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September 26, 2024
Editorial Note
Drawing Faces (in Terror Times) was a two-day program initiated with de Appel and the Stedelijk Museum in December 2022, and was the culmination of then Curatorial Programme Fellow Edwin Nasr’s year-long research into the ethics of visual representation in the aftermath of 9/11 and the so-called global ‘war on terror’. It took as its starting point a painting by artist Marlene Dumas titled The Neighbour (2005), part of the Stedelijk’s permanent collection. The source material for the painting originates from a police mugshot of Mohammed Bouyeri, now serving a life sentence in the Netherlands for the highly mediatized assassination of filmmaker Theo van Gogh in 2004.
The murder, in October 2007, of Dutch Moroccan youth Bilal B. at the hands of two police officers was one of the first “incidents” of such violence in Amsterdam Nieuw-West brought to my attention. I had relocated to this neighborhood from Beirut, Lebanon at the height of the COVID-19 pandemic to participate in de Appel’s Curatorial Programme, where I initiated a year-long inquiry into the ways contemporary artistic practices and cultural institutions have mobilized against the carceral state.
This effort shaped ALI R U OK?, a three-day public program that gathered students, artists, activists, and thinkers to work through forms of solidarity praxis toward racialized communities within and outside of the Netherlands who suffer the force of surveillance, policing, and imprisonment.
Aesthetics and its central function in the perpetration, and acceptance, of state-sanctioned violence against racialized communities remained overlooked. Drawing Faces (in Terror Times) was being shaped in continuation of ALI R U OK?, at a time when abolitionists the world over were commemorating twenty years since the arrival of the first detainee at the Guantanamo Bay prison camp. The research-led project took as its point of departure Amsterdam-based South African artist Marlene Dumas’s painting The Neighbour (2005), currently part of the Stedelijk Museum’s permanent collection. The source material for the painting originates from a police mugshot of Mohammed Bouyeri, now serving a life sentence in the Netherlands for the highly publicized assassination of filmmaker Theo van Gogh in 2004. The project implicated Dumas’s portrait to reflect on the paradoxes of representation through a carceral, racial, and postcolonial lens, resulting in a two-day public program at de Appel and the Stedelijk throughout which vigorous reflections on the paradoxes of aesthetic representation and image-making, as well as the history of antiracist formations in the Netherlands and the ongoingness of the so-called Global War on Terror, were expressed.
The following two roundtables were commissioned following the conclusion of the Drawing Faces (in Terror Times) and my time at de Appel. They were envisioned to serve as a blueprint for future conversations around the mediation of images and of the histories of violence they carry—but little did most of us know they would be so urgent at our present conjuncture, be it in the Netherlands or elsewhere. The Dutch liberal consensus had not yet been shattered by the time I left Amsterdam; today, far-right leader Geert Wilders and his political party, the Partij voor de Vrijheid (the Party for Freedom), have claimed a majority of parliamentary seats following last November’s national elections. Gloria Wekker contends in her seminal book White Innocence that “an unacknowledged reservoir of knowledge and effects based on four hundred years of Dutch imperial rule plays a vital but unacknowledged part in dominant meaning-making processes [. . .] taking place in Dutch society.”
The implications of this statement are rather terrifying: Wekker suggests that the impulse to exploit, dominate, and other—once foundational to the psychic structuring of a colonial society—necessarily haunts, and subsequently shapes, social relations in the present. This “impulse” is wreaking havoc across our scorched earth—particularly in Gaza, where Israel’s genocidal campaign against Palestinian life continues to be facilitated by Western (former) colonial powers. One must always sit with images in order to understand how consent to maim and kill is manufactured, and how the extermination of entire lifeworlds can occur with total impunity.
About the Author
Edwin Nasr is a writer and curator from Beirut now based in Berlin. His work is broadly concerned with art practice’s engagement with the anti-colonial Left, as well as its propensity to make legible spaces and forms of capture. He was curator at CCA Berlin – Center for Contemporary Arts (2021-23), Assistant to the Director at Ashkal Alwan, The Lebanese Association for Plastic Arts (2018-23) and has held fellowships at de Appel Amsterdam (2021-22) and the Singapore Art Museum (2022). Recent writings can be found in Afterall Journal, Mousse Magazine, e-flux Criticism, n+1 and The Funambulist.
