Akram Zaatari: Everything Will Be Alright

One of the most influential Lebanese artists in activity today, Akram Zaatari is the author of an oeuvre—including films, video installations, and texts—that reflects upon the importance of images as fragments of a time and their complex relations with politics, desire, and memory. In “Tomorrow Everything Will Be Alright”, his first solo show in Brazil, these relations are brought to bear again, lending us an image of our time as seen from the perspective of contemporary Lebanon. Taking its title from one of its constituent works, the exhibition expresses its hope for a future in which all of today’s potential may finally flourish.

The six video installations collected here shift between public and private space, on the one hand, and between images of the past and aspirations for the future, on the other, investigating at one and the same time the delicate expression of a certain homoeroticism and aspects of the Lebanese social context.

By operating as a documentarian or archaeologist, the artist excavates the past in search of a snapshot of our sensibility that is at once the final image of a passing world and the first in the burgeoning world to come. Exploring the image of desire from their respective exhibition niches, the video installations create a sort of chronicle of loves lost, evoked through letters, video, and pictures. In many of these, homoerotic affection flowers in abstract places, almost entirely excluded from the real geography, as if the memory of desire peeled the objects away from their contexts to better highlight and rearrange them.