disclaimer + arab lesion
Amman, New York | 01/2016 + 02/2016an exercise in image-making prior to the performance Republic of Body put the production of the Jordanian/Hashemite nation under scrutiny. These archival and visual investigations prefigured the final public performance where marginalized bodies marched in a region at the edge of the economic divide in Amman.
Disclaimer (تنصل), was shot in Amman, along the edge of East and West, the crevices of an intersection between modernity and tradition. The aim was to address the displaced and distorted body of the woman in the masculine hegemonic domain. In the images, the femme body takes central focus on public steps of the older East Amman. Here, the private ritual of bloodletting is made public.
The images in this second exercise conveniently named Arab Lesion (الجرح العربي) re-deploy the artifact of the pith helmet, a memetic symbol of state power which was created for the Arab Legion Bedouin army in 1933 by the British. Here, the nation’s sovereign symbols appear in photographs which stage them at the scale of the particular body that interrupts the state corporeal narrative, highlighting its instabilities and constructed history.
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design | curatorial
Photography: hilmi, shakhshir, helga traxl
