AELIA HAZIL 2020
Aelia Hazil: Searching for Aelia
Curated by: Kaja Kraner, Miha Vipotnik and Lucija Smodiš
Txt by: Kaja Kraner
The analyzes of the impact of digital technologies on the changes in established approaches to storing and organizing memory begin to be articulated especially from the 1990s when also the countries of the so-called former second and third worlds are gripped by a wave of digitization and the general expansion of internet access. Precisely memory seems to be a good entry point that unfolds all the complexity of the intertwining of the cultural sphere and technology. Namely, memory is, among other things, an integral part of the formation of culture as such as well as identity (in the broadest sense of the word), and consequently crosses all segments of social communication, (self)understanding and orientation. The initial optimism about the democratic potential of so-called digital reproducibility among other things stemmed from the potential to blur the distinction between authors and consumers, where the author is increasingly becoming a consumer of existing, to an ever-larger extent accessible, materials and where the consumer is somehow becoming the (co)author of the work.Txt by: Kaja Kraner
In strictly anthropological terms, the digital form of storage is not significantly different from mummification or techniques of storing analogue heritage: in all of the cases, it is a way of the symbolic overcoming of human finitude through technology. One could even argue that the symbolic overcoming of human finitude through technology is actually synonymous with culture, that is, with something opposite of the randomness, non-selectivity, and non-reflexivity of the instinctive, automatic, or oblivion that supposedly rules the realm of the natural. The digital form of storage is, at best, special in that the potentially endless expansion of storage space and, at the same time, the reduction of storage time undermine the very foundation of the cultural that arises from the selection between what is worth preserving and what is not. At the same time, the digital form of storage is special in that its primary object – unlike mummification, which tries to preserve the matter – is information about or memory of material objects. Exactly through this, in a way, double detachment from the material, additional aspects are revealed: digital reproducibility corrodes the connection of the medium of memory preservation (statements, objects, images) with the place of enunciation as well as the context from which it originates. Through this, the social regulatory techniques are also corroded, the very techniques which otherwise guarantee the status of reality: digital reproducibility threatens to eliminate the conditions for the possibility of distinguishing between factual, objective and fictional. But this has ultimately always been the specifics of artistic language or art as such.
The work of Aelia Hazil, a Palestinian artist besieged in Lebanon, could be roughly termed post-internet archival art, whereby at the first glance this designation primarily concerns the media and chronological placement of her work. Nevertheless, it is necessary to be more precise. Archival art from the 1990s onwards is supposed to derive from the establishment of information processing as the central aesthetic problem within the framework of conceptual art, i.e. it concerns the change of the epistemological basis of contemporary art. In the case of Hazil, however, the cultural and geopolitical location of her work is also crucial. In her work, she addresses the collision between the materiality of bodies, very specific (political) territory, identity (basically a radically virtual and fictional phenomenon) and the seeming boundlessness of the sphere of the virtual – be it the World Wide Web or the imagination. Excessive documentation, which is one of the key starting points of her work, is therefore not only related to the general features of “digital culture”. It is indistinguishable from her ethnic, cultural and geographical origin or her existential experience: "with the fears, we inherited from our parents and ancestors that erasure or interruption, displacement and forced migration, for example, can happen at any time."
The work of Aelia Hazil, a Palestinian artist besieged in Lebanon, could be roughly termed post-internet archival art, whereby at the first glance this designation primarily concerns the media and chronological placement of her work. Nevertheless, it is necessary to be more precise. Archival art from the 1990s onwards is supposed to derive from the establishment of information processing as the central aesthetic problem within the framework of conceptual art, i.e. it concerns the change of the epistemological basis of contemporary art. In the case of Hazil, however, the cultural and geopolitical location of her work is also crucial. In her work, she addresses the collision between the materiality of bodies, very specific (political) territory, identity (basically a radically virtual and fictional phenomenon) and the seeming boundlessness of the sphere of the virtual – be it the World Wide Web or the imagination. Excessive documentation, which is one of the key starting points of her work, is therefore not only related to the general features of “digital culture”. It is indistinguishable from her ethnic, cultural and geographical origin or her existential experience: "with the fears, we inherited from our parents and ancestors that erasure or interruption, displacement and forced migration, for example, can happen at any time."
The clash between the materiality of political, cultural boundaries, the physical/biological body, its needs and limitations, and the virtuality of spirit, image, imagination and the World Wide Web seems to be most intensified and evident precisely in the case of Middle Eastern peripheral global capitalism. What existential experience does this collision bring? At the level of narration, we encounter accelerated fragmentation, constant interruptions (power and internet outages) and glitches. So with a phenomenon that generally seems to represent a kind of immanent temporality to the digital medium, wherein the flow of time there is a sudden stop or the blast of the present, which at the same time exposes the material side of the otherwise emphasized virtuality of the digital image. At the level of spatial display, we encounter radical dispersion and distribution, where each component acts as a shrapnel of information or a trace of our presence and activities that we constantly leave and produce in other people or online.
Hazil began her art practice as a travel blogger and visited Palestine and other places via Google Earth, the places she cannot physically visit due to her location in a specific geopolitical space. As stated in her biography, through virtual travel, she began to accumulate memories that inevitably affected her identity, while at the same time she began to build her artistic persona. So who is, therefore, Hazil? Is she still besieged in the physical space of Lebanon, where space is full of material and symbolic traces of an unresolved past, the result of the complex political history of the Middle East and where “identity is formed by an ID”? The title of the exhibition is perhaps the most informative in this connection: Hazil is (still) searching for herself. The formulation at first glance acts as a typical example of the (Western) life ethic of authenticity, stemming from the idea that the source of ourselves is our own interior, not so much the culture, place, and time in which we were born. But in virtual space and the so-called post-internet art one no longer finds authenticity without a (cynical) distance. Is Hazil’s identity thus merely a by-product of the fragments of her face, voice, conveyed emotions, messages sent to a person she cannot physically visit (everytime, Alo Beirut, Look at me now), an archive of memories of images of the Lebanese-Israeli border and Palestinian apartments (1001 views of Palestine) and other traces she leaves in virtual and actual space?
Hazil began her art practice as a travel blogger and visited Palestine and other places via Google Earth, the places she cannot physically visit due to her location in a specific geopolitical space. As stated in her biography, through virtual travel, she began to accumulate memories that inevitably affected her identity, while at the same time she began to build her artistic persona. So who is, therefore, Hazil? Is she still besieged in the physical space of Lebanon, where space is full of material and symbolic traces of an unresolved past, the result of the complex political history of the Middle East and where “identity is formed by an ID”? The title of the exhibition is perhaps the most informative in this connection: Hazil is (still) searching for herself. The formulation at first glance acts as a typical example of the (Western) life ethic of authenticity, stemming from the idea that the source of ourselves is our own interior, not so much the culture, place, and time in which we were born. But in virtual space and the so-called post-internet art one no longer finds authenticity without a (cynical) distance. Is Hazil’s identity thus merely a by-product of the fragments of her face, voice, conveyed emotions, messages sent to a person she cannot physically visit (everytime, Alo Beirut, Look at me now), an archive of memories of images of the Lebanese-Israeli border and Palestinian apartments (1001 views of Palestine) and other traces she leaves in virtual and actual space?
Aelia Hazil (00/00/0000) is a Palestinian visual artist besieged in Lebanon. Her artistic practice uses 3D scanning, photogrammetry, digital photography, CGI (computer-generated images) and artistic glitch. She began her art practice as a travel blogger on Instagram, where she documented her virtual trips to Palestine and created documentation of the trips via 3D scanning application display.land, using visual material of real places and people from occupied Palestine. In the process of appropriation and integration of those images, Aelia Hazil’s identity is being constructed, based on fictional memories, where her Instagram account is used as a narrative medium for telling an animated story of an intangible person, who is trying to overcome the borders/boundaries. Hazil’s work focuses on the policies, implemented and accelerated over the Internet, and interrogates a virtual world without borders.
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Spoznajte rezidentko: Aelia Hazil
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