Akram Zaatari, Video in Five Movements, 2006, still from silent video in color, 8:55.

Akram Zaatari
Modern Mondays
7pm Monday 17 March 2008
MoMA - 11 West 53 Street, New York NY
$10

Artist and curator Akram Zaatari presents his work tonight as part of Asian Contemporary Art Week at MoMA's Modern Mondays lecture series. Zaatari's work often takes experimental documentary approaches to the presentation and rethinking of significant historical narratives, often from his native Beirut. He is also the founding member of The Arab Image Foundation, whose purpose is to "locate, collect, preserve, interpret and present the photographic heritage and visual culture of the Middle East and North Africa from the early 19th century to the present." In Video in Five Movements (2006), from which a still image is reproduced above, Zaatari presents the Super 8 home movies of photographer Hashem el Madani and showcases how the author, using the filmmaking apparatus as a tool to create personal records for memory, directs and represents himself and his subjects in the 60s landscapes of cities across Lebanon and Egypt.