Stories the Photographic Material Can Tell

Photography is a medium of great precision. It records our observations down to the tiniest detail, with higher and higher resolutions and lenses that are constantly improving. By Pressing the shutter release a moment is frozen in time and photographs become the immediate repositories of memory. Today, in the interest of optimization, photographic images are generally edited after they’ve been taken. Their precision is a fallacy, however, because it’s limited to recording the external. Cameras scan surfaces accurately, but cannot reach inner states. When we look at the pictures, we easily become entangled with all the visual information the motifs offer and don’t generally pay much attention to the time that has passed since we took the picture or the emotions associated with it. This is where Raisan Hameed begins his work. Hameed views photographs as visual bodies in whose specific form individual emotions and collective experiences can be read or inscribed. As a photojournalist, he initially tried to document events in his home country of Iraq. Using traditional documentary means, he was unable to find a visual equivalent for the sheer vehemence of the wars that have been rocking the country for decades and have torn society apart. Instead of recording as many events as accurately as possible, Raisan Hameed now searches within the photographic material for images and omissions to testify to the effects of flight and migration.

The source material for his series Zer-Störung (De-struction) are family photos from Raisan Hameed’s private archive. During one of the many wars in Iraq, the artist’s family had to flee their home and left the framed pictures behind. When they returned, they had fallen off the walls, shattering the glass and scratching the surfaces of the prints. Cracks and scrapes cover the pictures now, with tiny shards of glass still lodged in the material. Furthermore, marks and creases are evidence of the pictures’ importance, with family members passing them back and forth as precious testimonies of their life together. In his artistic translation Raisan Hameed focuses on the material damage as a symbol of the physical and mental wounds involved with the experience of war. In greatly enlarged sections, the peeling gelatin layer and white gaps traverse the pictures like craters in a devastated landscape. The damage resembles abstract signs, while the people’s bodies are fragmented by the material erosion.

In Embers of Narrative, Raisan Hameed returns to Iraq via digital channels. The larger public archives are gone, Google no longer sends its vehicles to the country for systematic recording, and since his escape in 2015, he has not been able to travel there in person for political reasons. Amateur photographs published on the Internet are thus the only way for the artist to gain a more comprehensive picture of the current situation in his native country. Raisan Hameed selects panoramic views of places in Iraq that are familiar to him from childhood. The images depict architectural ruins, damaged cultural monuments, devastated landscapes, groups of people wandering around, as well as attempts at reconstruction. With the photographic material he chooses and the way he processes it, the artist conveys his emotional uneasiness regarding the situation in Iraq, the precarity of everyday life, and the cycle of destruction. Initially printed on thermal paper with a black-and-white printer, the image sequences resemble endless gloomy landscapes. In this series, Raisan Hameed directly intervenes in the materiality of the image. Using a lighter, he blackens parts of the heat-sensitive paper, creating irregular spots that eat through the landscapes like fire and whose embers continue to smoulder uncontrollably. The visual information that is erased during this process and the interruptions in the narration are subject to chance. Printed on lengths of fabric and staged in the exhibition space, the images take on a physical presence that exerts its effect on us. Similarly to Zer-Störung, the apparent flaws in Embers of Narrative create visual interruptions. As a metaphor, they represent the artist’s attempt to initiate an alternative memory of past events and to imagine a recommencement.