Khaled Ramadan

LEBANON/DENMARK, 1964

One thing should be clear from the beginning, even before we start watching: The one who watches is not the one who is in power. Khaled Ramadan realized that from the start, and even if he forces us, or at least tempts us, to watch and keep watching his videos, he himself cannot resist and warns us about the power of images, starting with his own.

Since the beginning, the Lebanese artist, curator, interdisciplinary media producer, documentarist (as his short bio states) and cofounder of the “Chamber of Public Secrets” project based (as he is) in Copenhagen, decided to work on the most controversial subjects, such as war, wounded people, massacres, Nazi-Skins’ ideology and visions or, to make a long story short, anything the media talks about without saying anything, without really talking about it.

Media stereotypes and constant manipulation of the TV and even the wider Web audience come to be the real subject behind the scenes. The translation media operates. What do you want to see, look, think, be told and what you do not want to see, look, think, be told? This last is exactly what, most probably, Khaled Ramadan is going to show you. And he shows it with a great deal of irony, jokes at his own expense, some melancholy and some recent unexpected signs of a nice autobiographical attitude. These emerged, for instance, in one of his recent creations, Wide Power, selected for a prize in the last Cairo Biennale (December 2008–February 2009). Using an apparently old-fashioned “hiccups” rhythm that compromises the narrative of the story, the artist leads us through his life, as child, adolescent and grown-up, one picture after the other, in order to make us learn how and why he discovered the secret power of image-making without resisting it. How, in other words, he became himself.

Martina Corgnati

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