ABSTRACT
The ideas of collection and preservation presume to offer slices of the past in the present and to keep them for the future. They promise immortality. As such, they reflect a modern discomfort with death brought on by the violent destruction of the present engaged through modernity itself particularly during the nineteenth century – the era when museums and the romance of archaeology became a central element in the formulation of collective public culture. Rather than allowing material culture to re-emerge in cycles of appropriation and reuse, as they have across the centuries, modern practices and institutions such as archaeology and museums aim to collect and freeze time in an apparently cryonic hope that some future people will know how to bring the frozen forms of the past to life again. Yet human cryonics has had a limited following, and what following it once has partly be superseded by the promise of genetic cloning. Such resurrection, known as restoration, has long been standard fare in re-presenting the past for the exploration of the present.
Yet interest in such representation has always had a niche following: without engagement in the present, the obsession with bringing the dead to life can seem like a peculiar enterprise. It should come as no surprise, then, that the intimate ties between archaeology and national identity in the middle east, fraught with ethnic erasures, incursions on private property, and association with totalitarian leaders, has often not captured the popular imagination. In the Middle East, where archaeology and museums emerged as part of the colonial enterprise and persisted as part of an ideological association between modern states and ancient peoples, regard for the past has always been intimately tied with politics of the present.
In light of the strategic inefficacy of calls to protect World Heritage in the face of wanton destruction under conditions of war, this chapter explores how preservation can function outside of the cryonic paradigm. It focuses on two distinct artistic practices which have engaged with legacies stored in the museum. Citing the work of Mahmud Mukhtar (Egypt), Cemal Tollu (Turkey), and Jawad Salim (Iraq) first introduces the positive appropriation of antiquity in the modern art of emerging nation states in the mid-twentieth century Middle East. It then contrasts this with the research-based practices of contemporary artists who use antiquity as a means of critically approaching the relationships between preservation and waste, local and global land rights, and historical and cultural memory. Such artists include, but are not limited to, the work of Michael Rakowitz (USA), Sinem Disli (USA/Turkey), Subodh Gupta (India), Lida Abdul (Afghanistan), Kutlug Ataman (Turkey), and Morehsin Allahyari (USA/Iran).
Contrasting the relationship between the museum archive and artistic production of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, this chapter asks what if, instead of freezing the past and planning to thaw it in the future, instead of reproducing the past in the present and playing make-believe, we enable dynamic processes to recycle the past into the present? How can text, technology and contemporary art preserve the past in living forms enabling multiple cultural actors? This chapter argues that without a dynamic practice of cultural incorporation, the archive of the museum does not simply preserve the objects frozen within it; it freezes ideologies of their collection rooted in racial, colonial, and national practices which no longer fit many contemporary discourses.
