The Artist as Archaeologist of the Present
Few artists today embody the role of historian, archivist, and poet of images as profoundly as Akram Zaatari. Born in 1966 in Saida, Lebanon, Zaatari’s work navigates the complex terrain of memory, war, personal identity, and collective trauma. His artistic language is rooted in photography, video, installation, and archival research, constructing multi-layered narratives that reflect the wounds and contradictions of the Middle East — particularly his native Lebanon.
But Zaatari is not simply documenting conflict; he excavates its traces. His works transform lost images, intimate photographs, censored materials, and forgotten narratives into spaces of reflection, where political violence collides with personal stories, and where the act of looking becomes an act of ethical responsibility.
In this comprehensive article, we will explore Akram Zaatari's biography, key works, central themes, and his growing significance in contemporary art.
Who Is Akram Zaatari?
Akram Zaatari was born during a period of great political instability in Lebanon. His life and career have been profoundly shaped by the Lebanese Civil War (1975-1990), whose echoes continue to reverberate through his work. Educated in architecture and media studies, Zaatari combines multiple disciplines into his practice, allowing him to blur boundaries between document and fiction, art and history, image and witness.
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| Akram Zaatari - After They Got the Right to Arms |
The Core Themes in Akram Zaatari’s Work
At the heart of Zaatari's artistic universe lie a few recurring thematic cores:
- The archive as a living space of memory and power- The legacy of war and political violence in Lebanon
- The fragility of personal and collective histories
- Eroticism, desire, and the male body within Arab visual culture
- The blurred line between photography and fiction
- The politics of censorship, silence, and disappearance
- The complexity of identity in postcolonial Arab societies
Zaatari’s art often resists linear narratives; instead, it offers fragmented, multi-perspective stories that challenge viewers to confront the instability of memory itself.
The Arab Image Foundation: Preservation as Political Act
In 1997, together with photographers Walid Raad and Fouad Elkoury, Zaatari co-founded the Arab Image Foundation in Beirut. The AIF collects, preserves, and studies photographs from the Middle East, North Africa, and the Arab diaspora, many of which were at risk of permanent loss.
But Zaatari’s relationship with the archive is never neutral. He continually questions the role of the archivist: Who controls history? What stories are preserved? What images are censored?
In this sense, the Arab Image Foundation becomes both a tool of preservation and a laboratory of critical historiography. It is not about celebrating a monolithic Arab identity, but about exposing its fractures, contradictions, and absences.
Akram Zaatari - After They Got the Right to Arms. Fourteen young men posing with guns
Key Works by Akram Zaatari
Let us now explore some of Zaatari’s most significant works, which together form one of the most compelling bodies of contemporary art dealing with memory and conflict.
"Letter to a Refusing Pilot" (2013)
One of Zaatari’s most acclaimed works, presented at the Venice Biennale 2013, this video installation tells the semi-fictionalized story of an Israeli pilot who, during the 1982 Israeli invasion of Lebanon, refused to bomb a school in Zaatari's hometown of Saida.
The work blends personal testimony, archival footage, and poetic reflection, exploring the ethics of war, the humanity of the enemy, and the role of memory in shaping political identity.
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| Akram Zaatari - Letter to a Refusing Pilot |
"Letter to a Refusing Pilot" is a powerful meditation on moral responsibility, and perhaps one of Zaatari's most accessible and emotionally resonant works for international audiences.
"The End of Time" (2012)
This film follows the intimate story of a young man in Beirut as he explores his sexuality and contemplates the disintegrating spaces of the city. The work captures the fragile interplay between personal liberation and a decaying urban landscape shaped by years of war.
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| Akram Zaatari - The End of Time |
Here, Zaatari addresses desire and queerness in an indirect but deeply suggestive way, portraying the hidden eroticism and longing that exists beneath the rigid norms of Arab patriarchal culture.
"Objects of Study" (2010)
This installation features fragments from the destroyed house of a Hezbollah fighter. The work questions the relationship between material remains, political ideology, and personal memory.
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| Akram Zaatari - Objects of Study |
"28 Nights and a Poem" (2010)
This ambitious project is based on Zaatari’s extensive research into the personal archive of Hashem el Madani, a Lebanese studio photographer from Saida whose private portraits span decades.
The work addresses themes of voyeurism, private fantasy, eroticism, and the hidden lives of individuals during Lebanon’s complex political history. It becomes an intimate window into the forbidden desires and coded expressions that exist in the margins of Arab society.
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| Akram Zaatari - 28 Nights and a Poem |
"Beirut Exploded Views" (2014)
This video installation offers a haunting meditation on the ruined architecture of post-war Beirut. In slow, hypnotic shots, Zaatari moves through half-destroyed buildings, frozen construction sites, and lifeless urban zones.
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| Akram Zaatari - Beirut Exploded Views |
The city appears as a wounded body, suspended between past destruction and unrealized futures. The viewer becomes an archaeologist of absence.
The Politics of Desire: A Subtle Queer Undertone
While Akram Zaatari is not usually labeled as a "gay artist" in the Western sense, his work often contains a subtle queer subtext that challenges heteronormative assumptions within Arab societies.
Through his explorations of Hashem el Madani’s photo archive, for example, Zaatari reveals coded forms of male intimacy and erotic ambiguity. Young men photographed with tender gestures, hands placed on shoulders, eyes meeting the camera with both pride and vulnerability. These images disrupt rigid notions of masculinity in the Arab world.
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| Akram Zaatari - Studio Practices |
In this way, Zaatari aligns with other global queer artists, from Nan Goldin to David Wojnarowicz, who examine intimacy not as spectacle but as subtle, coded survival.
The Archive as Theater: Fact, Fiction, and Representation
Central to Zaatari’s practice is the question of representation itself. He constantly interrogates the relationship between fact and fiction, truth and fabrication.
In works like Letter to a Refusing Pilot, 28 Nights and a Poem, or Objects of Study, Zaatari uses real documents but reframes them with speculative elements, forcing the viewer to reflect on the construction of historical truth.
This archaeological approach to storytelling sets him apart: he treats the archive not as a neutral repository, but as a stage where political forces play out, where personal stories are edited, censored, or amplified depending on who controls the narrative.
Exhibitions and International Recognition
Over the past two decades, Akram Zaatari has gained widespread international recognition, exhibiting in major museums and biennials across the world:
Venice Biennale (2013)Documenta 13, Kassel
Centre Pompidou, Paris
Tate Modern, London
MoMA, New York
The Guggenheim Museum
Sharjah Biennial
The Walker Art Center, Minneapolis
His work speaks not only to the specificities of Lebanon but also to universal questions of trauma, history, identity, and memory, making his voice increasingly important in global conversations about art and politics.
Akram Zaatari Today
In an era where historical revisionism and erasure are spreading globally, Akram Zaatari’s work feels more urgent than ever. He forces us to confront not only what we remember, but also how we remember, and who gets to tell the story.
At a time when the Middle East is once again a site of extreme political violence, where archives are destroyed and narratives manipulated, Zaatari offers an ethics of slow looking: a call to sit with complexity, to resist simple binaries of victim and perpetrator, to understand the layered dimensions of trauma.
Through his quiet but profound art, Zaatari reminds us that images are not passive; they are active agents of power, identity, and survival.
The Artist as Witness and Healer
Akram Zaatari does not give us answers. He offers instead the fragments, the ruins, the censored photographs, the whispers of private desire, from which we must reconstruct meaning ourselves.
In doing so, he performs not only the role of artist but also that of witness, healer, and cultural archaeologist. His work carries an ethical weight rarely found in contemporary art, one that confronts the wounds of history while preserving the fragile beauty of human intimacy.
In the silence between his images, we hear the echo of lives interrupted, forgotten, or erased. And yet, through his work, they speak again.
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