Camille Zakharia was born in 1962 in Tripoli, Lebanon. After obtaining his engineering degree he fled his country’s civil war, spent time in the United States, Turkey, Greece and Bahrain, then enrolled at the Nova Scotia College of Art & Design in Halifax, Canada. On his graduation in 2000, he decided to settle permanently in Bahrain. He has taken part in many exhibitions in the Middle East, Europe, Canada and the United States, and in 2009 was a finalist in the Victoria & Albert Museum’s Jameel Prize for Islamic art.
Camille Zakharia uses different photographic techniques and procedures, including collage and photomontage, to give visual expression to his reflections on the concept of territories and borders, real and imagined memories, and globalisation. Coastal Promenade was commissioned by the Bahrain Ministry of Culture as part of the Reclaim project the Emirate presented in its Golden Lion-winning pavilion at the 2010 Venice Architecture Biennial. The series looks at the present state of the archipelago’s coastline, devastated over the last few years by oil industry pollution and galloping urban sprawl. Working in the documentary tradition, Camille Zakharia has produced an inventory of the shoreline’s landscapes and architecture, a succession of no man’s lands beneath a cloudless sky with, here and there, a few fishermen’s huts as relics of a declining culture. This “architecture without architects”, as the photographer calls it, is also threatened by political and social change. Isolated and strangely empty, these huts evoke a human presence veering between the austere and the inviting, typified by the cushions we see thrown down on a bench and their suggestion of a languorous late afternoon. Tinged with a gentle melancholy, these landscapes escape all notion of time, acting on the viewer like dream images or sequences from a film.
Mouna Mekouar, curator
Text from the catalogue-book “Photoquai”, co-edited by Musée du Quai Branly- Actes-Sud
