On the way back from Documenta. In 2017, on the train from Kassel, thinking back on the Documenta 14 exhibitions I’d just dutifully visited over the past three days, I felt as never before that art had become the refuge of all that unbridled liberalism was striving to destroy. Most of the artists exhibited in Learning from Athens were between thirty and sixty, and used creative strategies that had all the attributes of the university or journalistic research techniques of yore.¹ Never before had I seen so many archival pieces, excerpts from investigative reports or library shelves exposed as works of art. At any time of the day the public could watch documentary films or attend what are called “reading-performances” in contemporary art jargon, which are staged speeches performed by the artists in the manner of academic conferences. Three or four decades ago these projects would undoubtedly have found their place in humanities departments or the editorial offices of magazines. But the unbridled quest for profit having more or less put these fields at risk, it is now within the art realm that such investigations have partially taken shelter. In 1990, in a text titled “Faire avec”, Michel de Certeau describes the common artistic practice of using unusual materials.² For the strategies I observed at Documenta, it was not so much a question of doing with as doing as. Since the historical avant-gardes, artists have effectively favoured approaches and techniques coming from outside the art world. Constantin Brancusi said he wanted to sculpt like an aeronautical engineer. László Moholy-Nagy likened his photography to that of an amateur or a scientist.³ With postmodernism, the use of non-artistic approaches became commonplace. “Everything I did, I thought of in terms of ‘as if”, explained Martha Rosler in a 1999 interview.⁴ Quite obviously, this is not without consequences on the aesthetics of works. In Kassel the aesthetic poverty of the works was glaring. Given that many the artists of this generation have an approach similar to that of scholars or journalists, it’s not surprising that their artistic productions are reminiscent of university lectures, symposiums or writing conferences. Returning from Documenta, I had the sense that I’d certainly learned a lot, but also the feeling of a lacking beauty, poetry or transcendence.

The subconscious of buildings. Karim Kal belongs to this same generation of artists. Born in 1977 to an Algerian father and French mother, he spent his childhood in a small hamlet in Haute Savoie but regularly visited family and friends who lived in city suburbs. Though he grew up in the countryside, the periphery of big cities is familiar childhood and teen stomping grounds. Between 1996 and 2001, he studied at the fine arts schools of in Avignon and Grenoble before studying at the Vevey School of Photography, from which he graduated in 2003. Since that time the artist has also questioned the social, urban and historical reality of the world he lives in. In 2002, during the civil war in Algeria, he went to the Bab El Oued neighbourhood, where part of his family resided. But rather than producing the same unbearable images the press published daily, he photographed the blue immensity of the Mediterranean, the beacon of hope (literally and figuratively) for many young Algerians destined for exile. Three years later he went to Guyana, where he became interested in social housing and the makeshift habitats made of recycled materials popping up here and there in the suburbs of Cayenne. In 2009 he photographed the residents of Miroirs, a housing development for migrant workers built in the 1970s in Evry, in the southern suburbs of Paris. The following year marked a turning point in his work. He stopped taking portraits to avoid, as he says, locking his subjects into generic representations (the commuter, the migrant worker, the deadbeat, etc.).⁵ He started shooting at night, by the light of the flash. Between 2011 and 2013, influenced by the works of Michel Foucault, he became interested in how institutions such as prison, hospitals and social housing induce forms of spatial coercion. With his series Entraves, he focused on those objects that irk the urban environment: markers, blocks, chains, grates, cones, spikes, lamp posts and other tactile markings. In 2017, as part of Les Regards du Grand Paris commission, he photographed the area surrounding RER Line D, between Viry-Châtillon and Corbeil-Essonnes, focusing on the strange and familiar details that arise in the peri-urban night. For the past fifteen years, Karim Kal has been investigating what he likes to describe an “expanded France”⁶, which includes overseas territories and former colonies. In this reality, which is both geographical and historical, working-class areas on the outskirts of the big cities are fertile ground for his research. Using photography, he takes stock of everything that contains and controls the body, establishes domination – in short, that which makes the city resemble a prison and the suburbs a place of segregation that, in his words, creates “a form of apartheid”⁷. He shows what history and politics do to architecture and the extent to which the latter affects those who live there. Documentary style? For twentieth-century century artists whose primary purpose was to question reality through photography, “documentary style”⁸ was one of the key techniques. Walker Evans, whose work remains one of the finest illustrations of this approach, was also the first artist to theorize it, which he detailed in a 1971 interview: “Documentary? That’s a very sophisticated and misleading word. And not really clear. You have to have a sophisticated ear to receive that word. The term should be documentary style. An example of literal document would be a police photograph of a murder scene. You see, a document has use, whereas art is really useless. Therefore art is never a document, though it certainly can adopt that style.”⁹ With his interest in historical and political issues, Karim Kal should naturally have adopted a documentary style and taken photographs in the manner of a journalist, sociologist or urban planner. However, he chose another path. If he sometimes mentions Allan Sekula, one of the most notable representatives of contemporary documentary style, it is less for his photographs than for his theoretical writings and Foucaldian criticism of institutions.¹⁰ Kal’s references are more on the side of abstract, minimal or conceptual art. To describe a vertical strip on the outside of a building, he likes to use Barnett Newman’s “zip”. To evoke the covering over of graffiti on a suburban wall, he cites Mark Rothko. He also talks about Peter Halley and his series of abstract paintings that resemble barred prison windows, and Olivier Mosset, whose Toblerones – those concrete sculptures in the form of anti-tank blocks – he admires. In speaking of these artists, he says he wants to “re-project what they did in the field of abstraction into the realm of photography”.¹¹ In the photographic realm, Kal also makes reference to the Disjunctions series by Jean-Luc Moulène, with whom he briefly studied at the school of fine arts in Grenoble.¹² Far from mere formalism, art for art’s sake or postmodernist discourse, the artists who interest him all take a critical approach to reality. But unlike the artists presented at Documenta 14, they do not do it in the manner of the academic or the journalist, but rather using the weapons of art. Though Kal’s series are based on extensive documentation and investigation, he does not attempt to reproduce this knowledge using the didactic practices typically employed in the fields of training and information. Rather, he chooses to transmit it visually, intuitively, poetically. Kal is therefore neither a postmodernist nor a documentary-style acolyte. He does not adopt the usual methods of knowledge transfer, but rather invents new ones. Centrifuged lucidity. How to describe the approach Kal has developed? His early years were largely spent roaming his territory: the suburbs of a historically and geographically expanded France. Nearing the end of this decade, with night photography he seems to have found his true style. Since 2010 he has used his flash to sculpt and explore the nightlife of urban fringes. The flash allows him to highlight certain urban details typically not visible in the diffuse light of day. There’s graffiti: Death to cops, the UMP will die, No chrome! Elsewhere, it’s a bunch of signs – bled.com, Pharmacie, Pain des états, Paradoxe, Pressing Amandine – that come together to form a cryptic message. In these nocturnal images, the blinding light of the flash also highlights the roughness of the asphalt and concrete. The suburb thus appears to be covered in an inhospitable gangue, as though wrapped in coarse sandpaper. Artificial light also has this ability to make everything it comes into contact with stand out more crudely against the dark of the night. The cones, markers and grates scattered throughout the public space to slow down or impede city dwellers’ movements also block the burst of the flash and are as such particularly accentuated. This factitious brightness makes the plastic bags intertwined in the trees along the highway shine with a singular brilliance. Strange Fruit, which is also the title of Billie Holiday’s song denouncing the lynching of black Americans, echoes the resolutely disturbing nature of the territory Kal takes us through. With his flash, he summons a host of symbols wherein each detail takes on a strangely metaphorical meaning. It’s worth adding that most night photographers try to maximize the light of their flash by centering their subject. Not Kal, however, who uses the same composition structure he used in Algiers in 2002, often relegating whatever it is that interested him to the edges of the photo: a concrete block at the bottom of the frame; a doorway in a wall to one side and the edge of a ceiling in the upper portion. The centre of the photo is not empty but remains shrouded in darkness. This deliberately centrifugal composition technique creates a mise en abyme: the artist isn’t interested in the centre; it’s the periphery he wants. He doesn’t photograph the city; he photographs the suburbs. It’s no coincidence that the words “around”, “surroundings”, “nearby”, “borders” or “edges” are omnipresent in the titles of his works. Nor is it surprising that this book is titled Outback. These notions of an eccentric social space are at the very heart of his work.

Depth of field. Another peculiarity of this artificial lighting is its extremely short range, lighting up only in the immediate area and leaving everything else in shadow. Kal masters this technical approach; in his photos, the light never reaches the extremities of the image. By coupling this short-range view induced by the flash with his off-centre composition technique, he creates images that are perfectly clear around the periphery that become darker as the eye nears the centre. Standing in front of one of his photographs is like standing at the entrance of a tunnel. The artist has thus invented a kind of photographic myopia whose main symptom is not blurring but rather a gradual darkening of the visual field. The space he presents seems devoid of depth. Though photography is by definition considered realistic, the artist uses it in an essentially metaphorical way. By virtue of the laws of analogy, he uses the resources of photographic technology to represent one thing with another. This is precisely wherein lies his inventiveness. His representation of the suburbs is not only dark, inhospitable and bristling with obstacles; it is also (and most notably) devoid of hope. Unlike traditional expression, no light appears at the end of the tunnel. The horizon seems definitively obstructed. The social elevator is out of order, and those who live there are constantly bumping up against either a concrete wall or a glass ceiling. So many metaphors of obstruction to describe the reality of the French suburbs. For several decades now, but even more so since the 2005 riots triggered by the electrocution of Zyed Benna and Bouna Traoré as they tried to flee from a police check, most academic and journalistic analyses of the suburbs highlight the failure of the French integration project. This is mainly reflected by a lack of prospects. “Forty per cent of the population of these neighbourhoods... live in ‘poverty’, versus sixteen per cent for the entire population. Twenty-five per cent are unemployed, which is fifteen points higher than the national average. 45% for young people under twenty-five (twenty points higher than the average). Forty-four per cent are unemployed, which is twenty points higher than the national average,” wrote an economist.¹³ Kal makes exactly the same observation as academics and journalists. But he does not render it by acting like an artist disguised as a reporter, or using documentary style. He invents photographic forms, and isn’t afraid of analogies or symbols, let alone metaphors. He dares to transcend reality.