With the benefit of hindsight, what role does new media play in artistic practices, activism, and as an agent for social change in the Middle East and North Africa today?

Shining a spotlight on something in order to 'make it visible' is a task indeed. It does not only entail personal and professional risk but also demands courage and responsibility. The ethics of monstration (on behalf of those whose intention is precisely that - to make sense of vision, to give sense to the invisible) comes from a 'monstrous' viewpoint: the viewpoint that designates each image in its form of monstrance (or pattern) and endows each image with quality and power of display.[1]

The following questions, in that regard, I find of significance to Ibraaz's Platform 004: firstly, in a revolutionary context, what kind of relationship do the image and the gaze have toward a people's movement for freedom? Secondly, what role can be taken by the gaze (be it optical or mechanical) and image (still and moving images) within socio-political conditions recognised as 'revolutionary movements'? And finally, regarding micro-processes of individuals' dissidence toward the social environment to which they belong, what kind of knowledge can be deduced by the image and gaze of a single person? Here, under the notion of the individual, I understand those singular subjects who – via unconventional modes of civil protest (among them most notably the private and public forms of self-sacrifice rituals) – act and take part in mass mobilisation, and who do so against political status quo while consciously or unconsciously contributing to changes of a higher level of meaning (collective, national, regional, and transnational).

I had no idea of the torture-culture in Algeria during the liberation war until the first printed material around the subject of such atrocities came to my hands last year (Quand la France torturait en Algérie, edited by Algerian historian and journalist Hamid Bousselham).[2] In front of insulting scenes of torture exercised by French soldiers over the Algerian population during the Independence War (1954-1962), I am trying to understand the attempts by a war photographer to negotiate, in the contested field of vision, at least two significant points: (1) a set of personal and political circumstances under which resistance takes place through the production of visuality (where the war among images is being waged simultaneously with military operations on the battlefield), and (2) a kind of singular/individual mode of resistance taking place in-between the photographer's eye/camera-lens, on the one hand, and his/her desire to look at what is supposed to remain hidden and forbidden from public view.