Abounaddara

Abounaddara is an anonymous collective of Syrian filmmakers, practitioners of “emergency cinema” who release a new short video via social media every Friday. They’ve maintained this impressive schedule since the start of the Syrian revolution in April 2011, through the initial mass protests and the Assad regime’s brutal crackdowns, the devastating civil war, and the resulting refugee crisis. The radical group’s remarkable, stylistically heterogeneous films—which range in length from about thirty seconds to five minutes—struggle to make visible what is obscured by war as well as by war reporting. Repudiating the international media’s focus on spectacular violence and suffering, Abounaddara produces counterimages, including many portraits of Syrian citizens. In elliptical micronarratives and beautifully composed static shots, violence is often represented by its aftermath or anticipation.

This exhibition, pointedly titled “The Right to the Image,” showcases the collective’s filmmaking strategies in three installations, each on view for one week. The focus of the first week was appropriation—Abounaddara’s savvy use of propaganda films, news footage, and found photography as well as sound. In this remix of their own work, three channels of video, projected on different walls, competed for attention, played in unison, or fell silent. Family snapshots, informational title cards, a fluttering Syrian flag shot off a television screen, and briefly displayed images of a massacre added up to an alarming montage.

In the hallway past the gallery’s entrance, a monitor screens the filmmakers’ most recent release, while a row of iPads allows visitors to peruse the Aboundarra online archive. On another wall, the collective’s “concept paper” is presented as a striking slideshow. Here, the critical conundrum of their project—that of truthfully portraying a humanitarian disaster while respecting the dignity of individual subjects caught in the frame—is addressed explicitly. In an inspiring short text, Abounaddara parlays their commitment to citizen reporting and experimental documentary into a call for a transformative new interpretation of international human-rights law.