Counting Memories, Oraib Toukan’s premier solo exhibition, is a promising introduction to a Palestinian Jordanian artist who possesses an impressive capacity for maturity and confidence in her cross-disciplinary practice. Of particular distinction is her photographic project, Icon Series, an investigation of ‘place,’ the non-descript and common public spaces of Jordan, relating the collective experience of contemporary Jordanians. In the series, the place never fully reveals itself. Rather, it is described incrementally from an anonymous perspective with bits of visual experience that identify a general locality where despite a lack of specifics, a viewer is strangely familiar with the images that feature objects and languages from shared spaces.
Toukan documents spaces inhabited by picture-objects that speak of nationalism, God, and a seasoned longing for Jerusalem tucked in a broader Palestinian nostalgia that are collected and displayed along the dusty walls of ordinary spaces betrayed of their commonness. The effect of “betraying commonness” is executed primarily via Toukan’s control of light that characterizes the photos in the series. Primarily through the execution of subtle, mature lighting decisions, Toukan is able to transform the ambient into the mystical with striking results. The repetition of themes in the different spaces suggests the iconic picture-objects displayed are born from a collective identity, a shared memory understood by the Jordanian people. This kind of shared consciousness is enforced in Toukan’s work while the specificity of ‘place’ is minimized.
The images weave layers of the Jordanian citizens' psyche; memories of homeland both past and present are preserved in her photographs. The subject matter, the “icons” (picture-objects), as well as the prints themselves, function as a kind of memory container or unintentional time capsules. In her book, The Image as Memorial, Martina Sturken proposes that the photograph represents far more than its materiality in that it either triggers memory (whose characteristics are vulnerable and ephemeral in nature) or produces it. [i] She states, “The photograph may be perceived as a container for memory, it is not inhabited by memory so much as it produces it; it is a mechanism through which the past can be constructed and situated with the present.” [ii] The spaces in Icon Series reflect the private and historic impressions Jordanians have of their homeland, but the images themselves visually map a Jordanian identity that is public, collective, and present in its orientation on the gallery walls. [iii]
Toukan’s images confront the collective memory inscribed into these spaces, negotiating a memory that is not quite one’s own memory, but one feels they can remember from somewhere, nonetheless. The significance of the ubiquitous objects ostensibly depicting allegiance to King and devotion to God appear conflicted in their haphazard placement. They are hung slightly off and look worn and battered, as if they have been forgotten. Even so, Toukan eloquently denotes their significance by presenting them in soft, glowing light. The luminosity of afternoon shafts beaming through dirty windows and exaggerated by neon bulbs elevates each site. Her manipulation of neon light is particularly captivating. Toukan deftly redeems harsh, uncomplimentary neon light and employs it to reveal each location’s spiritual power. The locations suggest sanctuary, its icons, an alter space to Jordan, the images themselves a memorial to a country.
Toukan’s photographs engender a remarkable amount of intimacy. Although large scale and rich in saturated color, the images are quiet, almost whispering to the viewer. One finds themselves being pulled in closer to listen, collapsing the space between viewer and print. In an intimate distance, the images change. The softness of the light, the vacant spaces void of detail juxtaposed to recognizable and repeating objects, speaks to the act of remembering in itself. Only glimpses are fleshed out, the rest is a hazy impression, like a story in which you can only remember a few of the details rather than the entire tale. Toukan’s images highlight that there are not only shared images, but shared ways of experiencing memory as well. The series exploits this by functioning on the concept of “first impressions,” similar to the reaction one has when one enters a room one has never been in, or meeting someone for the first time. The mind can’t gather in quite everything, but subconsciously scans around quickly for clues. Like a new acquaintance, we search and evaluate Toukan’s images for access to the identity of its non-present inhabitants; their religion, nationality and economic status are revealed but only briefly; more unique and substantial details are not easily deciphered. We greet the rooms in her prints as if it were a stranger, our comfort level and kinship towards it is dependent upon on our own proximity to the coded language of the space.
Distance, proximity, and language take on another form in Toukan’s single channel, split screen video, Remind Me To Remember to Forget. The act of contemplating the title alone can trigger memories one cares not to remember, provoking another personal level of meaning in Toukan’s juxtaposed performances.
The ephemerality of memories, words, and human breath intermingle in the video. The right side, a close up of a person’s throat, in absence of speaking, breathes. On the left, the words in Arabic, “remind me to remember to forget,” is blown down a pen’s barrel in gold glitter, and then sucked back into the blue, red and white pen. The meaning of this piece is again dependent on the viewer’s distance or proximity to the subject. Those whose countries and personal lives supported the total amnesia of war in its immediate aftermath will probably remain distant to its effectiveness. Those who cannot forget endure the painful watching of erasure and eventual absence of the words as stand-ins for the people, homes, and safety that perished in the summer of 2006 in Lebanon, when this video was produced. The disturbing sounds of labored breathing juxtaposed to the visual of the throat is a reminder of human fragility and the silence that fell after the end of the war. The throat doesn’t scream, doesn’t flinch, and doesn’t move. It simply, and barely, breathes.
Absence isn’t a concept that is easily described in video. Toukan manages to tackle the subject through the vehicle of erasure. The tension between presence and absence performed in the blowing and sucking of the glitter is extended by the medium itself. Unedited video, in this case, the ‘long-take’ performance, suggests an accurate record of the event. The act of erasure is on view to watch over and over again in vivid, accurate, and moving picture details that speak specifically to the abduction of justice that occurs in spite of the fact that it transpires every day before our eyes. It is a painful reminder of what has become a daily norm in the Middle East; the news and media each day broadcasting death and destruction in Lebanon, Palestine and Iraq, the spin that follows, and the deafening silence that answers from the international world.
Ordinary citizens can only scream into the silence or choke down the bitterness of the images and a memory that eludes them. Toukan’s performance is a haunting personal reenactment of the effacement of public memory, while simultaneously commemorating the disregarded victims of the war. Her exhibition is an influential commentary on the sociopolitical times of the Middle East, encoding, defining and straddling the line between collective memory and collective amnesia, suggesting that remembering and forgetting are born from the same need to survive, to relate, and to destroy.
Sama Alshaibi
Assistant Professor of Art
Photography Department
University of Arizona, USA
[i] Marita Sturken, “ The Image as Memorial: Personal Photographs in Cultural Memory,” in The Familial Gaze, ed. Marianne Hirsch (Handover: University Press of New England, 1999), 178.
[ii] Ibid.
[iii] Sama Alshaibi, “Memory Work in the Palestinian Diaspora,” in Frontiers: A Journal of Women Studies, (University of Nebraska Press, 2006),