Raed Yassin
Eternal Ghost

Eternal Ghost is a solo exhibition by Raed Yassin (b. 1979) in which he addresses the experience of historical memorialisation and mourning in the Levant and the surrounding region. The exhibition presents three bodies of works: ‘The Company of Silver Spectres’ a series of sprayed vintage photographs, ‘Phantom’ an unlit neon, and ‘Eternal Ghost’ a new music commission of two long-form pieces of modular minimalism. The exhibition takes us on a journey through the Beirut-born artist’s relationship with death, disappearance and the image.

Ghosts in a World on Fire

Exhibition catalogue essay by Matthew Holman

But the very question of whether photography is or is not an art is essentially a misleading one. Although photography generates works that can be called art –it requires subjectivity, it can lie, it gives aesthetic pleasure– photography is not, to begin with, an art form at all. Like language, it is a medium in which works of art (among other things) are made. Out of language, one can make scientific discourse, bureaucratic memoranda, love letters, grocery lists, and Balzac’s Paris. Out of photography, one can make passport pictures, weather photographs, pornographic pictures, X-rays, wedding pictures, and Atget’s Paris. Photography is not an art like, say, painting and poetry. Although the activities of some photographers conform to the traditional notion of a fine art, the activity of exceptionally talented individuals producing discrete objects that have value in themselves, form the beginning photography has also lent itself to that notion of art which says that art is obsolete.
— Susan Sontag, On Photography, 1977

We live in a world on fire. As I write these words, major conflicts are ravaging communities globally. We have become deaf to the wails of mothers cradling their infant children; we are blind to the images of unconsolable fathers at the feet of their wives, cloaked in bloodied white shrouds. As families are torn apart, the ceaseless deaths haunt like spectres the consciences of those who survive. Photographs are our means of empathising with those who suffer in unimaginable circumstances; photography is the medium by which we are kept at a remove from the violence itself. As Karl Marx put it, in an altogether different age: ‘the tradition of all the dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brain of the living.’

The present exhibition by Lebanon-born artist Raed Yassin, Eternal Ghost, centred around a series of found vintage photographs sprayed with acrylic, addresses the experience of historical memorialisation and mourning in the Levant and the surrounding region. During the Lebanese Civil War (1975 – 1990), a conflict exacerbated by sectarian tensions and foreign interference, Yassin’s family was devastated by the successive waves of violence. His father was murdered; his siblings displaced; the family photographs were lost. For the artist, the experience of political upheaval was embodied by the loss of those visual keepers of time and, for him to overcome his traumas, he began buying and buying and collecting the family photographs of others in bulk, especially those from the Arab world where war, occupation, and forced migration had separated so many other families. As the binders upon binders of photographs became a burden, Yassin began erasing the images of the families by spraying the photographs with paint so that only the most indistinct traces of their bodies remained. They became like beautiful ghosts, at once present and a lasting reminder of their enduring invisibility in the world.

In some of these pictures, we find a young woman on her wedding day, tenderly clutching a bouquet of local flowers while a matriarch, perhaps her mother or mother-in-law, stands just behind her left shoulder and proudly fixes her stare upon us. Elsewhere, we see babies, surely not more than a year old, unintentionally posing for their first photographs. We meet mothers cradling their newborns, and families across generations — some including as many as eight members, mostly entirely delighted and presumably parents, brothers, sisters — washed out by a pink haze. They are there and not there simultaneously; they are entirely dead and so memorialised, warmly remembered but not corporeally alive. Especially in these coloured and edited pictures, but indeed in any photographic portrait of a family, we wonder what we are not seeing: the lies, the infidelities, the arguments behind closed doors, the private passions, in short the lives lived in real life which are not prepared for the photographer’s visit. The staging of these photographs necessarily invites us to speculate on the figures’ lives: who they are, what they wanted, what the true relationship was between parents and children. The family portrait is a fascinating medium not because of what it shows–or what it engineers to show, like actors arranged on a theatre set–but what it keeps hidden from view.

Family portraits emerged in the early 19th century, initially as expensive, one-off photographs called daguerreotypes. With the democratisation of the medium of photography in the early twentieth century families sought to document their lives, especially around special occasions such as births, graduations, and marriages. In one respect the family portrait served the same desire which compelled the nobility, aristocracy, and royalty to seek portrait paintings from esteemed artists: to preserve a moment for posterity. However, the family photograph takes on a slightly different function. Unlike oil paintings, the photograph can be made quickly and relatively cheaply; it can capture life lived on the fly. In this way, the photograph serves more than a staged record of a major moment in the life of a family; it also serves by retrieving, irredeemably, those spontaneous moments of tenderness, the flushes of first love, the gentle affection for a sibling, the life of a family when no one else is watching.

Yassin is alive to all these possibilities and is alive to them not least because of how he was able to source them at flea markets, junk shops, and online. The custodians of these photographs were no longer willing or able to keep hold of them; familial treasures became ten-a-penny pawn books leafed through by strangers. Their beauty resides in the troubling rubbing up of intimacy and unknowability: these photographs mark some of the most beautiful and most felt personal moments in an individual’s life and are yet, entirely defamiliarized from their context, signifiers of estrangement. In Yassin’s hands we are held at a double remove: we can barely work out the figures left in the photographs and, even if we could, we would not be able to piece together their relationships or know with any clarity their purpose in the world.

Family photography has been orchestrated in many forms, but much of its purpose has been as a historical document of personal life. Yassin is part of a generation of artists who have engaged with the form and function of the family photographic portrait to probe with questions of loss and identity. Photography offers the remarkable capacity to bring back the dead. At the same time, when we look at the face of someone lost, we are reminded that they cannot be redeemed. Yassin has reimagined the images principally as a site of recuperation — to destabilise the snapshot as a record of a moment in time by revising it to mourn the passage of time. ‘Photographs are a way of imprisoning reality’, Susan Sontag wrote, and ‘one can’t possess reality, one can possess images — one can’t possess the present, but one can possess the past.’

In Phantom, Yassin spells out the work’s title in unlit neon lettering, which resembles rushed cursive, a childlike scrawl, as though the signature of the artist to be reproduced, unilluminated, by the mechanical reproduction of signs. ‘PHANTOM’. A ghost. A figment of the imagination. The Greek root is phantasma, ‘image or phantom’, which in turn comes from phantazein, ‘to make visible.’ Is this what the light here is doing: containing the possibility, but never the actuality, of making itself visible? ‘At bottom, the spectre is the future’, Jacques Derrida wrote, ‘it is always to come, it presents itself only as that which could come or come back.’ The future itself now feels like a reduced place, a place where the past cannot be recuperated, where the dead will not return. Yassin’s work offers a haunting and compelling counterpoint to the nihilism of memory during a new age of mass death. As in Sontag, Yassin calls attention to the subjectivities, the lies, and the aesthetic pleasure of photography by radically defamiliarizing itself from the intimacies that brought the images about. His work reminds us of how heavy the spectres of history — personal and political — weigh on us, and how art, for a moment at least, can help us make sense of loss through the work of mourning.