Eternal Ghost, Cedric Bardawil (6 June – 12 July 2025)

THE OUTLINE

Courtesy of Raed Yassin and Cedric Bardawil, Photographer: Peter Otto, 2025

“The Company of Silver Spectres” (2021-an ongoing), vintage commemorative photographs transformed by spraying their surfaces with highly saturated paint covering with a layer of colour, the captured images gain slightly out-of-focus spectral appearance, ghostly images gain off a sense of haunting presence as if they were appearing from a great distance. Raed Yassin began to collect discarded black and white photographs years ago following the loss of his family photographs during the Lebanese Civil War (1975-1990). Initially of Lebanese or Arab world origin, now photographs share their “orphaned” status.

”Phantom” (2023), an unlit neon. Neon tubes full of potentiality of gas residing inside. While not alight, it is burning internally. Phantom of hidden energy. “Phantom” is in working order in a sense that neon tubes are full of gas. The potentiality of change and an ongoing transformation of the substance inside, gives off a slightly uncanny, discomforting presence. As if the spectre was hiding, ready to go off. Things dead are never gone.

“Eternal Ghost”, LP commissioned for the exhibition , performed by the artist at the beginning of the exhibition, left playing for the duration of the show, adding sonic presence to spatial memorium created out of the gallery space. Music performed once has returned to stay, persistently calling out. Its rhythm, repetitive, underlying the space, calls, like a persistent haunting

Ali Shamseddine. Poetry reading.

Ali Shamseddine is a Lebanese-British poet and translator, born in 1979. He lives in London and regularly contributes articles and translations to various cultural newspapers and platforms

Other Works:

“Humming in Abandoned Places” (2020)

Recorded sonic performance. Video shows people dissonantly humm in abandoned locations. Taking in the air, breath-like song. Experiencing trance-like state of controlled, particular respiration that humming is. Somehow an introspective vibration. A shared wave.

“Floor Plan of a Cycle” (2024)

Work manifests instances of memory recall achieved by marking the outline of the location of Yassin’s fathers assasination during the Lebanese Civil War (1975-1990).

remembrance(n.) remember(v.)

Remember implies that a thing exists in the memory, not that it is actually present in the thoughts at the moment, but that it recurs without effort. Recollect means that a fact, forgotten or partially lost to memory, is after some effort recalled and present to the mind. Remembrance is the store-house, recollection the act of culling out this article and that from the repository. The words, however, are often confounded, and we say we cannot remember a thing when we mean we cannot recollect it.

[Century Dictionary, 1895]

“Burial is an unsettled dust”

Ali Shamseddine *

PHOTOGRAPHS AND THE DEAD

There are scores of photographs. Collected over the years. Picked at flea markets, spotted on ebay, found, bought or obtained. Black and white, posed, following certain aesthetics. Commemorating moments in life, family entanglements, passages and achievements. Commemorating those departed. Exhibited in the family home. To remember. To recall.

Discarded. Left behind. Orphaned. With no memory, no ties, no reference. No family, no friends, no relationships.

Grainy images barely discernible under a saturated layer of colour. Our eye searches for the outlines. Looking for the details. Fine lines creating a face. For a presence. To emerge from. To be recognised. Resurfacing through the paint. Hidden below. Manifesting. Repetition of becoming.

The photos are not specific to Levant, even though many have connections to the Arab world pointing clearly to history and the neo-colonial context of the region and artist’s personal experience. We all have photos like this, some belonging to long departed relatives, some of people we do not recognise. They mark line of generations making family, an umbilical cord of ancestral record, relationships and memorials, rites of passage and moments of love. The way people are seated, posed, and finally, preserved away makes me think how photos like this belong to historic thinking, a time where a singular family line belonged to an even longer, omnipotent line of history. A line marked by punctuation of moments. Life marked by events. Like war. A series of events that tear relationships apart and make people posed in the photographs have fallen through a crack in time with no one left to remember them. Snapshots of the past with no one to recall them. The dead who have no one to return to. Specters with no one left to haunt.

Frozen moment no longer recognised.

These transformed photographs are like images of loved ones lost and slowly forgotten. People, faces, gestures, emotions hovering under layer of saturated colour. Ghosts. As time passes their features blur, lose their fine definition, sometimes becoming nothing more than the glimpse of a smile, an outline of a cheek, a detail of finger, once often held, as if there was eternity attached to this hand forever. At some point they become a mere resonance, a glimpse in the corner of your eye, a sensation of being with someone that we almost remember, but can never quite recall.

The photographs have been disposed of their belonging, their familiarity. They do not come from a specific place or group, Their shared origin is that of an orphanage. From anonymous rejects, a waste, they are given a different status. They become. hauntings, specters unanchored .

As if the photographs, the people photographed, and their loved ones, were all victims of strange displacement. Separated from their custodians in a similar manner as people are displaced from their place in collective and individual memory. We live in a world populated by ghosts, moving between one haunted life to another.

As we are trying to reconstruct the painted over image, we think of lives behind faces. “It is like bringing back the dead somehow, from memories that are frozen in time,” 1.

CAMERA LUCIDA

“. . . And the person or thing photographed is the target, the referent, a kind of little simulacrum, any eidolon emitted by the object, which I should like to call the Spectrum of the Photograph, because this word retains, through its root, a relation to "spectacle" and adds to it that rather terrible thing which is there in every photograph: the return of the dead.” 2.

Memory, time and death are the essence of “Company of Silver Specters” where photography is always that of the dead. The dead are dead either metaphorically or actually. The dead are dead, because either the memory of the individuals deposited in the pictures is gone, or because they passed, or what strikes me the most, those who could remember them, who could anchor them in the world, to give them substance, detail and context, have gone themselves. The dead are fixed in the time past and are symbolically covered with a protective layer of paint calling them from the void of time. The ghosts forgotten. Persistent in their haunting. Refusing to leave. Their presence, an accusation.

The dead are nameless, but not generic, fixed onto light sensitive paper by the camera lens, but untethered. Individuals holding a series of codified poses, re-emerging from the unclaimed memory. As if while fading away, losing recognition, they were somehow losing mass making them present in the world. The paint covers them like liquid dust, a layer of time passed, saturated with dissociation but also heavy binding them again to this world. Lingering absences. Eternal ghosts.

What is memory? How do we remember? And who is worth remembrance? It begins with the examination of personal narratives and their position within collective history. The point of emergence is an intimate loss leading to investigation of the nature of memory, grief and loss. History is a flow, a closely curated line of stories, events, people, relationships, instances and only those classified worth remembering, only those useful and approved, are included. What is the position of individual histories within history structures and collective memory? Starting from intimate repositories, how do we confront the spectral presence?

There are two fundamental characteristics of the process of photography; the chemical transformation of light sensitive materials and the physical emergence of image processed through mechanical device. They present as strange mirrorings in ‘Company of Silver Specters”. Firstly, the chemical process is repeated (mirrored but not the same) by application of paint. Like a secondary index, it anchors it to the event that is a photograph's rebirth during the creative process. By bringing to attention this stretch of endless, undefiable temporality and different from life - a photograph is bound to an unrecognisable past, commemoration/image of unclaimed dead. It becomes a commemoration. The paint is re-indexed. Positioned in a relation to memory understood as a cascade of moments, instances of existence belonging to a stretch of time. Yet, nothing is ever definite, possible to recognise, only partially specific; its uniqueness embedded within the paint surface and the image itself. Secondly, the image memorised endlessly, frozen by camera lens, fixed upon the surface, is recalled from non-referable obscurity by vivid colour giving it a-newed, re-validaded presence. Presence of an absence.

An act of paint application mirrors strangely the chemical process of photography as if repeated by a different manner, releasing a new version of the original image, a ghost of it, covering it (and simultaneously revealing) with a coat of sprayed paint.

Sometimes photographs cannot take the weight of the paint and that physical collapse becomes somehow symbolic, as if ghosts refuse to be recalled.“Company of Silver Specters” is an act of re-collection.

“Earlier societies managed so that memory, the substitute for life, was eternal and that at least the thing which spoke Death should itself be immortal: this was the Monument. But by making the (mortal) Photograph into the general and somehow natural witness of "what has been," modern society has renounced the Monument. A paradox: the same century invented History and Photography. But History is a memory fabricated according to positive formulas, a pure intellectual discourse which abolishes mythic Time; and the Photograph is a certain but fugitive testimony; so that everything, today, prepares our race for this impotence: to be no longer able to conceive duration, affectively or symbolically: the age of the Photograph is also the age of revolutions, contestations, assassinations, explosions, in short, of impatiences, of everything which denies ripening. And no doubt, the astonishment of "that-has-been" will also disappear. It has already disappeared.” 3

The posed photographs from the first instance, from the moment of their capture were intended as special, ritualised, serving the purpose of commemoration. Silver Spectres are conduits for the presence of the (returned) dead. Altered photographs are re-indexed, but forever non-specific.

The work oscillates between individual and general, private and public, intimate and shared/collective. In a way this is the work of an empty house. Empty of people, shelled and gutted, living and nonliving, peoples and objets who were depositories of memory have been gone and displaced. But it is also an empty house of history where those deemed not worthy remembering, have been displaced from its flow.

Courtesy of Raed Yassin and Cedric Bardawil, Photographer: Peter Otto, 2025

MUSIC

The music fills the space. Discreetly. Inescapably. I keep on thinking about persistent rhythm, like a measurement, time going backwards, trains. I keep thinking about Yassin’s voice, calling out to the void beyond the paint. I keep thinking about electronic notations, timeless land of 0s and 1s.

The performance. The record playing in the gallery. In a way, the recording is a memory itself. Memory of the moment past. I find each instance of music, played and re-played, already in the past. As if decisions to record the sound, to keep the data, to press the LP, all act in the same manner as the medium of photography. They return the dead. And so all performances are already dead, already in the past, just returning for a brief moment. The music, memory not-quite -forgotten. A call.

Call is circular. Yassin calls out to ghosts to step forth, to manifest, to reconnect, his voice reaching for the event horizon. Equally it is a call from beyond. Ghosts themselves call to us, so just for a moment ,they may be remembered.

POETRY

elegy , ˈɛlɪdʒi (noun)

(in modern literature) a poem of serious reflection, typically a lament for the dead.

(in Greek and Latin verse) a poem written in elegiac couplets, as notably by Catullus and Propertius.

4

What sort of text was this exhibition’s foundation ? Was it an elegy? Or was it a lament with no end? Or an old script that slowly faded away? Ali Shamseddine’s momentary, glimpsed poetry resides in the gallery like an elegy impossible to complete. Sound invokes presence, creating a haunted place. The memory of verses,

Poems like snippets, like moments, like fragments of faded meaning. Memories impossible to grasp. Recollections of nameless events. Poetry of loitering. Of suspension.Ghosts and hauntings embedded in words and noises of the city filtering the gallery. The outside and inside, the interior and interior, all interfere with one another, mixing with the poet's voice placing the experience in the realm of in-between, impossible to capture.

The gallery is now full of echoes. Impossible elegies.

TERRITORY

There is a memorial in Warsaw that not many people notice. An unbroken line of differently coloured stones embedded in city pavements, marks the border of Warsaw Ghetto. A simple line marking a space for memory, of grief, trauma and loss cutting out physical territory and a space of remembrance. Forensics of history.

Where in “Floor Plan of a Cycle” the artist makes a similar gesture with one difference. He does not draw boundary at the actual location of past violence that marked his life, but instead carries it in memory, recreating it, making a spot for remembrance at each exhibiting location, repeating the ritual of the event's recollection. In a similar manner, we picture the space of loss when going through the process of mourning. Over and over again. The place, event and people involved, live on in memory, manifesting with every act of delineation, with each display.

I feel as if the artist recreated time and history, within the spatial experience of the exhibition, using the sonic dimension of the show as blueprint, where music, poems and sound of the city became demarcation points, drawing a line around the space of memory that we have lost and now are desperately trying to get back. His works are spaces between the forgotten and the remembered.

“Floor Plan of a Cycle” (2024) re-creates space defined by metaphoric boundaries which establish a space for violence occurred that is gone but still resonates. A ghost, a loss. A memory. A return. A spectre.

Drawing outlines of the location of his father’s assasination (but also a habitat associated with his life) Yassin does not perform the archeology of the moment(s) past, but acknowledges his and ours resistance against violence of forgetting and violent desire to remember. A refusal to forget.

To comprehend that what loss is, is an eternal search for an irreplaceable sense of grounding that love and familiarity of those we share life with, gives us. Ghosts populate the ongoing experience of loss. Ghost on the other hand is floating, untethered un-being formless, with no shadow; a gap in particles of air, a map of a void filled with solidity of absence, not breathing itself and stopping our breath, its outlines almost discernible, but not quite there.

INDEX

“(...)But the photogram only forces, or makes explicit, what is the case of all photography. Every photograph is the result of a physical imprint transferred by light reflections onto a sensitive surface. The photograph is thus a type of icon, or visual likeness, which bears an indexical relationship to its object. “P.75 5

Families, couples, children, the elderly, young men and women proudly facing the camera. People, faces, gestures, emotions, difficult to recognise under a layer of saturated colour. What is it? Time? Process of forgetting? Death? Shadow images.

Rosalind Krauss’ indexity already defined analogue photographs in “Company of Silver Specters”. In the process of alteration the new layer and another index was added. Paint and particles of dust, skin and pollution amount to a layer applied by the artist. The indexity which marks the instance of remembrance. Paint is the index of haunting, the index of not as much of a specific moment but of recollection of history. Index that acknowledges disappearances. Traces that are phantoms. Ghosts eternal

Like fixing a non-specific moment, these photos mark another absence.Absence of those who make them particular. Those who hold them in memory.This is about memory, and inevitably about those who are there to remember.

GHOST

Exhibition is set out as a rite. A ritual of bringing back, giving place to those that faded into phantoms; where the artworks, photographs; sonic dimension, the record and the poetry; all mark stages of the call.

The gallery is filled with past lives echoing creating a sensorium of forgetting. Instances of lives and connections from the before congregate to think of lives left behind. Of people who were part of them. People for whom the photographs were made. Space is a ghost. Space is filled with ghosts.

Sonic presence. Sonic memory. A realm of habitual lingering. As an invocation of becoming.

The ritual of getting ready, at absolute best, going to a photographic studio, posing, putting on a brave face, smiling patiently waiting for a perfect shot. Few minutes of stillness so the memory becomes fixed forever.Forgetting takes away the weight as if mass attached to someone’s existence has slowly vanished. Ghost has no gravity.

The exhibition is a tear in time, the music is an eternal ritual. Not-exactly-lamentation, more of a humm.Sound of recorded music over the ghost of music played. Presence of a stranger.Space becomes a space of recollection, a cascade of echoes that creates a conceptual demarcation of space for time, event, lives and connections from the before. The Apocalypse with no Revelation. There is no sound in the void. Are the sounds introduced into the space of the exhibition, weapons against silence in which ghosts are afraid to fade away? Even if it is eternally there, always? A whisper, a vibration, an aura , a wave?

The work is an exploration of the nature of memory and loss, grief and forgetting. An act of painting is not that of erasure, but rather that of veiling and simultaneously of bringing forth.The work is about the nature of what is left after. It is about traces. Traces that are half seen shadows. Memory and loss have a strange relationship. It is an equal process of remembering and forgetting those gone, as it is a reflection of the nature of historical processes lying behind losses.. Forgetting is as much about presence as it is about absence. Who is around? Who is present to recall and remember? Like potentiality made out of minusculely thicker density than the surrounding air. Like a bigger, denser void.

Ghost Eternal.

V

The true picture of the past flits by. The past can be seized only as an image which flashes up at the instant when it can be recognized and is never seen again.

(...)

For every image of the past that is not recognized by the present as one of its own concerns threatens to disappear irretrievably.

6.

Footnotes:

* Quote is note from the poet’s reading at Cedric Bardawil

1.“Chasing Ghosts: Raed Yassin at Beirut Art Center – Canvas,” July 4, 2024.

2.Ronald Barthes, Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography (Vintage Classics, 1993), p.9

3.Ronald Barthes, Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography (Vintage Classics, 1993), p.93

4.Wikipedia contributors. “Elegy.” Wikipedia, May 25, 2025.

5.Krauss,Rosalind.“Sculpture in the Expanded Field,” n.d.

6.“Walter Benjamin on the Concept of History /Theses on the Philosophy of History,” n.d. https://www.sfu.ca/~andrewf/CONCEPT2.html.

Raed Yassin (born 1979, Beirut) is an artist and musician. He graduated from the theater department at the Institute of Fine Arts in Beirut in 2003, and since then has developed his conceptual practice through multiple mediums such as video, sound, photography, text, sculpture and performance. Yassin’s work often originates from an examination of his personal narratives and their position within a collective history, through the lens of consumer culture and mass production. He was a resident artist at De Ateliers, Amsterdam (2008-2010), the Delfina Foundation, London (2010 & 2014), Akademie der Künste der Welt, Cologne (2015), and is a recipient of the Abraaj Group Art Prize (2012). As a musician, he is one of the organizers of the Irtijal Festival for Experimental Music (Beirut), and has released several solo music albums, as well as part of groups such as “A” Trio and PRAED. In 2009, he founded his independent music label Annihaya. Raed currently lives between Berlin and Beirut.

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