Rasha Salti

On Seeing and Archives: Thinking Historically and Critically

14 April 2025

Past Disquiet looks at a chapter in our modern history where militants could not imagine conducting their struggle without artists and artists were fully engaged in political struggles. Historisizing images and documents implies exploring their production as well as their dissemination, and this is how the network of international solidarity began to emerge and draw cartographies that challenge the canons of “center” and “periphery”. The lot of images and photographs that we collected, compelled us to trace another level of their dissemination: paintings, drawings and lithographs became posters, book covers, postcards as well as murals. In other words, there is an iconographic archive and narrative to our modern political struggles, composed of images, art works, exhibitions, collections and practices. And reversely, collective memory as well as political subjectivity are composed of images as much as they are composed of stories, keywords and ideological paradigms. Images outlive their authors, their stories of genesis and the ideological context in which they emerge, what happens when their stories are forever lost?

Required Reading:

Past Disquiet PDF: The relevant texts in the book are the chapters by Jérôme Bazin, Jelena Vesic, Dominika Blachnicka-Ciacek, Katarzyna Matul,  Sara Catenacci and Catherine Dossin.

Rasha Salti is a researcher, writer and curator of art and film. Together with Kristine Khouri she has co-curated with Kristine Khouri the exhibition Past Disquiet at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Barcelona (MACBA), at the Haus der Kulturen der Welt (HKW) in Berlin, in 2016, at the Museo de la Solidaridad Salvador Allende (MSSA) in Santiago de Chile and at the Sursock Museum  (Beirut) in 2018, at the Palais de Tokyo (Paris, 2024) and at Framer Framed (Amsterdam, 2025).