Next time you’re watching that classic crime comedy ‘The Pink Panther’, tear your eyes away from Peter Sellers for a moment to focus on a suave waiter briefly serving him cocktails. That’s Wael Zuaiter: Palestinian poet, political activist, occasional movie extra and, according to the Israeli secret service, one of the masterminds behind the Black September assassinations of Israeli athletes during the 1972 Olympics. Just a month later, Zuaiter was assassinated by Mossad agents.
It’s this incident that forms the basis for Emily Jacir’s immersive installation, ‘Material for a Film’. Essentially it’s an ongoing research project featuring a vast array of original letters, documents, photographs and audiovisual material (including that ‘Pink Panther’ clip). Winning Jacir the prestigious Golden Lion prize at the 2007 Venice Biennale, it’s a thoroughly fascinating presentation – yet also more than a little problematic. Jacir jumps straight from Zuaiter’s intellectual background to the brutal fact of his killing, largely ignoring the complex debate over the degree of his involvement with terrorist organisations. Also, Jacir herself features as a presence in the project, displaying her own writings and photographs in a way that feels vaguely unnecessary and intrusive.
There are similar issues with other works in the show, where Jacir explores CCTV proliferation in the Austrian town of Linz (where she once lived) or documents an archive of Palestinian-owned books that were looted by Israel in 1948. They’re interesting pieces but marred by the sense of Jacir making editorial interventions – such as the comments she adds to daily CCTV images of herself and the choices she makes in deciding which pages to photograph. The most penetrating works, by contrast, feel far more simple and self-contained. Tracing over all the exposed female skin in a single copy of Vogue being brought into Saudi Arabia, for example, she creates a patchwork like some dark, abstract camouflage.
Gabriel Coxhead