Liverpool Arab Arts Festival 2022 @ LJMU
Image credit: Development of one of the Arab Image Foundation negatives in the dark room of the Beirut Printmaking Studio. Photo: Blanche Eid / AIF.
Liverpool John Moores University’s Exhibition Research Lab (ERL) partners with Liverpool Arab Arts Festival with exhibition displays featuring archives from the Arab Image Foundation (AIF) and the Beirut Printmaking Studio, and works by Hannaa Hamdache.
Impressions from an Archive brings printmakers from the recently created analogue printmaking studio into dialogue with the photographic collection of the 25-year-old Arab Image Foundation.
The Arab Image Foundation’s work is an ever-evolving research process into ways of looking at, interpreting, and interacting with the photographic objects in its custody. A photographic negative or print, once created, remains in constant physical mutation. Likewise, its historical, cultural, and affective lives depend on the viewer and continue to shift. Through its work, the AIF studies the material and immaterial layers of photographs and seeks to further enrich this layering.
For this exhibition, printmakers from the Beirut Printmaking Studio chose images from diverse AIF collections, spanning from the 1870s to the 1970s, and from different parts of the Arab region and its diaspora, from which to produce their own intaglio prints. Positive prints of the original photographic negatives have been produced, each of which is displayed alongside the corresponding intaglio print as a diptych.
Hannaa Hamdache, Father Tongue (2022). Courtesy of the artist.
Father Tongue is a newly commissioned video work by artist and curator Hannaa Hamdache. The work speaks of what it means to sit in-between two cultures through the use of language. It presents an alternative example of what it looks like to be the confluence of two cultures: to be mixed-heritage.
This moving image piece uses the spoken word to address the artist’s own personal experience of being British and Algerian. The English language (her mother tongue) is used to explore these ideas, but it is in Arabic (her father tongue) that these words are shared.
The words are performed by the artist – it is her mouth that we see moving – but it is the voice of another that can be heard. A translator speaks the words in a language that the artist cannot.
Related activities at the ERL include:
Father Tongue: Poetry workshop with Hannaa Hamdache
Friday 8 July, 12:30 pm - 1:30 pm
Sign up for free here
Printmaking workshop with Tarek Mourad, artist, director of Beirut Printmaking Studio, and part-time instructor at Lebanese International University.
Friday 8 July, 2:00 pm - 3:00 pm
Book here
Talk: Impressions of an Archive
Discussion with members of the Arab Image Foundation and Beirut Printmaking Studio on the process behind the exhibition, their collaboration, and the relationship between archives, photography and printmaking.
This talk will be facilitated by Mariam Attah, Curator, Open Eye Gallery.
Friday 8 July, 4:00 pm - 5:00 pm
Book here
Liverpool Arab Arts Festival @ Exhibition Research Lab
John Lennon Art and Design Building
Duckinfield Street
Liverpool
L3 5RD
Thursday 7 – Saturday 16 July
Open: 11am – 4pm
Closed on Sunday 10 July
Find out more on the Exhibition Research Lab.
Visit Liverpool Arab Arts Festival for the full programme and venues.
The festival runs from Thursday 7 to Sunday 17 July 2022
