Can you capture the future in a photograph? The answer, of course, is no. You can, however, detail individuals on the edge of it. This is seen most strikingly in war photography where people living on a pinhead simultaneously grapple with an untenable reality, a chaotic past and an encroaching future more acutely than us who wander through galleries or scroll our phones.
Lebanese-born American/Palestinian photographer Rania Matar, in her new exhibition “Where Do I Go?,” attempts to get as close to photographing the future as she can, not by divination, but by questioning.
The show is the inaugural exhibit at the new RKG x SEA-DAR Project Space in Boston’s SoWa District. Robert Klein Gallery, the famed institution dedicated to showing photographs, has collaborated with the Boston-based construction company, SEA-DAR, to establish a new space to view some of the world’s greatest photographic images. It will house this collection of nearly 20 years of Matar’s work until September 19.
“Where Do I Go?” is Matar’s reflection on the Lebanese Civil War, the 15-year-long conflict fought out by an assortment of different domestic and international actors; just one example of the proxy warfare that constituted the jumbled map of Cold War intrigue. With this history, Matar’s title is all the more provoking: Where does a state and its people move to next after such prolonged suffering and abuse? The civil war began 50 years ago. The Lebanese people have had little peace since, as the latest ongoing invasion by the state of Israel that began this past March has starkly shown.