Archival Practices and Narrative Transformation in Arab Art
By Laramie Shubber
Visual history in the Arab world has long been contested. Colonial archives framed the region through orientalist tropes, exoticised imagery and depictions of societies as ‘backwards’, creating documents to justify control and domination. State-led visual cultures often imposed their own ‘official’ narratives, whilst marginalising alternative accounts. The authority to tell the story was rarely led by the people.
It is in this context that contemporary artists and initiatives across the Arab world have turned to personal and ‘official’ archives as material and subject. Their practices go beyond the preservation of memory: they challenge hegemonic narratives and singular ‘truths’, and propose alternative histories rooted in lived experience. In doing so, they reclaim agency, reassert authorship over their own pasts, and open space for imagining futures outside of imposed frameworks.
Archives as Tools of Power
Colonial and state powers have long catalogued people, landscapes, and traditions, attempting to dictate how society is seen, both within and beyond its borders. In deciding what to record and what to leave out, archiving was also a practice in determining history, deciding whose experiences were remembered and whose were erased. Rather than neutral, static documents of history, archives functioned as active story-telling tools which negotiated power, and truth.
For example, the Palestine Exploration Fund was founded in 1865 to undertake ‘research’ that was both evangelical in nature and closely tied to British military operations, reinforcing imperial presence in Palestine. Similarly, in French-occupied Algeria, photography was used to shape how the colony was imagined by citizens in France. While Felix Moulin’s photographs may seem like neutral, historical documents of Algeria in the 1800s, they were carefully crafted images that projected colonial projections and fantasies of Algeria and its people. Likewise, Lehnert & Landrock, a German-Swiss duo, produced staged photographs of North African women in harem scenes, reinforcing orientalist fantasies for European audiences.
These materials, and others similar to it, were used for decades to shape how the region was seen, presenting carefully curated versions of reality. But our understanding of history isn’t fixed. Building on the idea that archives can shape perception and memory, contemporary artists from the region have used archival imagery and documents to question official narratives and explore their construction, reimagining and reclaiming stories in the process.
Fact, Fiction & Official Truth
Lebanese Artist Walid Raad’s Atlas Group exemplifies this approach. A fictional ‘foundation’, the Atlas Group was a project that used fictionalised documents, photographs, and narratives to investigate Lebanon’s civil war and the constructed nature of historical memory.
One such part was ‘Notebooks’ attributed to the imaginary historian Dr. Fadl Fakhouri. Notebook 38 combines photographs of cars that were used as car bombs along with handwritten notes that meticulously detail the explosion, casualties and impact. Another segment of the project ‘My neck is thinner than a hair’, documents the 3,641 car bombs used between 1975 and 1990, using photojournalistic images of the engines to present an ‘official’ perspective. The juxtaposition between ‘official’ documentation and the ‘Dr’s’ notebooks shows the fragility of relying on what we’re told is official truth. It highlights how archives are not unbiased records of history but are used in constructions of narratives. Meanwhile, Notebook 72, Missing Lebanese Wars, portrays members of different sects gambling at the racetrack in the midst of the civil war, creating a strikingly paradoxical and darkly humorous contrast to the surrounding violence.
The Atlas Group project exemplifies how artistic practice can destabilise official accounts of history, questioning the authority of archives and the reliability of documented narratives.
Like Raad, Akram Zaatari examines the authority of archives, viewing them as living documents where history is continuously reexamined and written. The artist and co-founder of the Arab Image Foundation explores the interaction between archival material and contemporary reproductions, asking how “personal narratives meet historical moments”. His approach emphasises the continuity and fluidity of narrative and describes the Arab Image Foundation as not a place that only preserves the past but a space for continual research and engagement with the archives, creating new encounters with the photographs and documenting history. In a sense the archival images become their own living beings, constantly evolving and influencing meaning.
Reclaiming Memory
Beyond fictionalised or organised archives, other contemporary projects explore how personal archives mediate memory and lived experience.
Irish-Iraqi artist Basil Al Rawi’s work concerns different perceptions of reality and collective memory. His House of Memory and the Iraq Photo Archive Project uses personal archives to reconstruct a more nuanced picture of life in Iraq. For Iraq, a place that conjures thoughts of war, destruction and suffering for many, the Iraq Photo Project has a poignant purpose. Described as a “space of representation where authentic images of Iraq life can be shared and celebrated”, it brings personal narratives and the diaspora to the forefront of telling Iraq’s story. The House of Memory takes these archives a step further by immersing audiences in a virtual reality experience, emphasising the live quality of these images and stories rather than framing them as relics of the past. In doing so, the virtual space becomes home to a digital community.
Similarly, Tanya Traboulsi uses her camera and personal archives to explore Beirut’s layered histories. Having been forced to leave the city as a child during the civil war, returning after it ended, in Beirut, Recurring Dream, she layers archival material with contemporary images. By engaging her personal archives alongside her photography taken recently she juxtaposes memory, social history, change and also the constant, creating a dialogue between the past and present, and the different histories that are experienced in Beirut. Her work particularly emphasises the phenomenological experience of these spaces and how they are inhabited and remembered by those who passed through them.
Finally, initiatives such as the Middle East Archive (first an Instagram page and now a publishing platform) reimagine everyday life in the MENA region, pushing back against orientalist and narrow portrayals. The photobooks challenge the media’s focus on conflict and bring lived experience to the forefront by highlighting ordinary moments and spaces, showing how everyday imagery can reshape collective memory and popular narratives. The images lie at the intersection of personal, community, and national memory and reveal the multiplicity of perspectives that constitute Arab visual histories.
Archives as Agents of Narrative Transformation
Far from being neutral, archives are powerful tools. They aren’t just static records to be preserved but living resources that can be used to challenge, rethink and retell histories. Archival practices enable artists to foreground marginalised voices, negotiate contested identities, and produce new ways of understanding the Arab world. In this way, archives become items of power and influence, showing how visual culture can reshape collective memory and make space for multiple accounts of the past.
Basil Al Rawi’s community-driven projects and the Arab Image Foundation emphasise the role of collective memory in reconstructing identity from dispersed or marginalised sources, while Tanya Traboulsi’s layering of personal and contemporary imagery underscores how individual experience contributes to broader social narratives, while also offering a phenomenological perspective on a lived and experienced past. Initiatives like the Middle East Archive extend this work and challenge narrow media portrayals by foregrounding everyday life across the region. Similarly, Walid Raad’s Atlas Group interrogates the authority of official archives while Akram Zaatari treats archival material as a living, evolving record of history.
Together, these projects and artists reclaim control over how their histories are told, shaping not only how we remember the past but how we understand the present.