Flowers Gallery, London
27.02.2015 - 04.04.2015
The Mountains of Majeed is a reflection on the end of ‘Operation Enduring Freedom’ in Afghanistan through photography, found imagery and Taliban poetry. Edmund Clark examines the experience of the vast majority of military personnel and contractors who have serviced Enduring Freedom without ever engaging the enemy. He distils their war down to a concise series of photographs of the two views they have of Afghanistan: what they see of the country over the walls or through the wire of their bases, and what they see of pictorial representations within the enclaves that they never leave.
At Bagram Airfield, the largest American base in Afghanistan, and formerly home to 40,000, the view, both outside and inside, is dominated by the mountains of the Hindu Kush. Set against their looming presence, Clark’s photographs from his time spent embedded with the U.S. military, expose the dystopian relationship between the man-made landscape of Bagram and the country beyond its walls.
© Edmund Clark, The Mountains of Majeed, 2014
Evoking the intangible, yet intensely felt presence of the mountains beyond, and the unseen insurgents they hide, Clark’s quiet and contemplative images portray an alternative narrative to the one ordinarily presented by the media.
Clark’s photographs capture the visual mirroring of the distant views within the base. Echoes of the surrounding landscape are found in the craters formed by construction work, peaks of refuse-strewn razor wire and the precisely ordered vistas of military tents.
Inside the buildings of the base, the landscape is simulated by murals and artworks, representing another view of Afghanistan. On the walls of a dining facility, a series of paintings signed by an artist named ‘Majeed’ project a romantic vision of its lush mountain passes and lakes. Reflecting on the significance of the paintings’ location on an American base, Clark says: “How many tens of thousands of pairs of western eyes have registered the pastoral peace of these mountainscapes? Has anyone considered what they say of the country they are playing a part in occupying?”
In this exhibition, Majeed’s paintings have been reproduced as a series of picture postcards. Likening them to mementos for souvenir hunters of an idealized touristic landscape, Clark’s appropriation of the paintings offers a powerful reminder that the mountains remain out of Western reach.
«At its peak Bagram was the busiest military airbase in the world, with 140,000 operations a year. It was also a home for the military personnel and civilian contractors who lived behind large concrete barriers called T-walls and razor wire on six square miles of Afghanistan.
The boots on the ground at Bagram were overwhelmingly American. This was a town of 40,000 inhabitants and about 7,000 local ancillary workers, who came in daily. It had power and water plants, sewage treatment, waste disposal, recycling and landfill, industrial zones, suburbs of storage and newly built barracks, town planners and a director of public works. Management was outsourced to private contractors and staffed by civilians servicing Operation Enduring Freedom, the official name of the war in Afghanistan, which ends next month for the Americans, after 13 years (and when Bagram will finally be empty). Britain handed over its bases to the Afghan government two weeks ago.
© Edmund Clark, The Mountains of Majeed, 2014
My interest in Bagram stemmed from my work about Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, published in 2010, where I made a series of pictures examining the institutional spaces of Guantánamo naval base and its prison camps. Guantánamo and Bagram are linked. The Bagram Theater Internment Facility, a makeshift US prison in a former Soviet aircraft hangar, preceded the prisons at Guantánamo. It was replaced with a purpose-built prison in 2009, and between them, the old and new facilities have held more detaineees than Guantánamo. Many who ended up in the latter passed through the cages in Bagram first, and I know men who were subject to interrogation and abuse in both.
I explored these ex-detainees’ experiences through three notions of ‘home’: the places where they are rebuilding their lives; the complex of prisons where they were held; and the naval base at Guantánamo that is home to the American community. Winning the inaugural Zeit Magazin Photo Prize in Germany in 2012 gave me the opportunity to work in Afghanistan, including looking at Bagram as an oasis of ‘home’ in a foreign desert; seeking an alternative narrative to the ambushes and improvised explosive devices that characterise the news media’s reporting.
Accessing Bagram and Guantánamo as a photo-grapher involves the backing of media organisations, much form-filling and a lot of persistence before getting US military or International Security Assistance Force clearance. Getting there is a comparable process too. Guantánamo requires a flight straight from Florida to the base. The plane even has to avoid Cuban airspace. Similarly, arriving at Bagram in October 2013 involved very little contact with Afghanistan apart from a short transfer from Kabul International Airport to the military airport for the flight to the base.
© Edmund Clark, The Mountains of Majeed, 2014
Research told me that Bagram is situated close to the Hindu Kush mountain range, but it had not prepared me for the mountains’ constant looming presence. Depending on where you are, the time of day, the weather and the dust, they are on occasions indiscernible, at other times sharpened by light and snow, but always there. The mountains are inside, on the walls, too: meeting rooms with murals of the Hindu Kush on all four walls, photos of planes against mountain backdrops, T-walls painted with images of soldiers and Afghans with the range behind them. Inside a dining facility I found simple paintings of mountains and monuments showing a different Afghanistan, by an Afghan artist called Majeed (I have no other information about him). These transcend the confines of the base, taking the viewer to passes and lakes in the Hindu Kush and other ranges.
My nine-day visit coincided with Eid al-Adha, the Muslim festival of sacrifice, and a period of enhanced insurgent activity. Most nights were punctuated by amplified chants of ‘incoming, incoming’, and two to a dozen distant impacts. No one was killed inside the base. Outside, a man rammed his motorcycle into an armoured column. Only he exploded.
Wars of resistance are characterised by fluid insurgencies fighting more sophisticated occupying powers, stationary in their fortified enclaves; watching across a technological gulf and an abyss of mutual incom-prehension; waiting for the duration to sap resources and political will.
My work at Bagram juxtaposes the mountains of eight of my photographs with those in four paintings by Majeed and three poems by Afghan insurgents. It is a reflection on the war in Afghanistan and the relationship between the mountains, the insurgents and the forces occupying the bases, the vast majority of whom never leave their enclaves. Their vision of Afghanistan is what they see over their perimeters or represented on the walls inside. ['Inside the strange world of the US airbase at Bagram' by Edmund Clark, The Telegraph]
© Edmund Clark, The Mountains of Majeed, 2014
Edmund Clark uses photography, found imagery and text to explore links between representation and politics. His work traces ideas of shared humanity, otherness and unseen experience through landscape, architecture and the documents, possessions and environments of subjects of political tension. His recent work explores control and incarceration in the War on Terror, in the monographs ‘Control Order House’ (2012) and ‘Guantanamo: If the Light Goes Out’ (2010).
The publication ‘The Mountains of Majeed’ by Edmund Clark is available from Here Press. Signed copies will be available at the private view and throughout the exhibition.