family-photographs may confront the Zionist “Geographical Imagination” and the physical landscape the Zionist project designed and imposed upon the “Israeli” land. Such photographs, I argue, extend and alter existing Zionist representational regimes, challenging formal Israeli historiography. While this article centres on the production of landscape-family-photographs within the Israeli State, it intends to offer an insight into the impact both the commercialisation and technological simplification of the photographic medium had on the use of photography in cultural politics. I suggest that photography in this context does much more than simply serve the distribution of power by state officials. In the vernacular, I argue, photography must be read as a potentially subversive apparatus capable of undermining formal doctrines and canonical histories.

Video still: Ursula Biemann, “X-Mission”, 2008

In this talk I will peruse the visual traditions utilised in Nervus Rerum (2008) and X-Mission (2008) with a view to investigating what support they offer to the informative and political values these two video essays diffuse. Both the Otolith Group and Biemann’s work focus on the perceived physical, political and existential conditions shared by Palestinian refugees. Nervus Rerum is explicitly preoccupied with the challenge of representing people who have no formal political representation. Likewise, X-Mission employs pseudo-scientific informative conventions to portray an incoherent Palestinian reality, isolated from the realities of any other refugees. I will suggest that in both of these cases, the Palestinian people paradoxically emerge as “modern heroes”, engaged with political thought and in global politics while recognising a necessity to obliterate these if they wish to earn political emancipation. Yet, as the Palestinian people have been internationally deprived of any formal representative political agency, the Otolith Group as well as Biemann’s video essays cannot be perceived as loyal to the Palestinian cause or experience. Instead, I will propose to think of them in line with the nineteenth-century representational conventions used in colonialist travellers’ diaries. As such, Nervus Rerum and X-Mission are understood as audio-visual documents that give expression to European post-colonialist desires in the era of “political correctness”.

Video still: The Otolith Group, “Nervus Rerum”, 2008

I will be giving this talk as part of A Thing Like You and Me, a four-part screening and talks programme supported by the Arts Council England, PVAC and Pavilion arts organisation. The screening programme explores the relationship of the documentary ‘real’ and essayistic ‘fiction’ in contemporary artists’ video works, in both their analogue and digital form. The series re-examines the politics of representation, and the question of looking ‘at’ and ‘to’ one another in the twenty-first century. A Thing Like You and Me has been conceived and organised by Amy Charlesworth (a doctoral student at the University of Leeds) in collaboration with Director of Pavilion, Gill Park.

This is a review published by Culture and Conflict, critically engaging with a conference that I have co-organised in June 2012

Copyright © 1971 Gil Pasternak

at the Photographers’ Gallery in London
18th September 2012 (time TBC)

My forthcoming talk will investigate the practice of family photography and its interrelationship with the social domain, with state politics, and issues of cultural difference, class, nationalism and racism. Addressing some visual examples taken from popular culture as well as from less conventional sources, my talk will engage with the fragmentary histories of family photographs, and will challenge some of the most prominent historical and sociological debates about family photographs. I will question what political agency family photographs may contain within and beyond the narratives of family life and the domestic sphere.

This will coincide with Fiona Tan’s exhibition at the Gallery, whose artistic practice makes use of family photographs to explore private modes of representation and their meanings in broader social and cultural contexts.

Insight Palestina: Images, Discourses, and the Image of Discourse

at the University of Leeds,  7 June 2012
9.30– 20.45, Room 1.08, Parkinson Building

Click here to view and download the Conference programme and paper abstracts

Co-organised by Dr. Gil Pasternak (The University of Huddersfield) and Lior Libman (The Hebrew University of Jerusalem; The University of Leeds), ‘Insight Palestina’ will focus on visual and textual images produced within, and in relation to, the circumstances of the Israel-Palestine struggle. Its aim is to explore and challenge a range of current research approaches to photographic, cinematic, documentary, literary, fine art and other media images. It will look into academic studies and patterns of interpretation which tend to solidify exclusive perceptions of politicised images.

REGISTRATION IS NOW CLOSED (If you still wish to attend the conference, please email us at insight.palestina@hud.ac.uk)

For updates please follow us here and/or on Twitter @GilPasternak

Keynote Speakers Paper Titles:

Prof. Sander Gilman: SCANDAL! Images, Discourses, and the Image of Discourse that ‘hurt people’s feelings’

Prof. Griselda Pollock: Screen Memories: Making Pasts Futures in ‘And Europe Will Be Stunned’ by Yael Bartana

Dr. Ihab Saloul: Sites and Insights: Exilic Memory and the Politics of the Anti-linear Sound-Image

Artist Talk

Yael Bartana and Sławomir Sierakowski will be in conversation with the audience about Bartana’s piece ‘And Europe Will Be Stunned’ (2011). Chaired by Prof. Griselda Pollock. This part of the event was organised in association with Artangel, who are presenting Yael Bartana’s trilogy of films at Hornsey Town Hall, London, from 22 May to 1 July 2012.

Speakers Paper Titles:

Dr. Alma Mikulinsky (University of Hong Kong): Crossing Discursive Borders: Representations of Checkpoints in Palestinian Art and Film

Dr. Simon Faulkner (Manchester Metropolitan University): Israel/Palestine and the Politics of Curiosity

Dr. Orly Shevi (Tel Aviv University): Ici et Ailleurs – Godard’s Cinematic reflections on the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict

Lior Libman (The Hebrew University of Jerusalem): Shadows over the Land Without Shade: The Iconisation of the Kibbutz in the 1950s as an acting-out of post-Nakba Cultural Trauma

Dr. Gil Pasternak (The University of Huddersfield): Jewish Soldiers of the Time: Ethos, Pathos and Logos in Rineke Dijkstra’s ‘Israel Portraits’

Insight Palestina: Images, Discourses, and the Image of Discourse

Conference Date: 7 June 2012

Conference Organisers:

Dr. Gil Pasternak (The University of Huddersfield)

Lior Libman (The Hebrew University of Jerusalem; The University of Leeds)

Keynote Speakers:

Professor Griselda Pollock

Professor Sander Gilman

Dr Ihab Saloul

Click here for a PDF of Insight Palestina CFP

This one-day conference will focus on visual and textual images produced within, and in relation to, the circumstances of the Israel-Palestine struggle. Its aim is to explore and challenge a range of current research approaches to cinematic, documentary, literary, fine art and other media images. It will look into academic studies and patterns of interpretation which tend to solidify exclusive perceptions of politicised images.

While such explorations often evoke a belligerent discussion, in which challenging theoretical perspectives are commonly being buried, this conference will specifically focus on perceived relationships between politically-engaged academic investigations, and the political agendas represented by the objects of their inquiry.

Intending to embrace theoretical and political complexities, Insight Palestina will investigate the reciprocity between images and historical narratives in a context that exceeds formal state, non-reflective and non-self-critical historiography. In this respect, the organisers aim to explore modes of academic inquiry that are not removed from politicised discourses, while resisting the activation of tangential biased forces and demands.

How can academic research modify socio-cultural perceived norms and conventional understandings to materialise a platform which allows for critical distance from binary-oriented political debates? Can academic research open up a space which does not compromise critical theorisation, activism, and radicalism while avoiding the reiteration of biased ideologies? Do academic investigations of politically-loaded images always-already generate or reinforce existing perceptual regimes and opinionated dogmas? In other words, are academic researchers bound to using familiar methodologies in a manner reiterating and cementing political structures, constructions and divisions, even when intending to challenge or reconcile between them?

These are some of the relevant questions this conference wishes to explore through the examination of various case studies. This call for papers invites proposals that span the widest possible range of periods within Israeli and Palestinian history, historical accounts, theories, Israeli and Palestinian cultures, societies and modes of image-making, whether visual or textual, art-related, documentary, professional or vernacular.

Abstracts should be sent via email to Dr Gil Pasternak g.pasternak@hud.ac.uk and to Lior Libman lior.libman@mail.huji.ac.il by 15^th April 2012. Submissions should be of 300 words in Microsoft Word or PDF format, and should include your name, title, email address, academic position and affiliation. All proposals will be read by the Conference Advisory Board: Dr Verina Gfader, Catriona McAra and Dr Juliet Macdonald. Successful applications will be allotted 20 minutes to present their papers, followed by ten minutes for questions. Researchers, lecturers, practitioners and postgraduate students are all encouraged to apply.

Applicants must propose new and original research; selected speakers may be given the opportunity to extend their papers, and prepare them for academic publication – more details about it will be provided at a future date.

About the Organisers:

Lior Libman is Honorary Associate Scholar at the Centre for Jewish Studies, University of Leeds. She is a Ph.D. Candidate at the department for Hebrew Literature at The Hebrew University of Jerusalem, writing her dissertation on the representation of the Kibbutz in Israel, 1948-1954. Libman’s work engages critically with the relationship between historiographical and artistic images of history. She is a winner of The Hebrew University President Scholarship for Outstanding Research Students in the Humanities (2009-2013), and the Wolf Foundation Scholarship for Outstanding Doctoral Candidates (2012).

Dr Gil Pasternak is Senior Lecturer in Photography and the Photography Course Leader in the School of Art, Design and Architecture at the University of Huddersfield. He was awarded his Ph.D from the History of Art Department at University College London (UCL), specialising in the theory and history of photography in the context of fine art and visual cultures. Pasternak’s published research focuses on the participation of vernacular photography in the solidification and subversion of state policies, in the alteration of Middle-Eastern cultural historical topoi, and in acts of political violence.