Origin of Trauma

In the installation Origin of Trauma Mohamed Thara addresses the issue of collective trauma. The installation is composed of extremely cruel black and white photographs glued on stones and cinder blocks, they form a body with them. Inserted in the installation they appear as ghostly traces of the destruction that contribute to the artist's obsession with human violence. Both political and conceptual, these images are taken in the urgency of war and conflict zones: Iraq, Syria, Palestine, Afghanistan, Yemen... The aesthetic and plastic imperfection of these photographs gives them a dimension of historical proof and testimony. The artist offers us an aesthetic experience that is both painful and hallucinatory, quite singular with fragments of reality taken directly from the past, through an archaeological writing that aims to bring us into the present.

The work is a setting in tension, impotent, cold, it confronts us, staring at us, in an eminently physical way. In front of these images, we cannot remain disinterested. These images interest us humanly, politically as well as intellectually. Thara forces us to see, in spite of everything, those whose gaze we turn away in an immoderate, immoderate work that violates the experience of contemplation. A work that seeks to understand the generic image of a horror that is also generic and yet well materialized in bodies and in human destiny. The visual astonishment echoes the historical astonishment. A work that speaks directly to our sense of tragedy. A form of tireless exploration of the aesthetic, visual, institutional limits of art; violence against art and the sensibility of the public.  Violence here embraces negativity, a claim that will be at the heart of Theodor Adorno's aesthetic thought, as it was, before, that of Walter Benjamin, as it was that of Alain Badiou, who for them, the traumatic event exceeds our capacity for recognition and understanding because it intrudes into our psychic sphere in the form of the irruption of an unbearable reality. What Thara's photography gives us to see, in the temporal jerk that it introduces, is precisely the gap constituted by the phenomenon of latency that Freud places at the center of his theory of trauma. In a critical gesture that engages the aesthetic relationship and seems to exhaust the meaning. It is a powerful installation, the work speaks of past atrocities and human rights violations, those of today and unfortunately those to come. Placing images on stones or what looks like pieces of rubble adds tragedy to the intensity of the scenes and people photographed. A cry of alarm addressed to humanity in peril.