From Point to Point - 2012
When he arrived here, the Lebanese Halim Souki brought with him his degree in humanities from the American University of Beirut and a photographic look that gave our city part of his birth certificate. A man of tradition, he translated what had been scattered forever from his homeland. His bond with the place of origin and its traditions were negotiated with the new culture, through his photographs. A man of hybrid culture, he did not seek for local purity but rather to translate, transfer or transport between frontiers. Translated men are like that, they learn to inhabit two identities, to speak two or more cultural languages, to negotiate and to walk through them. Perhaps this is the question that deeply permeates the works of Adel Souki: the transition or the transit. Legacy of her father. For, as an immigrant, he kept his identity suspended between different positions. His photographs tell us about this. The lenses of Halim Souki weave texture between the sacred and the profane: the carnival, the processions, the parades and corteges, the reign ... Their transits aren’t meant to immobilize the relations of power, but to put in motion the bodies and the spirits of this reality.
In the Stitch to stitch exhibition, Adel Souki evokes this manifestation, but now she continues to the top of her experiments: she transposes for photographs her interventions with lines and snips from her father's origin, the land she did not inhabit. Now she walks toward unity or fusion - in opposition to the profane, the sin, for such courage. She does not seek self-assertion through her father; instead, she undresses herself from previous experiences, she wipes herself out, expropriates herself of the inner experience to seek another dimension: the poetic of traffic.
"My father's land was more within me than I could imagine," Adel said on her first visit to Lebanon, Jordan and Syria. She was searching for her ancestry when she discovered the origin of her work in pottery: houses, tombs, buildings, walls – all dug into the stone more than 12,000 years ago. It was a provocation to know places at such a propitious time, she was afraid to be heard and to want what she did not ask for! To live with small mutations and insignificant traffic movements would mean not leaving things in half. Keeping this love speech would be as difficult as achieving it. The traffic is configured in these small dislocations, between one and another, in the intersection, always present raising signs and gestures.
By appropriating her father's photographs, Adel brings a conception of the covered truth, which becomes visible in a see-not-see, in an image-not-image, making the transit between the visible and the invisible, between the vest and its covers, a game of blindly ticking what should not be mentioned, just indicated. In this game of concealment and unveiling, there is a free look that, to transgress, undresses itself. For only then will we discover the bond that unites the robe and the naked, the truth and its concealment. The decisive action of Adel in the photographs is not an obstacle to the naked eye, on the contrary, it brings the condition of all possible vision.
In this work "Point to Point", Adel seeks a connection with what she lived and saw, through the gaze of her father; she obliges herself to bring what is absent, to make visible what is merely spiritual. This spiritual transitivity is similar to what Klossowski proposes in The Laws of Hospitality: "It is only by giving others a body that belongs to us that we can continue to see it in its outward exteriority."
Just like her father did, Adel puts us in movement. We advance and retreat, hide and desperately unravel, breathe and exhale together, in a transit beyond memory and the present.