I wake from history, alive

Two parallel solo shows: Ala Younis, Battles in a Future Estate: Haifa Street & Vangelis Vlahos, An Index of Νο Events

An image within an image, an event within an event, a word within a word, a museum within a museum: objects and occurrences in time overlap, layer and fold gently into one another.

In the conflicted historical moment we live in, haunted by geopolitical impasses with unresolved tensions experienced as a seemingly constant loop, breakthroughs into new ground seem elusive. Two artists from the same generation and broader region invite us to rethink our relationship with the past. Two parallel solo shows at TAVROS by artists Vangelis Vlahos and Ala Younis offer us fresh historical perspectives. Through their labyrinthine pursuit of exactitude, they explore the architectural, social and geopolitical reverberations spanning forty years in Greece and Iraq. Each artist develops their own methodology for examining historical events but shares a common strategy: focusing on often ignored details to piece together a larger picture. 

Through their commitment to meticulous archival research—gathering every possible trace, from publications and printed press to visual documents, hearsay, and newsreels—they take on the Sisyphean task of reliving history to awaken it.  “The past is never dead. It’s not even past.”[1] William Faulkner’s words feel particularly prescient vis-à-vis Younis and Vlahos’ practices, which bring clarity to the heavyweight arena of history—its frames, who frames it, and for whom. Their work doesn’t resurrect ruins, but methodically lays out, step by step, the convoluted workings of historical structures, the lives lived and lost, the minutiae that compose a web of correlated, interrelated, causal social infrastructures. These, in turn, shape the politics of existence, of where we are and who we are today, as glimmering reflectors of our many pasts. 

An Index of No Events, Vangelis Vlahos

Vangelis Vlahos’ work is an exercise in understatement. Contained, controlled, precise, yet filled with surreptitious uncertainties that creep up on you unawares, quietly allowing for a form of cognitive turbulence. Let’s start by dissecting the exhibition title, and the word ‘event’. Who decides what constitutes an event in a historical continuum, where it begins or ends, the ‘eventness,’ if you like, of an event? Is it a noun that imagines itself as a verb, or vice versa? Does an event occur, fall out of the sky like a meteorite, or what are the forces of agency that allow it to happen? Can a life, any life, mine or yours, be an event? An index of events suggests pinpointing, a selection, list, a potential hierarchy (of those included as well as those excluded). An indexical finger points out these are the events worth taking note of. The title is suggestive of more open endings, that loop outward in a form of conceptual entropy that counters the negentropy of the index itself. The No is a reminder of an everyday calendar with only blank entries.  Meanwhile ambiguities hover over the precision of words, as “an” offers the potentiality of more than one index. As Derrida posited, “to decide if there is an event, story, story of an event, or event of a story”.[2] Well, that is a question. 

Events, then, in Vlahos’ work function as a form of punctuation (a question mark?) in a timeline of ordinariness. In An Index of No Events, a series of political circumstances that took place in post-dictatorship Greek history, ranging from 1981 to 2024, oftentimes with broader regional geopolitical resonances, become an entry point into thinking through recent political histories. In an aversion to emotive responses to the past, Vlahos deftly realigns our attention to details: a folder full of papers, a political subtext, a seemingly insignificant persona, a subplot of a subplot, and more often than not, language, utilized deftly as a useful decoy. By honing in on language, and visualizing text which functions as scripts or transcripts of ‘events,’ Vlahos allows the audience to become both a community of ‘readers’ as well as embodied participants in what amounts to a three-dimensional walk-in publication. Whilst seemingly innocently avoiding the drama or hyperbole of political narratives and current affairs, Vlahos allows for a subtle dramatisation that borrows heavily from cinematic tropes—with their pregnant pauses and use of time filled with foreboding. Language is consistently portrayed as neutral, black ink on paper (or ink shadows of actual events), ‘official’ documents that coyly ignore the multiple layers of subjectivity that inform the works. The audience brings their viewpoint, the timbre of their voice as they read, the references that they carry with each political circumstance, allowing for the impossibility of neutrality through their own class, gender, age, life experiences. Nevertheless, language, whether in printed form or scrolling down a screen, stands in for popular, generic or even national histories saturated by iconic images and becomes, instead, the foundation block of historical meaning. Language asserts itself both as a form of institutional bureaucratic power, whilst at the same time hinting at the fragile fault lines in between. It is through language, its precision and graphic abstraction, that Vlahos asks us to pay close attention to details that lead to a larger whole. And it is this attention that doesn’t allow the dust to rest, which doesn’t relegate our pasts to the past, or as poet Anne Carson understands it, “Attention is a task we share, you and I. To keep attention strong means to keep it from settling”.[3] 

As we follow the timeline of political events presented by Vlahos in the exhibition, we notice that they are untitled. Instead, they are headed by the date of the event: starting on the left by the day, date and then year. These choices edify Vlahos’ strategy of de-dramatization. The flow of time, marked by days and dates, appears commonplace, yet we know that from their selection, they must have impacted the chronicles of our time. Vlahos is not a historian, he doesn’t classify or critique, his work is more akin to that of an archaeologist. He unearths the past, bringing it to the surface, making it visible. On the last page of the printed material that accompanies the exhibition, there is a list linking all the various categories and characters that are referred to in the works on display: from Konstantinos Mitsotakis to Yasser Arafat to the Hilton Hotel. The list is now there for all of us to see. It’s up to us then to make the connections.   

Battles in a Future Estate: Haifa Street, Ala Younis 

Two seemingly contrasting images, of the many that overlap in Younis’ research: Palestinian-American artist Samia Halaby’s oil painting Kansas City Studio (1966) and video stills of the war-torn Saddam Centre for the Arts and its exhibition in 2003, where artworks surviving, or reflecting on, the looting of the museum, were displayed, in place, however, not all intact. The first image, a painting of the artist’s studio housing a few models next to their depictions in painted works, spheres and boxes appear repeatedly, a center and whole, fragmented, one painting propping up another, creating a closed circuit revolving around itself, folding in, as far as the eye can see. The next one, a poor digital image from a recording, video-still, of Iraqi modernist sculptures strewn on a long thin white fabric on the floor of a devastated museum amid debris. Picture these two images: they both speak to different forms  of collapse—one imaginary, the other all too real—a collapse of viewpoints, modernism, histories, and the multiple perspectives in between. 

These images, amongst an exhaustive collection of others, are critical components of Ala Younis’ ongoing project Battles in a Future Estate: Haifa Street. Through her long-term meticulous investigation, she has amassed an encyclopedic number of references, architectural plans, photographic documentation, texts and videos, through which four historically consequential decades of the urban and architectural project of Haifa Street in central Baghdad unfold. These four decades function as a palimpsest for a broader narrative, where Haifa street becomes the crux for unlocking several chapters of modern Arab history, and its ripple effects around the globe. Younis insists on incorporating a maximum number of viewpoints, with multiple protagonists and histories, avoiding one dominant storyline whilst still acknowledging the overwhelming persistence of hegemonic narratives. 

In Younis’ forensic investigation, the interlocking contexts that brought about the design and implementation of Haifa street—where oil politics, the Iraq war (clear turning points in its history),  nationalism and internationalism intersect—are reflected in the ambitious architectural and urban plans of the city, its construction, the changing usage over the decades and its survival. 

“Why such a forest of concrete walls?” Saddam Hussein wondered on one of his visits to Haifa Street while under construction in the early 1980s.[4] Indeed, it was only after assuming his presidency in 1979 that the largest urban project on Haifa Street, one of the central arteries of Baghdad city, was ignited. The plan included the construction of eight large-scale high-rise buildings, each to be developed by international architectural and construction firms, with the long-term goal of hosting a non-aligned movement summit in Baghdad. The construction of these complexes took place during the Iran-Iraq war, accompanied by the government slogan: “One hand builds, the other battles”. It is these concrete walls—the very ones Hussein spoke of—the physicality of the construction materials, the fittings, and architectural elements, that Younis foregrounds in the current exhibition. Each structure and design material reflects broader historical narratives: from international architecture firms to plans put in place to maintain these buildings to assure recycling of materials when needed, such as in the sanctions’ era in the 1990s, from the museum structure affected by war to the costs of refitting the domestic apartments for renting in a post-war Iraqi economy. In one soliloquy in Younis’ video lecture (a key element in her output on Haifa Street), she reveals how an architectural colonnade designed for shade and visually linking the multi-part project along the street, was later used during Haifa Street battles between the Iraqi militias and the US army (2006-2008), to shelter from bullets. Searching through the walls unskinned by war, Younis delves further into architectural and construction details (such as piping, sockets, plumbing, insulation materials), zooming in closer than the eye can see. She borrows this from the process of looking in virtual reality games, where vision infinitely searches for a vanishing point. Detail can transform into the vastness of abstraction, the minute and the infinite loop back onto each other, in correlation, telling a more complex story. 

This infinite imagery, and the resistance to the pitfalls of perspective that Younis argues “betray reality,” appear in a series of textiles produced for the exhibition in Athens. Each textile is emblematic of a specific phase of Haifa Street, interwoven with multilayered images within images, collaged with a myriad of sources, to the point where the flatness of the material intersects with the depth of references and the multiple vantage points of Younis’ research. In one of the textiles, cropped images appear as if hung in a museum display, each one showing a fragment of the history of the Saddam Centre for the Arts. Inspired by a painting produced to restage one of its opening receptions in 1986 with Saddam Hussein and the Centre’s female director (killed in a US airstrike on Baghdad in 1993) and put up in the museum, the textiles uses the historical imagery as if exhibited again on the walls of the museum, along with works from its collection, to create the infinite cycles of imagery within imagery. Critically, the textile appears to have a structure within a structure grafted inside, so that the museum space within the textile ultimately leads only back onto itself. Architectural space, historical references, memories and time once again collide. 

Battles in a Future Estate refers not only to the construction and military battles that took place within and amongst the buildings on Haifa Street, including images of American soldiers brutally raiding civilian apartments, but also to the post-war media battle over what stories these images tell, who tells them and where they lead us, if anywhere—from Haifa Street in Baghdad, Iraq, and  perhaps also to the rest of the world.

[1] William Faulkner, Requiem for a Nun (New York: Random House, 1951), 73.

[2] Jacques Derrida, Demeure: Fiction and Testimony, trans. Elizabeth Rottenberg (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2000), 28.

[3] Anne Carson, Note on Method, In Economy of the Unlost (New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1999), 4.

[4] Ala Younis, Battles in a Future Estate: Haifa Street, video lecture, 2018.