Still from ‘Twenty-Eight Nights and a Poem’ (2015), Akram Zaatari
In collaboration with Glasgow Film Theatre, The Common Guild presents Akram Zaatari’s film ‘Twenty-Eight Nights and a Poem’ (2015) followed by a Q&A with the artist. This striking visual essay continues Akram Zaatari’s ongoing engagement with the work of photographer Hashem el Madani (1928–2017), who ran a commercial studio for more than six decades in southern Lebanon.
Still from ‘Twenty-Eight Nights and a Poem’ (2015), Akram Zaatari.
Partly a study of a photographer’s studio practice in the mid-twentieth century and partly an exploration of the essence of archives today, the film tries to understand how this mode of producing images functioned in the lives of the communities it served, and how it ceased to exist. It is set between the Arab Image Foundation in Beirut (of which Akram is co-founder), where most of Hashem el Madani’s collection is preserved today, and in Studio Shehrazade in Saida, where the photographer worked surrounded by his old machines, tools, photographs, negatives and what remained of millions of transactions that took place there.
It is a reflection on making images, on an industry of image-making, on age and on the life that is preserved but that nevertheless continues in an archive. All this is presented in the film through a set of staged interventions of which Madani himself was part.
Event Details
This screening was presented with Glasgow Film Theatre as part of the exhibition, Akram Zaatari - ‘The End of Time.’
