Tarek Al-Ghoussein & Chris Kienke
Tarek Al-Ghoussein: * 1962 Kuwait; Palestinian.
Chris Kienke: * 1972 Rochester, NY, USA.
War Room. 2003/2005
Back-lit photos of TV-images
About the work
In the first Iraq War in 1991, Tarek Al-Ghoussein photographed TV images from the news and reworked them artistically. He repeated this procedure – this time with a digital camera – starting in March 2003, when the second Iraq War began. He wanted to show how differently BBC, CNN, Aljazeera, Dubai TV and other broadcasters report the same event, thereby communicating a divergent understanding of reality to their viewers.
While switching back and forth between the channels, he noticed parallels between the "real" news pictures and the fiction of movies and cartoons, which is why he also included the latter in his zapping sequences. Tarek Al-Ghoussein told Chris Kienke, a colleague at the School for Architecture and Design in Sharjah, about this and they noticed that, independently of one another, they had done almost the same thing. Out of this was born the idea to review more than 1,500 photos and develop a joint installation from those selected. The concept includes the thought that all the pictures, which we see every day and which substantially contribute to our judgment, have been subjected to a number of filtering processes and manipulations.
From an article by Pat Binder & Gerhard Haupt, in: Nafas Art Magazine, 2004
See also:
Photographs by Tarek Al-Ghoussein
© Photos: Haupt & Binder, Universes in Universe
Teil 1 der Fototour durch die Sharjah Biennale 7, 6. April - 6. Juni 2005. Präsidentin & Chef-Direktorin: Hoor Al Qasimi. Kurator: Jack Persekian; Ko-Kuratoren: Ken Lum und Tirdad Zolghadr. 70 Beteiligte.