- Title
- The Strong Believers
- Date Made
- 2008
- Medium
- Archival print on cotton paper
- Dimensions
- 43 5/16 × 55 1/8 in. (110 × 140 cm);
Frame: 49 3/16 × 61 × 1 3/16 in. (125 × 155 × 3 cm)
- Accession Number
- M.2013.39.5
- Collecting Area
- Art of the Middle East: Contemporary
- Curatorial Notes
Ammar Al Beik is one of a growing group of Arab artists whose work focuses on the state of image making, past and present, by incorporating old archival and found photographs. These remade images document, conflate, and obscure ideas of history and memory in a society that has been in almost constant turmoil for decades. In these two prints (see M.2013.39.7), which are part of a larger series, old black-and-white images, each with five young men—one showing a troupe of bodybuilders striking poses and the other a studio shot of uniformed but unarmed soldiers—capture a happier, seemingly playful time that is contradicted by the ominously contemporary titles given to the works. As a frame, Al Beik uses wildly chromatic thumbnail depictions of ancient goddesses preserved in the National Museum, Damascus.
Based in Berlin, Al Beik is a conceptual artist, photographer, and award-winning filmmaker. His interest in the circulation of images has to do with the manipulation of memories and their impact on current religious divisions and political events, especially as they relate to his Syrian homeland.
