Silverstein Photography Lecture: Fazal Sheikh

Undergraduate Fine Arts presents artist Fazal Sheikh as part of the 2016 Howard A. Silverstein and Patricia Bleznak Silverstein Photography Lecture Series. This series is focused on supplementing the wide-ranging photography curriculum that is available to Penn students as well as to engage the vast arts-based community on campus and the wider Philadelphia community. The lecture is presented in conjunction with Erasures, an exhibition by Fazal Sheikh on display at Slought Foundation from March 17-May 1, 2016, with support from Slought. 

Fazal Sheikh is an artist who uses photographs to document people living in displaced and marginalized communities around the world. His principle medium is the portrait, although his work also encompasses personal narratives, found photographs, archival material, sound, and his own written texts. He works from the conviction that a portrait is, as far as possible, an act of mutual engagement, and only through a long-term commitment to a place and to a community can a meaningful series of photographs be made. His overall aim is to contribute to a wider understanding of these groups, to respect them as individuals and to counter the ignorance and prejudice that often attaches to them.  

Each of his projects is collected and published and is exhibited internationally in galleries and museums. He also works closely with human rights organizations and believes in disseminating his work in forms that can be distributed as widely as possible and can be of use to the communities themselves.

Fazal Ilahi Sheikh was born in 1965 in New York City. He graduated from Princeton University with a B.A. in 1987 and since then has worked as a photographer documenting the lives of individuals in displaced communities across East Africa, in Pakistan, Afghanistan, Brazil, Cuba, India and Israel/Palestine. He has received many awards for his work, including a Fulbright Fellowship (1992), a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship (1994), the Infinity Award from the International Center of Photography, New York (1995), the Leica Medal of Excellence (1995), Le Prix Dialogue de l’Humanité, Rencontres d’Arles (2003), the Henri Cartier-Bresson International Grand Prize (2005), the Deutsche Börse Photography Prize (finalist, 2008), the Deutscher Fotobuchpreis (2009) and the Lucie Humanitarian Award (2009). In 2005 he was named a MacArthur Fellow and in 2012 a Guggenheim Fellow.

More about the exhibition Erasures:

Slought is pleased to announce Erasures, an exhibition of photographs by Fazal Sheikh and related historical documents tracing the dispossessions and displacements of the Arab-Israeli War of 1948, and their impact on Palestinians, Bedouins, and Israelis, on display March 22-May 1, 2016.

The exhibition takes its point of departure from Sheikh's remarkable multi-volume set of photographs on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, The Erasure Trilogy (2015). Divided into three separate volumes—Memory Trace, Desert Bloom, and Independence/Nakba—the photographs seek to explore the legacies of the Arab-Israeli War of 1948, which resulted in the establishment of the State of Israel and in the reconfiguration of territorial borders across the region. In conjunction with the exhibition at Slought, elements of these volumes will be simultaneously exhibited at the Brooklyn Museum of Art, the Pace/MacGill Gallery, and Storefront for Art and Architecture in New York, the Al-Ma'mal Center for Contemporary Art in East Jerusalem, and the Khalil Sakakini Cultural Center in Ramallah. Together, this decentralized network of institutions, each functioning in different arenas and with different mandates, collectively seeks to generate conversation across different sites, contexts, and communities about the politics of dispossession and displacement.

From his first visit to Israel and the West Bank in late 2010, Sheikh claims that he came to believe that any effort to understand the region had to confront this war and its long-term effects on the divided societies of Israel and Palestine. In his words, "[t]he war and its aftermath led to the depopulation of more than 450 Palestinian towns and villages and the flight of an estimated 700,000 Palestinians to neighboring countries, refugee camps, and areas under Israeli military rule. It was, in effect, the dissolution of Palestinian society, and has left a wound that has never healed."

That the wound has never healed means that the violence, trauma, loss, and ruin that were the signature of the war do not only belong to the past. In the end, they cannot even be said to be restricted to any single population or any one side of the conflict. The devastating impact of this tension has touched every generation since. Given what we know of the ongoing history of land confiscation by the State of Israel, for example, Sheikh's images suggest that the catastrophes of 1948 have not ended. This devastation can be read in the ruination wrought upon Palestinians by the violent aftermath of the war, but also in the less frequently discussed displacement of Bedouins in the Negev desert, which is the focus of Sheikh's Desert Bloom. In regard to the latter, Sheikh reveals the historical and contemporary traces of what has been called "The Bedouin Nakba," the moment between the 1948 war and 1953 when the Israeli military relocated nearly 90% of the Bedouins in the Negev. The devastation can also be read more generally in the fact that Palestinians, Bedouins, and Israelis all find themselves in mourning. What they mourn is themselves, but also their ability to relate to the other. In asking us to be attentive to the history that simultaneously divides and binds these populations -- because, for him, the history of the one can never be disentangled from the history of the other -- Sheikh hopes to lay the groundwork for a potentially transformative empathy.

What is at stake for Sheikh is the possibility of exposing and countering the various processes of erasure that, over the last several decades, have sought to erase both the violence of this history and the acts of erasure themselves. His work hopes to account for the Israeli State's complicity in the dispossession of Palestinians and Bedouins, and in the dispossession of memories without which its history can never be fully told. Bringing these multiple instances of injury together in his photographs, Sheikh also evokes, by a kind of formal analogy, the inability of Israelis, Arab-Israelis, Palestinian refugees, or Bedouins to belong to either a single place, time, or even community. Like the images that would present them, they exist between, as Mahmoud Darwish would put it, "an interior that exits and an exterior that enters." Erasures seeks to recreate the experience of this exile in its viewers. In making these histories of dispossession visible, it hopes to interrupt our historical amnesia, and to transform our understanding of this ongoing conflict.