Visual Art

Official Selection — International Festival of Films on Art, FIFA. World Premiere during La Nuit du Court at Concordia University.

Screened alongside 21 other short films by artists and directors such as Santiago Sierra Soler, Georges Schwizgebel, Wrik Mead, Laura Bari, and Emilie Racine.

In his film WATER 2, Marc Kandalaft processes his experiences of armed conflicts from the Lebanese Civil War to the 1991 Gulf War in a dense visual narrative. With a subtle blend of neo-pictorialism and surrealism, this film employs a rich palette of visual and auditory sensations, in which water, a key element in Kandalaft’s work, serves as a common thread. Natural elements are used to reflect the ambivalence of the states of existence. Sound composition with echoes of musique concrète and variations in framing and rhythm result in a short film that is both formally and acoustically vivid, hypnotic, and immersive.

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“She (nature) endowed man with a tool-making intelligence. Instead of supplying him with tools, as she did for a considerable number of the animal species, she preferred that he should make them himself. Now man is necessarily the owner of his tools, at any rate while he is using them. But since they are things apart from him, they can be taken away from him; it is easier to take them ready-made than to make them. Above all, they are meant to act on some specific matter, meant to be used for hunting or fishing, for example; the group of which he is a member may have fixed its choice on a forest, a lake, a river; another group may find it more convenient to settle in that very same place than to look further afield. There is now nothing for it but to fight the matter out. (…) But no matter the thing taken, the motive adduced: the origin of war is ownership, individual or collective, and since humanity is predestined to ownership by its structure, war is natural.”

Henri Bergson, The Two Sources of Morality and Religion, Paris, Félix Alcan, 1932.

Official Selection / World Premiere – Musée McCord Stewart – Saturday, March 18, 2023, 1 p.m. via The International Festival of Films on Art FIFA. WATER 1 explores the connection between matter, reality, life, and the absurdity of human thought. Kandalaft uses sound to deceive our senses and inject confusion. Through image he highlights the beauty and complexity of natural elements and their patterns in a style reminiscent of pictorialist photography, where evocative beauty takes precedence over faithful representation of reality.

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Elora Weill-Engerer
Art Critic
Member of AICA

Urban spaces shaped by man and yet entirely unpopulated, by the crudity of their subject matter Marc Kandalaft’s images evoke the approach of Germany’s New Objectivity movement, which often turned its lens on uninhabited industrial spaces. Here the document subsumes the image and the scientific method seeps into the creative process to prioritize, classify, prescribe. Generic topoi, scraps of iron, brick, or clouds of vapor — apparitions that emerge only in the expressive collection of the photographer-wanderer, punctuating the real in a suspension of judgment.

As for capturing wonder, it all depends on the instant. Chance, here, is the first correlate of the image; an image not so much sought out as received by the artist. An alternative thus presents itself to the purely subjective approach, in the sense of the auto-biographical. The systemic dimension of the series married with the simplicity of its composition are far more reminiscent of the principles of the documentary style, as theorized by Olivier Lugon^[1]. At the same time, this signals the capacity of art-documentary acolytes to employ qualities specific to the medium in the interest of a technical originality that nonetheless takes raw material as its theme. This topographic air does nothing to detract from the poetics of the ensemble. On the contrary: the everyday is photogenic, demonstrated by the enigmatic character of these urban motifs, as evocative of almost-cinematic narratives as they are devoid of detail in themselves. Better yet, the play on light and shadow, the grain obtained from a singular process, the tendency to abstraction lend these works a neo-pictorialist accent when we step back to take in the combined effects of the aesthetic’s interference in the real. This only becomes more pronounced in light of the textural aspect of the medium and the atmosphere thus conjured.‍

Marc Kandalaft’s 33 33 33 conjugates photographic processes that tend to oppose each other: the image is taken on film, before being projected digitally, then partially captured on digital camera as a sample and then re-used in video. The pictorial aspect of the work is therefore never the result of any real intervention in the photograph itself, the given effects produced only by the different prisms that modulate the images. 

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Rather than a “pure” objectivity, here objectivity is a process anterior to the capture of the image insofar as it allows for the photographic experience. It is within this delimited system that the artist’s freedom is expressed. The alliance of different grains, sharp and then blurred, the palimpsest double-exposures, cover scenes with an isolating veil. The visual archeology that results offers a host of textures that are to be deciphered like a language. If the stage is bare, humanity subsists in the form of traces, imperceptible marks, as in the quiet emptiness that follows the execution of a perfect crime.

"Land of Chaos and Saints" is a 2017 collection of photographs shot in Lebanon. This series effectively captures the country's complex duality, showcasing both its chaotic, violent side and its mystical side in a poetic and mundane manner. The misty images were captured in Annaya, Saint Charbel's hometown. They add a unique perspective, making it a great reflection of Lebanon's identity.