Bookworks – Uriel Orlow

Archive: Bookworks

Terrain vague – Persistent Images – حركات غير مكتملة

Terrain vague حركات غير مكتملة Persistent images gathers works by Céline Condorelli and Uriel Orlow in a multi-voice artist book conceived by Sophie Demay and Lola Halifa-Legrand. It explores blind spots, unexpected epilogues and disappearances in the grand narratives of History; starting from Alexandria and the Suez canal in twentieth century Egypt. Composed of four stories, the book engages with the constitutive movements affecting time and space: movements of people and goods, the flow of capital, political movements, removal of statues (and regimes) and migrating species. As a complement, the last chapter assembles contributions from Bassam El Baroni, Marianne Hultman, Jean-Marie Straub, Gilane Tawadros.

Published by Alexandria Contemporary Image Forum and Oslo Kunstforening

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Re: the archive, the image, and the very dead sheep

Bookwork by Uriel Orlow and Ruth Maclennan, 160 pp.
Design by Kapitza. London: Double agents, 2004 ISBN: 0-9548947-0-7

A ‘ready-made archive’, a holiday correspondence and a philosophico-anecdotal meditation on history.

Ruth Maclennan and Uriel Orlow write to each other while on holiday in the Highlands of Scotland and in Zurich and the Swiss Alps. The correspondents draw on documented, anecdotal and imagined histories of their surroundings to produce associative genealogies: mapping thought, image, object and experience. Seeking correspondences between what has been, what might have been and what could arise, they speculate on pre-archival moments and the archive’s aftermath. This idiosyncratic historiography brings together Cabaret Voltaire, Pictish burial mounds, Lenin, Joyce, the Gulf Stream, and the Rosetta Stone.

The correspondence is expanded by commentaries, afterthoughts and annotations by Robin Banerji, Finn Fordham, Mikhail Karikis and Nicholas Noyes.
The book collates images from personal collections, the internet and museum shops to form an autonomous, yet related image-archive, which generates its own associations and references. This, together with lists of names and terms and a bibliography performs the role of a thesaurical archive-catalogue that provides an alternative entry to the book.

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What the billboard saw / La ville mode d’emploi

Bookwork by Uriel Orlow, published by Kunsthalle Fribourg (2005), limited edition of 200, signed

A notebook-sized archive of the billboards vision of the city interspersed with a compendium of reflections on the urban condition by de Certeau, Perec, Acconci, Sinclair and others.

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Time+Again: Critical Contradictions in Chris Marker’s La Jetée

PhD thesis (University of the Arts, 2002)

The thesis is an investigation into the critical power of a work of art. This critical power is seen to be produced by paradoxes which are particular to it and which have the potential to infiltrate theoretical debates in the form of contradictions. The thesis takes the form of a case study of Chris Marker’s 1962 film La Jetée. The main concern in the consideration of La Jetée is its critical relation to conceptions of time in different discursive contexts.

More specifically, La Jetée’s criticality is attributed to two particular paradoxes which are examined in two separate yet related parts of the thesis. Both parts are divided into three chapters which deal with the same paradox but under the aegis of different theoretical frameworks. In part one the paradoxical narrative scenario of the repetition of the protagonist’s death at the beginning and at the end of the film is related to narratological (chapter 1), psychoanalytical (chapter 2) and philosophical (chapter 3) conceptions of time and death; conceptions which are in turn destabilised by the economies of contradiction produced by the notions of haunting, trauma and eschatological ethics. Part two considers the paradoxical status of the image in La Jetée between photography and cinema. The examination of the contradicting photographic and cinematic medium-specificities and their attendant temporalities (chapter 4) leads to a consideration of the temporality of the image independent from its alleged medium (chapter 5) and eventually to a new conception of the notion of medium and its temporality on the basis of qualitative pictorial powers rather than in terms of a quantifiable status (chapter 6).