A Review of Siwar Masannat’s Cue — June 20, 2024 by Alyse Knorr
Siwar Masannat’s second collection, Cue, is a multimodal, multilingual wonder that employs a compressed, experimental lyric voice and extensive collage to explore questions of the private vs. the public, the performativity of gender, and the ethics of art-making. Masannat’s ever-surprising syntax is often inverted or punctuation-less, imbuing each line with sacredness and playfulness, reverence and dreaminess—a dance of dichotomies that refuses to land on any binary. Cue blends English and Arabic to juxtapose compact bursts of poetry and prose, artistic erasures, and photographs from an art project by Lebanese artist Akram Zaatari called Hashem El Madani: Studio Projects.
Zaatari is the co-founder of the Arab Image Foundation (AIF), a Beirut-based non-profit that has, since 1997, dedicated itself to preserving the photographic heritage of the Middle East and North Africa, with a focus on collecting and restoring photographs that document the region’s cultural history. The AIF has accumulated hundreds of thousands of photographs for its archive, including a substantial body of work by Hashem El Madani (1928–2017), a Lebanese photographer who captured more than 75,000 photographs between the 1940s and 1970s in his (and Zaatari’s) hometown of Saida. Madani claims to have photographed 90% of Saida’s mostly working-class population, and while some of his photos record a more documentary sense of everyday life in Saida, most of his photographs are portraits taken on commission at his studio. Zaatari’s art project treats Madani’s body of work as a site of artistic excavation and archaeological research through which to study the societal role of the photographer, as well as the power dynamics between photographer and subjects. And, in turn, Masannat’s book takes Zaatari’s project and many other texts as a source of excavation for her own work.
From Madani’s archive, Zaatari selected portraits of people of all ages, striking a variety of poses that incorporate a variety of costumes and props that Madani provided to his clients. The photographs Masannat includes in her book represent an even more narrow selection, almost all of which represent queerness or somehow suggest queerness. They include, among others, women kissing or about to kiss, two men staging a mock wedding portrait, two women staging a mock wedding portrait , and a male couple cuddling intimately. This selection reveals Masannat’s core concern with the photography studio as a place of gender performance, where the photographer both documents and pushes the limits on social ritual and gender norms, and the clients navigate a fraught relationship between private and public identity. In Cue, Masannat explores how Madani’s archive serves as a “site of libidinal investment” for herself and for Zaatari, and notes, by way of scholar Tarek el-Ariss, that Madani has likely arranged his scenes with the precision of a choreographer. “Could the choreographer be an excavator too of the subject’s playful desires?” Masannat asks, and in so doing, excavates queer desire from the archive just as Zaatari first excavated the photos from Madani’s studio and Madani himself, in Masannat’s estimation, excavated the subjects’ desires in the process of photographing them.
Masannat’s poetic practice thus creates an effect of doorways opening into doorways opening into more doorways, burrowing deeper and deeper into artistic reference and reproduction, homage and critique and celebration. It is as if Masannat wants to cut straight to the source—to the point of singularity at the center of the black hole of art—and consider the people in the photographs not just as artistic subjects but as three-dimensional individuals with internal thoughts, desires, and dreams lost now to the ages. In Cue, Masannat is documenting a documentary project, which makes this book, in many ways, a work of meta-documentary.
Parallel to Zaatari’s practice of artistic archaeology, and with a nod to Michel Foucault’s epistemological archaeology in The Order of Things, Masannat conducts an extensive linguistic and philosophical archaeology of her own in Cue, drawing from sources as disparate as a 14th-century Egyptian encyclopedia and an episode of Bojack Horseman. She collages language from poets Joy Harjo, Emily Dickinson, and Lorine Niedecker, as well as from scholars, biologists, filmmakers, medieval Arab philosophers, and members of Lebanon’s contemporary queer community as told through oral history. The words of Etel Adnan make many appearances, as well as references to Indonesia’s third-gender peoples.
But it is Zaatari’s photographs that are the beating heart of Cue. Masannat is interested in non-linear, layered practices of artistic transmission and translation, asking, in a poetic dialogue with Zaatari’s and Madani’s artistic practices: What happens to a work of art after it’s created? What does it become? How does it take on a life of its own? What is gained when you understand the history behind the work, how it was made, and how it made its way to us today?
Building on Butler’s theories of gender performativity, Masannat questions whether an artist can ever accurately capture intimacy and identity, or whether this is an inherently impossible, or even unethical, project. She demonstrates how Madani’s photos blur the dichotomy between public and private, revealing a “hiding-in-plain sight” everyday gender fluidity. Indeed, in some ways, queerness in these photographs is rendered extremely legibly and publicly: the subjects gaze directly at the camera, unabashedly embracing each other in kisses or “just-married” embraces. In other ways, however, their queerness is covered up by the fact that their intimacy takes place on a stage, performed by actors in costumes (or disguises) with props. “Cue,” of course, can mean a memory aid, a trigger for action, or, most importantly for this book, a signal to a performer to enter the stage or deliver a line. Perhaps in the studio, Masannat seems to postulate, secret truths can be revealed by individuals finally free enough—or choreographed enough—to reveal them.
There is an elegiac quality to the black and white portraits that appear throughout Cue—and a tragic longing inherent in Masannat’s address to their subjects, whom she will never meet. Her deep tenderness toward these individuals is most movingly evident in her address to a tailor named Ahmad El-Abed, for whom Masannat imagines an open queer life and love: “i must confess i am searching for that sugary playfulness.” Masannat’s speaker then places her own life alongside Ahmad’s, recalling her own childhood experiences and imagining and confessing things to Ahmad with a clear longing to have had the chance to know him. She notes, too, that either Madani posed him or he posed himself to appear more feminine. A question at the crux of the book’s exploration of identity construction—Is the Ahmad we see in Madani’s photographs the performance, the disguise, or the revealed authentic self?
To complicate this question further, as the book goes on, Masannat’s speaker positions herself as or alongside the photographic subjects. For instance, after a poem that contains a personal childhood memory involving a radio, Masannat includes a photograph of a little girl beside a radio. On another page, alongside a sensual, somewhat campy photo of a bodybuilder named Reesh flexing in his underwear, the speaker relates to Reesh’s body in a moment of gender fluidity that reaffirms how the photograph operates as a site of imaginative queer potential: “often i = muscular dude i am not bodied like reesh but you could have imagined too how i imagine (t)his = my body.”
Queer longings of this sort permeate the book. One page is empty of all text except the single line: “i want to be genderless.” On another equally stark empty page floats the expression: “men think they own masculinity.” Equally pervasive are expressions of queer love and desire, many of which appear impossible or at least unfulfilled. “i once fell in love with a woman’s eyes for an entire week—i was delirious with it,” Masannat writes, an expression that concludes: “though i never did ask to gather her nor her laughs in my arms.” What is amazing about this collision of the speaker’s personal desires with the impersonal faces of strangers from an archive is the fact that the photographs come to contain heartbreaking regret, hopeful potentiality, and re-imagined history all at once.
Ultimately, the queer kinship Masannat develops for Madani’s photographic subjects is part of a larger concern with questions of photographic, and more generally, artistic ethics around power and control. How much agency does a subject have in how they are represented? How does the photographer construct or co-construct identity with his subject? Can identity be authentically documented in a subject who is “performing” for the camera? Who is disguised and who is disguising? Who controls what is private or public?
As early as the third page of the book, Masannat dives into these questions by quoting from Madani himself:
my father is sheikh mohammad el madani, a religious authority he was asked once: your son is practicing photography. isn’t it a sin? he said: when one stands near a pool of water and sees one’s reflection in it, this is photography. there is no harm in it. this is not a sin. this is a transfer of an image.
Here, Masannat asserts that the artist can guiltlessly take photographs because no matter what he is pointing his lens at, it is only his own reflection that he ultimately reproduces. In other words, the artist always appears in the work, even when he doesn’t exist within the camera’s frame. On the other hand, when Masannat writes “no vase nor vessel fit to an entire flower’s spirit,” she conveys the idea that the subjects of a photograph will never completely fit their “vessel”—the photograph itself. The spirit of the original can never be fully encompassed by the medium of photography—or any other art form, for that matter. It will always joyfully elude, playfully escape, or violently burst out of whatever artistic form attempts to contain or capture it.
Zaatari himself is fascinated by similar questions of power in photographic practice. He has stated that by exhibiting Madani’s photographs in art galleries, he understands that he has radically re-contextualized them from their original purpose as personal artifacts not meant for public display. As his career progressed, Zaatari became increasingly disillusioned with the practice of collecting, archiving, and exhibiting, to the point of quitting the AIF board. He stated in a 2020 MOMA interview that he is less concerned now with preserving the object of a photograph itself and more with preserving the emotions involved in the photograph. He has speculated that the truest act of preservation might lie in returning rather than “taking” pictures—a practice he literally enacted by returning forty-two original photographs back to the Saida sites where they were first taken, forty to sixty years after their creation.
Masannat engages with these ethical concerns in many moments, one of which is the mention of a photographer who refused to give Zaatari his photographic negatives for the AIF. The photographer believed this would constitute an act of betrayal against his clients, who had not given him permission to share their photographs with a stranger. Through her careful consideration of Madani’s photographs, his subjects, and Madani himself, Masannat thus asks: what does an artist owe their subjects? Privacy? Confidentiality? Consent? Today, Zaatari seems regretful that he collected photographs for the AIF from people hesitant to give them, an idea that Masannat explores with the lines: “there is here always a question of consent: means a mystical belief that you and i consented to being created that you and i as recipients of the act of creation participated each in a verb of our own coming to be(ing).” Interestingly, Masannat is equally concerned with the dangers of violating an individual’s privacy as she is with the inherent narcissism or “desire for disavowal in the context of disguise” (El-Ariss’s words) wrapped up in the impulse to be photographed. All along, her speaker experiences these issues of posing and performativity in a very personal way, stating at one point: “i bump against all adjacent / selves i’ve shed and reworn, / picked up and apart.”
And so, just as Zaatari seeks to return photographs to their original owners and locations, Masannat in Cue returns Madani’s portraits back to their lost queer subjects and honors the dead—by speaking with them, lovingly contextualizing them, offering them back their dignity.
