Huda Takriti. "I will leave this for you to finish"

Huda Takriti’s video On Another Note (2024) begins with the nocturnal chirping of crickets and polyphonic birdsong, which remind her of family visits to the mountains in Lebanon. We also see close-up images of the Japanese lacquer paintings called Urushi on a photo album belonging to her family, which show an idea of the “Orient” shaped by colonialism and can presumably be read as motifs of longing. While writing this text, the nights here are also filled with the pleasantly warm sounds of crickets and birds. During the day, there is disquieting news about the war between Israel and Gaza whose outcome is as uncertain as its long-term consequences for the population.

In her artistic work, Huda Takriti occupies herself with the charged political relationships in the “Middle East,” which have also shaped her family. She shifts the perspective from current events to the effects of migration on collective and individual visual memory and seeks out alternative forms of archives that take a stand against power relations shaped by history. Souheir Takriti, Huda Takriti’s mother, uses the album in On Another Note for pictures from the professional life of the artist’s grandmother. The photographs show Hikmat Al-Habbal, a successful modern textile artist, with her works at exhibitions openings and as a lecturer with students and colleagues in Kuwait in the 1960s. While her mother browses through the album or caresses textile works, we learn that the grandmother traced her Sarma embroidery directly on the fabric without a preconceived pattern, that members of the government often purchased her worksand those of her students directly from the exhibitions, and that her sister advocated for the education of women in Kuwait and taught the Kuwaiti princesses. We also learn what is not shown in the photos: that Hikmat Al-Habbal married a refugee who as a result of his Syrian-Palestinian travel documents was forced to go through the process of obtaining a new residency permit every six months and had to close his business while doing so, that the family was also unable to remain in Lebanon because the father did not want to convert to a different religion, and that they ultimately moved to Syria.

Huda Takriti transposes the fragmented character of the family history to the visual level. In her two-channel video, pictures and texts stand next to or lie on top of one another. They interrogate, contrast, and cover each other, thus producing a connection to what is absent or also possible. Huda Takriti inverted some images so as to be able to view them in the negative and find other interpretations. In the middle of the film, Souheir Takriti reports that her mother started various textile works and showed her how they should be filled with repetitive patterns—as memento es for her grandchildren produced by their mother and grandmother. Because she had no patience for this work, she left the finishing of it to her daughter. She produces an intergenerational connection through repeatedly narrating the history of the family. Huda Takriti also decided against continuing the embroidery homogeneously. She makes use of the textile works as a starting point for telling a new, “potential history,” the term used by Ariella Aïsha Azoulay to describe the open-endedness of history. Contrary to the imperialist conviction, past events have no beginning or end, but instead continue into the present. When one returns to significant moments, one can begin before the violence and injustice. To develop an alternative past and future, what are necessary are “different forms of ‘de,’ such as decompressing and decoding; ‘re,’ such as reversing and rewinding; and ‘un,’ such as unlearning and undoing.”¹

These pictures take on a material form in Revisitation: In Three Acts (2024). For Act One, Huda Takriti printed film stills from On Another Note on fabric. When installed, it produces folds, or portions of the picture information disappear, while other pictures are thrust together, unfold anew, and break open the linear narrative of the film. In Act Two, traces of glue on the rear side of a photograph attest to the migration of pictures through various contexts. For Act Three, Huda Takriti digitally interwove fragments of two textile works by her grandmother to create a large picture collage.

“How do you measure the distance between a vague dream and an image?”²

Family histories and photography are associated with a potential for fiction. Both create transfer pictures of a world that develop from reality, are perceived as documentary, and nevertheless quite often tend toward manipulation. In the film Of Cities and Private Living Rooms (2020), a kaleidoscope of narrative strands opens up, starting from an encounter between Huda Takriti’s mother and great-grandmother that leads to the substantive question: “Do we need the truth?,” and ending with a conceptual surveying of distance and years between cities in the “Middle East.” The encounter between the two women ultimately turns out to be a dream, since in the story the great-grandmother sprouts wings and abruptly flies away. In Huda Takriti’s family, the great-grandmother’s origin in Poland or Russia is an open but not yet completely aired secret that serves as the starting point for this work, but is not specified further. A multilayered stream of pictures and thoughts instead approaches the question of the “truth” and in the end leads to fundamental considerations on how variably narratives develop in different juxtapositions of pictures.

“Images are both fictional and real. They reflect on each other, look at each other. They retell the past over and over again. There is never one image alone. There is always one that tries to eliminate the other.”

Historical amateur films from Lebanon come together with photographs and moving images from public archives, libraries, and newspapers from the “Middle East” and Poland,³ and with pictures of interior spaces and landscapes filmed by the artist herself. In the process, places and eras, identifiable sights and indeterminate locations, documentary views and abstract-dreamlike interspersings blur. The history of the migration of Huda Takriti’s family takes on a more concrete form in an accompanying slideshow. From the Facebook profiles of her branched-out family members, she downloaded family pictures that seem historical as a result of their visible materiality and nonetheless exist solely as digital reproductions. Do we learn more from such family pictures than from the documentary-like landscape images—or do other variations simply join in via the past? How do the narratives of pictures change over the course of time? Is the enigmatic quality, which holds space for fiction, a more fitting answer to the question of the truth than an attempt to present detailed research?

With photographic images from public and private archives, Huda Takriti searches for the nature of archives as places for the production of truth and knowledge, and addresses the question of how historically fixed narratives can be altered by forms of contamination, the liberating or weaving in of overlooked information.⁴ She addresses this explicitly in the video Refusing to Meet Your Eye (2022), which begins with a tracking shot through endless archive shelves. The archive is rendered digitally, stands under water, finds itself on the moon, and is nonetheless prototypical. Archival boxes are lined up in an orderly and efficient manner. Their contents remain concealed from us. The film continues with a rapid stream of photos of events from the year 1969: the first moon landing, the death of an activist in the Black Panther movement, Michael Jackson’s first appearance with the Jackson Five, Richard Nixon assuming office, and Yasser Arafat as well, soldiers in the Vietnam War, student protests in Tokyo and Rome, the end of the Prague Spring, labor unrest in England. . . We are able to classify many pictures, since the individuals and events photographed have burned themselves into our memory. While comparatively few iconic pictures and/or footage of less geopolitically decisive moments circulate in the public sphere, countless pictures are stored in archives, waiting to be discovered. Huda Takriti selected the year 1969 because it was when the first aircraft hijacking in which a woman played a leading role took place. Aware of the significance of documenting such an undertaking for archives, the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP) commissioned a photographer. He, however, forgot to remove the lens cap from the camera at the decisive moment and no picture was thus taken of the blowing up of the empty aircraft redirected toward Damascus. The many iconic pictures are thus contrasted with a black, unmade photo and the story of a female freedom fighter, which represent the numerous gaps in archives. Huda Takriti reacts to this with extensive research. She proverbially sheds light on the material found and with her archival finds draws ever-larger content-related circles—from subsequent photographs and reports on the hijacker to fundamental considerations regarding how the past is represented in archives. With such thoughts, in the film we are hurled into outer space, land on the surface of the moon, and the camera perspective in the archive tilts.

“But not every image is an evidence of the past, nor is its absence an evidence of nonexistence. Absence of evidence is not an evidence of absence. . . . What is not photographed does not disappear. It spreads between the seen and the unseen, filling the space between story and history.”

The works of Huda Takriti are quite compacted. On the level of picture and text, besides what she makes visible, she also addresses productive gaps. With allusions and a cryptic quality, with loose ends in the narratives, she calls for us to react to empty spaces and position ourselves. In the nine-part photo series Against Nostalgia (2023), the artist, for instance, conceals a large portion of historical postcards that she acquired on eBay with white-gloved hands. On the still visible edges, we can only just grasp that they come from the colonial period and that exoticizing motifs were conveyed with them. The gloves refer to archival contexts, while their positioning might stand for unease: Can such motifs still be shown today, and, if yes, how? We have to imagine the center of the picture on the respective postcards, and it is interesting what motifs occur to us and what they express about our position vis-à-vis colonial picture aesthetics. With this, the circle to the injunction of Huda Takriti’s grandmother can be closed, and at this point is also directed at us: “I will leave this for you to finish!”