It may take a lifetime to see an image decaying naturally and it could take many lifetimes to witness the decomposition of a place; its geography, its landmarks, its limits, its suns, its moons…its light.
In “Imagining Post-Truth, Or Truth Temporarily Unavailable”, Ziad Antar proposes us spaces as opposed to places, apertures as opposed to closures, decomposed spaces and elusions of composed places.
While questioning light as a source of truth; its abundance, its absence and all that is in between, the three series; After Images, Cactus and Post-Truth bring art to the heart of the current political realm where crude emotion doesn’t merely outdo fact; it overpowers it, ostensibly to triviality, and with little defiance. These art works present no endorsement but a momentarily parallelism that compels our engagement to come to our own conclusions.
There is nothing divine in the perfection of a device; divinity in Antar’s work is a creation of its intentional imperfection. While facts can be eluding so can light. Challenging light is a way to contest the image when perceived as a document. In the ensued nonrepresentational image there is an allusion to abstract painting, to a freedom accorded by the artist to himself and to the viewer.
After Images were taken with a camera with no lens and Post-Truth photographs were shot in complete darkness. These seemingly two opposite approaches unite in their skepticism of the predictability of today’s digital image. They favor fragility over certitude. They invite us to reconsider the foundation of trust.
Manal Khader