The first encounter you have with Emily Jacir鈥檚 work at the Whitechapel Gallery is accompanied by the sound of Mahler鈥檚 Ninth Symphony. What this experience feels like quite depends on which movement coincides with your arrival. The symphony brings together elements of waltzes, but also the solemnity of a funeral march. For some, the work eloquently expresses death鈥檚 sudden arrival.聽For others, it celebrates life.
Jacir鈥檚 work contemplates life and confronts death too. Perhaps none so searchingly as the first work in the show 聽and Jacir鈥檚 best known, Material for a film (2004-). A large-scale installation, it unpicks the final years, days and hours of the life of Palestinian writer Wael Zuaiter. In 1972, Zuaiter was assassinated near his home in Rome, shot 13 times by Mossad agents for a plot of which he was never a part. 12 bullets lodged in his body, the 13th in the spine of a book he planned to translate from Arabic to Italian, One Thousand and One Nights.聽Jacir has imbued the piece with symbolism and poignancy.
What makes a man? What causes聽him to die? In the aftermath of聽Zuaiter鈥檚 death, Jacir traces out possible answers to these questions and lets the viewer come to their own conclusion. As one letter to Zauiter’s聽partner Jean reads, sent by a friend聽after his聽death, 鈥減erhaps the few bits and pieces you told me about him on various occasions gave me an idea of what he was like.鈥 Clues to a person exist and endure regardless of their owner. But as Jacir鈥檚 patient work suggests, ideas are the sum of what we鈥檙e offered.
These are bits and pieces; the parts that start to make up a whole. It implies a casualness which is apt here – Jean has mentioned Zauiter, at this point still alive, to a friend in passing, heedless of what鈥檚 to come. Though the installation features the arbitrary remnants of a man鈥檚 life – a coin he operated his elevator with, postcards, book covers – they have been gathered and laid out with careful purpose. As in all of Jacir鈥檚 work she takes a forensic interest in sequence, and what it might allow us to discern. It鈥檚 anything but casual.
Like the studious Material for a film, the following pieces on show聽again work through ideas of sequence, succession, accumulation and the spaces they leave behind.聽 linz diary (2003) documents, through fuzzy CCTV shots, Jacir鈥檚 daily visits to a square in the Austrian city of Linz. Sometimes she sits, sometimes she curls up in a ball or brandishes an umbrella. Each image is annotated, but despite this, meaning breaks down. What is she doing in Linz? Why this square? There鈥檚 a madness in the method which only emerges as you stop to look. Nothing Will Happen (eight normal Saturdays in Linz) (2003), plays a similar game. Here, she observes the same square but from a new angle, homing in on the moment, at noon each day, when an alarm sounds. As it wails, the pedestrians criss-crossing the square seem unperturbed, continuing to go about their day. Even with repetition, nothing accrues any significance – like the money in Change/Exchange (1998), passed from bureau to bureau, we still, finally, end up with nearly nothing.
Perhaps the work that best sums up our condition as a bystander in Jacir鈥檚 world is ex libris (2010-12). Presenting images of markings left in books: stamps, scribbles, stains, annotations, the viewer is聽obliged to search for meaning and decipher this incomprehensible ephemera. Neatly lined up, they tease the viewer聽with narratives they’ll never understand. Though her art continually probes, it ensures meaning鈥檚 careful elision too. Her meticulous stockpiling – of images, documents, times and dates – in the end just demonstrate the answers we鈥檝e failed to add up. In the end we are powerless. Like the woman in Lydda Airport (2009), we can only stand on the runway, waiting.
Imogen Greenhalgh
Emily Jacir: Europa, until聽3 January,聽Whitechapel Gallery, 77 鈥 82 Whitechapel High Street, London E1 7QX.
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Credits
1. Emily Jacir,聽Lydda Airport,聽2009.聽Installation with single channel animation film and sculpture聽dimensions variable. Photo: Jason Mandella聽漏 Emily Jacir, courtesy Alexander and Bonin, New York.
