Akram Zaatari (b. 1966, Saida, Lebanon) lives and works in Beirut. He has produced more than forty films and videos, a dozen books, and countless installations of photographic material, all pursuing a range of interconnected themes, subjects, and practices related to excavation, political resistance, the lives of former militants, the legacy of an exhausted left, intimacies among men, the circulation of images in times of war, and the play of tenses inherent to various letters that have been lost, found, buried, discovered, or otherwise delayed in reaching their destinations. Zaatari has played a critical role in developing the formal, intellectual, and institutional infrastructure of Beirut's contemporary art scene. He was one of a handful of young artists who emerged from the delirious but short-lived era of experimentation in Lebanon's television industry, which was radically reorganized after the country's civil war. As a co-founder of the Arab Image Foundation, a groundbreaking, artist-driven organization devoted to the research and study of photography in the region, he has made invaluable and uncompromising contributions to the wider discourse on photography and its disintegration, preservation and archival practice.

Zaatari represented Lebanon at the Venice biennale 2013. He has shown his films, videos, photographs, and other documents in institutions such as the Centre Pompidou in Paris, MoMA in NY, Tate Modern in London, Moderna Museet in Stockholm, MACBA in Barcelona and Kunsthaus Zurich. He has taken part in Documenta13 (2012), the biennials of Gwangju, Liverpool, Istanbul, Sao Paulo and Sydney. His films have screened at the Berlinale, FID Marseille, Rotterdam, Toronto, and Oberhausen film festivals.

Akram Zataari exhibited at Oslo Kunstforening in the 2018 show 'Beirut, Beyrut, Beyrouth, Beyrout'.

https://en.oslokunstforening.no/beirut

https://arabimagefoundation.com