Description
The cultural and symbolic reproduction of Al-Khiam, a town in the south of Lebanon and a detention centre which carries its name, has had significant country-level implications manifesting in various ways, including in the layers of history omitted from the narrative of this particular site of injury. This paper argues that the visual intervenes in order to excavate buried histories and latent meanings made invisible by discursive, political, and ideological discourses which have sought to organise meanings for Al-Khiam. How does the visual trace injury and re-imagine possibilities of recovery? To what extent can it recentre the experience of populations violently excluded from ‘the international’? In answering these questions, this paper argues that the artwork of Khalil Joreige and Joana Hadjithomas reassembles fragments of Al-Khiam’s history, excavating individual narratives of incarceration and occupation, while Ahmad Beydoun’s audio-visual recreation of Al-Khiam relocates it within a broader landscape of injury enacted against not only the detainees, but also an entire civilian population. This paper contends that the visual plays a significant role in revealing the political contestations around sites of injury, while reimagining a specific moment in space and time.
