January 18–May 4, 2008

 

F A Z A L   S H E I K H   b. New York, 1965

Photographed in various refugee camps occupied by displaced Afghans, Fazal Sheikh's images of hands holding small portraits of young men plays on the nature of social and private memory. The photographs incubate other images, the real images one must scrutinize in this conversation between the living and the dead. They push the archive toward a zone of both unbearable loss and familial tenderness, feelings rarely applied to those who may be generically labeled terrorists in the current political climate. Sheikh, however, does not stand in judgment. The images serve as both testaments and sites of vigilance. They stand in defiance of the events that threaten to swallow up the individual’s memories of loved ones, who seem to have been irretrievably lost but must be constantly remembered as emblems of injustice, nobility, and martyrdom. Against the edicts of forgetting, Sheikh's photographs of hands holding tiny passport images of lost or dead family members hover in the gray zone between remembrance and commemoration. The hands extend to the viewer images of sons and brothers, those who—the captions tell us, based on the testimony of their beloved—have been martyred. The hands reach out, as if to touch us with a searing memory, in gestures of affection that are nonetheless marked by the daunting affliction of death.

 

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