The Transformative Power of Film
Andrea Lissoni and Akram Zaatari on films, institutions, and their metamorphic characters
Akram Zaatari, from On Photography People and Modern Times, 2010. The thirty-eight-minute film conveys Zaatari’s research into the archives of Studio Sheherazade, the photographic studio of Hashem al-Madani, in Saïda, South Lebanon. Courtesy Akram Zaatari. © Akram Zaatari
Akram Zaatari, from On Photography People and Modern Times, 2010. The thirty-eight-minute film conveys Zaatari’s research into the archives of Studio Sheherazade, the photographic studio of Hashem al-Madani, in Saïda, South Lebanon. Courtesy Akram Zaatari. © Akram Zaatari
- Akram Zaatari
- I grew up in a country that has virtually no museums. So I turned to the VHS tape as a museum, or the newspaper as a museum—that was how I could access research material, other than in my university library. Perhaps this is why, to me, the museum often comes with a disappointment. Even if museums differ from one another—not all of them have collections, not all embody past colonial practices, not all follow the same financial model—they all have political, financial, technical, and spatial limitations, like any other institution. From the point of view of an artist, working with museums involves a lot of expectations that are not always met. And one realizes that their institutional missions have less to do with the kind of art they show than with the community they serve, or succeed to bring in, and the resources they raise to implement projects.
- Andrea Lissoni
- A museum is a living organism, and the first questions I think we should consider are the needs and desires of the communities around the museum. I would never recommend orienting the program of a museum in a single direction—rather, I’d recommend diversifying it as much as possible. In that respect, focusing on moving images can be a strength. This interest in film marked, for instance, the origins of visionary institutions, like the Centre Pompidou, which was conceived in the very beginning of the 1970s as the Centre de production industrielle—the centre of industrial production. They had a real film and moving-image production area, and while the institution unfolded in other ways, the fact that they had initially defined this specific line of work is to me relevant.
- AZ
- At the Arab Image Foundation, which I co-founded with other artists in 1997, we initially wanted to create a kind of museum that we called the Center for Photography. But quickly, in 1999, we became convinced that we didn’t need a museum, which was already a tired term at the time, but that we had to build a collection to be fed with a research program, without an exhibition space. A few years later we met Catherine David while she was at Witte de With [today Kunstinstituut Melly] and realized that the centre had to transcend the museum space and work outside its walls.
Paul Valéry wrote already in 1923 that the museum is a place of incoherences, with collections consisting of objects that have nothing to do with each other and that are often displayed showing little respect for their former utility, scale, or provenance, as opposed to the harmony that Valéry perceived between space, material, light, sculptures, and paintings in a Renaissance church. He even writes that every object deserves to be seen in a space by itself. I don’t necessarily agree with him, and I am not at all excluding the AIF collection from the incoherence that he mentions: it comes naturally with collecting and selectively extracting objects or parts of objects from different places, and bringing them together in a single space. But to consider a collection as the outcome of research and material for research is very different than to consider it as intended for display. Archives and research material are incoherent by nature, even when they are framed by a certain latent logic.
But I think that what we are trying to discuss is whether the activity of filming or of making film, which a museum could commission to an artist, can emulate or replace the museum, especially when we think of the museum’s colonial history. Photography and film allow us to seize without physically possessing, to narrate different material filmed in several places, in distant geographies, and create a harmonious presentation that can travel be seen in a museum gallery, a cinema, on television, or even a smart phone. We’re addressing the museum as a producer of knowledge, and the idea that commissioning film works is actually commissioning thinking and reflection about space and architecture.
Lawrence Abu Hamdan, Walled Unwalled, the Tanks, Tate Modern, 2018. Semi-transparent panels act as a projection screen; light and images spill through its surfaces. © Lawrence Abu Hamdan, courtesy Maureen Paley, London. Photo: © Tate (Andrew Dunkley).
- AL
- Yes, definitely. I guess everyone who works in a contemporary art museum realizes how difficult it is to do research there. It’s almost an extinct practice, apart from the mandatory research on collection objects and their care. In this respect, for a museum, film can be an extraordinary tool to co-research. When you commission you necessarily have some aim. You want to be involved. You’re steering research.
At Tate Modern, with Tate Film, we set up a cinema program between 2015 and 2020 with the aim of diversifying our activity as much as possible, and opening up in all the possible directions toward the world, in critical dialogue with what was perceived as the main activity of the Tate—its exhibitions. The program, Tate Film, generated a sort of spine that enabled the institution to engage with questions that did not find a space in the exhibition program.
That was a nourishing compost, because young filmmakers, future researchers, students at Goldsmiths or the RCA, and other potential audiences had the opportunity to engage with topics that otherwise they would not have encountered in the museum. Everything rests on the quality of the works that are chosen, but the program itself generates a wave of attendance, with an audience that comes again and again. So, through basic programming tools, as a film curator you can generate a sequence of works and discussions that makes the real discourse.
To some extent, one could say that as film programmer you extend the thinking beyond a given moment, and the more the program is stretched over time, the closer you can get to the act of research that the museum has lost the ability and time to do. You reacquire it through the long thematic film program that helps the museum develop its mission.
Joan Jonas, Reanimation, installation view. Haus der Kunst, 2022. Courtesy Haus der Kunst München. Photo: Maximilian Geuter
Karrabing Film Collective, Wonderland, Haus der Kunst, 2023. Karrabing’s work, which speaks to forms of collective, Indigenous agency in the care of the land, is an opportunity for the museum to interrogate the history of the building. © Karrabing Film Collective, courtesy Haus der Kunst München. Photo: Maximilian Geuter
- AZ
- What do you do with films that were not considered art when they were made, but that were great films? I have a very specific relation with film because what I watch every day is Egyptian trash film from the 1930s, 1940s, or 1950s. Some of the films I’ve seen fifty times. I consider them the same as music. I will always find a line that had not caught my attention before.
I’m talking about popular comedies, love stories, things like that. They help me ground myself. And while I do art films and use film as a medium of reflection, the films I watch are not tools for reflection. They are products of an engagement with the economy of spectacle that started with theatre and the cabaret scene in Egypt toward the early twentieth century and moved slowly to occupy the film industry with the invention of sound film. With the revolution in Egypt in 1952, film production peaked as studios gradually flirted with power.
All of this history will never find its way into any museum, except maybe through an artist’s work. I could write a critical history of popular Egyptian cinema, but I will never see this cinema in a museum because this is the type of reflection that interests a minority. And I’m sure every country has a similar history with every popular medium, like pop music. These films are not seen by the institution as being worthy of either discussion or conservation, so the question is if it is okay to accept their gradual loss.
The television channel that broadcasts this type of films twenty-four hours day—why don’t we call it a museum? Is it because it’s a commercial enterprise? I asked myself this question when I was collecting black-and-white photographs from family albums made by photographers who are not necessarily known, yet they were able to communicate very interesting, pointed takes on a practice, a medium, and shed light on social history. Yet no one takes those seriously. They don’t find any place for them in a museum. So, what do we do with them? If they end up being kept by a commercial enterprise, a TV channel, why wouldn’t the TV channel become the museum?
I definitely see a time soon when museums will not be bound to buildings, but instead will be programs that find their audiences through telephones—in fact this is already the case—or other screens or devices. Museums are reaching a deadlock and will become unsustainable. We will still be left with museums that are bound to space that contain material objects, but what about the museums of immaterial objects or immaterial things like cinema?
Of course, analog films have negatives and sound recordings that need to be conserved properly, but negatives could be stored anywhere, somewhere underground, sharing space with other things—whereas programming can happen elsewhere.
Akram Zaatari, from Twenty-Eight Nights and a Poem, 2015. Courtesy Akram Zaatari. © Akram Zaatari
Akram Zaatari, from Twenty-Eight Nights and a Poem, 2015. Courtesy Akram Zaatari. © Akram Zaatari
- AL
- I agree. I can see the museum as a broadcaster—let’s say, as a radio system. I don’t believe in buildings. I mean, I love them, but I don’t think they need to host something specific. They can be used in different ways. After dismantling the legacy of modernity—giving up white walls, not hanging anything anymore, not having politicians speaking at the opening, but rather conversation or performances—my ultimate dream is to leave the building and to let the building be refurbished completely into something else.
I guess what we’re saying is that we believe there is a chance for an art institution to be everywhere, and that we should be absolutely open. Because if we’re really transnational, as we are told and we believe, then we must also acknowledge that so many cultures don’t even have these walls. But what is relevant is the content. The walls may be the content, yet we care about the arts, their relevance, the encounter they are predisposed to, their inextinguishable transformative power.
Andrea Lissoni is artistic director of Haus der Kunst München and formerly Senior Curator, International Art (Film), at Tate Modern, London.
Akram Zaatari is an artist, filmmaker, photographer, and curator based in Beirut. In 1997, he co-founded the Arab Image Foundation with the photographers Fouad Elkoury and Samer Mohdad.
This conversation is excerpted from The Museum Is Not Enough no. 10–14 (CCA and Lenz, 2025).
