In 1997, photographer Radwan Matar did many photo sessions with actress/singer Haifa Wehbeh. These are photos, which Haifa would distribute copies of to different magazines and newspapers. In this work, Zaatari painted Radwan’s silhouette twice using two contact contact prints as canvas; once in black on white and another time in white on black, using RGB acrylic paint.

Akram Zaatari has produced more than fifty films and videos, a dozen books, and countless installations of photographic material, all sharing an interest in writing histories, pursuing a range of interconnected themes, subjects, and practices related to excavation, political resistance, the lives of former militants, the legacy of an exhausted left, the circulation of images in times of war, and the play of tenses inherent to various letters that have been lost, found, buried, discovered, or otherwise delayed in reaching their destinations. Zaatari has played a critical role in developing the formal, intellectual, and institutional infrastructure of Beirut’s contemporary art scene. He was one of a handful of young artists who emerged from the delirious but short-lived era of experimentation in Lebanon’s television industry, which was radically reorganized after the country’s civil war. As a co-founder of the Arab Image Foundation, a groundbreaking, artist-driven organization devoted to the research and study of photography in the Arab world, he has made invaluable and uncompromising contributions to the wider discourse on preservation and archival practice. He was part of Documenta13 in 2012 and represented Lebanon at the Venice biennial in 2013.