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Afghanistan has suffered from civil wars: first from the Mujahideen war againts the Russians, and then from the fights between the different factions within the country, which led to the current Taliban government. Photographer Fazal Sheikh, whose grandfather emigrated from this region to Kenya in the early days of this century, takes us into Afghanistan, where he has worked for the past years. His in-depth texts and sensitive portraits of the people reveal layer by layer a population that has kept its dignity and respect for life through almost two decades of violent struggle. Fazal Skeikh has gained the trust of his subjects, they have told him the stories of their family martyrs, and they trusted him so deeply that they even shared their often haunting dreams with him. Images of the women, of the elders gathered around the gaslight, of children anxiously looking into an unknown future, and of war victims maintaining their pride, create thoughtful insight. This volume in engaged with human rights and war as much as with photographic representation itself, and with the quest for what the people of Afghanistan really think and feel.
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For the past 25 years, Fazal Sheikh has highlighted the plight of displaced people and refugees around the world. He has photographed people driven from their homes by war as well as those upended by the redrawing of national borders and the reassertion of racial and ethnic divisions. Sheikh has also made sublime photographs of landscapes altered by political and environmental crises. In the past two years, the shift to the political right in the US has been replicated across Europe, the Middle East, Central and East Africa and Southeast Asia, as authoritarian governments and xenophobia have increased. As an act of refusal to these political trends, Sheikh sought out the celebrated novelist ...
"Ramadan Moon" is a timeless and poetic evocation of one woman's plight: It draws together passages from the Koran about the holy month of Ramadan with Seynab, the protagonist, and her memories of Mogadishu before the war, the story of her flight to the Netherlands in search of asylum and the history of the Dutch treatment of Somali asylum seekers.
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The village of al-'Araqib has been destroyed and rebuilt more than 70 times in the ongoing "Battle over the Negev"--the Israeli state campaign to uproot the Palestinian Bedouins from the northern threshold of the desert. Unlike other frontiers fought over during the Palestine conflict, this one is not demarcated by fences and walls but by shifting climatic conditions. The threshold of the desert advances and recedes in response to colonization, cultivation, displacement, urbanization and, most recently, climate change. In his response to Sheikh's Desert Bloom series, Israeli intellectual and architect Eyal Weizman's essay incorporates historical aerial photographs, contemporary remote sensing data, state plans, court testimonies and 19th-century travelers' accounts, exploring the Negev's threshold as a "shoreline" along which climate change and political conflict are entangled.
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"The portrait is fundamental to Fazal Sheikh's photography: his subjects face the camera without gestures or dramatization, but also without fear. As viewers, we can look into their faces and simultaneously recognize our kinship with them, as human beings, but also understand the significant difference of personal experience. This is not a naive exercise in attempting to "read the soul;" at its best it is a search for common ground, an understanding of what it is to experience life and survive it." "This book uses a series of photographs of women, taken in India over the past five years, to trace the passage of life from birth to death. In his two previous books, Moksha, and Ladli, Sheikh ha...
The pictures in Ether, Sheikh's first book in colour, were made as a way to honour the experience of death and to try to comprehend its significance. Benares (Varanasi) is one of India's sacred cities, where many Hindus come to die in the belief that they will find salvation. As he walked its streets by night, Sheikh observed sleeping figures, shrouded in blankets, lost to an oblivion that seemed, in that holy city, to offer a simulacrum of death. In watching these ambiguous figures, which hover in the imagination between a dream state, sleep and death, Sheikh recalled his own experience with his dying father and their passage together through his father's final days. He remembered it as an invaluable period of emotional connection with the body and soul of the person he knew and loved, a connection that reached back to his paternal ancestors, who had travelled south from northern India a century before. To lose oneself in sleep is to abandon the senses and leave the way open to a dream state in which mind and body separate. Just as, in death, the soul leaves the physical body behind and takes to the air, becoming ether.
Organized and written by renowned scholar and ICP Adjunct Curator Okwui Enwezor, Archive Fever presents works by leading contemporary artists who use archival documents to rethink the meaning of identity, history, memory, and loss. Over the past thirty years, successive generations have taken wide-ranging approaches to the photographic and filmic archive. The works presented here take many forms, including physical archives arranged by peculiar cataloguing methods, imagined biographies of fictitious persons, collections of found and anonymous photographs, film versions of photographic albums, and photomontages composed of historical photographs. These images have a wide-ranging subject matter yet are linked by the artists shared meditation on photography and film as the quintessential media of the archive. Artists in the exhibition include Tacita Dean, Stan Douglas, Felix Gonzalez-Torres, Zoe Leonard, Ilán Lieberman, Walid Raad, Thomas Ruff, Anri Sala, Fazal Sheikh, Eyal Sivan, Lorna Simpson, and Vivan Sundaram, among others.