Using film, installation, writing and public engagement, Frame of Accountability investigates “risk” as a lived condition produced through capitalist financial systems and violent modes of conflict. International laws of war and aerial bombardment are violent processes undertaken by strong states to secure sovereignty and control over bodies, land, and resources. The risk inherent to these processes then extends into the architecture of the lived-built environment as a form of governance. Focusing on “risk” across Lebanon and Syria, with a view to understanding the wider regional and global consequences, the project engages feminist, decolonial, critical-legal and artistic methods to explore possibilities of dismantling its ongoing operation. Recontextualizing risk, a complex of human and nonhuman voices give poetic testimony to its disproportionate effects as the project investigates the revolutionary potential of such methods and practices of radical solidarity.

Archival Research:

With thanks and access to...

​American University of Beirut Archives, Beirut
Liddell Hard Centre for Military Archives, King’s College, London 
Middle East Centre, St Anthony’s College, Oxford 
​Royal Air Force Archives, London 
The Arab Centre for Architecture, Beirut 
The Arab Image Foundation, Beirut 
The British Library, London  
The Fraud Debbase Collection at the Sourkauk Archives, Beirut 
​The Imperial War Museum Archives, London
The National Archives, London 
​The Orient Institut, Beirut​
 Picture
Helene Kazan, “Frame of Accountability: (Un)Touching Ground” 2022. Digital film still. Courtesy of the artist

Episodes:

Frame of Accountability: (Un)Touching Ground 16min, 2022
‘Frame of Accountability: (Un)Touching Ground’ gives an account of conflict between the Allied and Vichy French forces in 1941 across Iraq, Lebanon and Syria. As under the legal construct of ‘military necessity’ – two foreign forces fight for control and access to natural resources across the territory. Engaging feminist, decolonial and critical-legal methods, the film traces the multiple routes of the invasion and its human and non-human effects. As a visual (un)touching attempts to undo a temporal and spatial distance constructed in distinguishing this violence as environmental or conflict based
​
​Frame of Accountability: In Her View 15min, 2022
Tracing the effects of a burgeoning technology of capitalism and conflict and its intersection with a modern history of Lebanon and Syria, archival evidence discovered at the Arab Image Foundation in Lebanon reveals the sexual exploitation of a woman by occupying Australian soldiers fighting for the Allied forces in 1941. Engaging feminist and decolonial methods, the film moves through the archival evidence to sense, trace and position her encounter as a form of poetic testimony. This episode points to the lack of legal accountability of violence perpetrated at the scale of body and the domestic, during armed conflict.

​Frame of Accountability: In Law’s Terms, tbc
Told through the imagined voice of a feminist, queered, decolonial, international law, this legal fiction narrates law’s consciousness coming-to-terms with its own failings. The episode unravels this complex non-human subjectivity as part of radical methods towards reparative and expanded frameworks of accountability in international law. As it’s authority and legitimacy rests on its claim to operate as a ‘universal law’ capable of representing and protecting all equally, this aim is corrupted by racialised, gendered and capitalist agendas of strong states involved in its making. The work invites discussion on the critical and known failures in international law.

Project Credits:

About The Artist:
Written and Directed by Helene Kazan
Cinematography by Jad Youssef
Sound Design by Mhamad Safa
Human/Non-human Modelling by Anabel Garcia-Kurland
Language Translation by Ziad Chakaroun and Yara Hasan
Graphic Design by Leen Charafeddine
Research by Leila Sibai
Web Design and Co-ordination by Saskia Hewitt
With the voice of Sally Moussawi (foa-ihv) and Helene Kazan (foa-ug)
Helene Kazan is a research-based practitioner and senior lecturer in Critical Theory at the School of the Arts, Faculty of Technology, Design and Environment, Oxford Brookes University. Kazan is artist-in-residence at the Law and Theory Lab, the School of Law, Westminster University (2022–23); and was a Fellow at the Vera List Center for Art and Politics the New School, New York (2018–20). She received her doctorate from the Centre for Research Architecture, Goldsmiths, University of London. Kazan has exhibited and published work in exhibitions and with museums and institutions internationally.
​Frame of Accountability, has been developed, in part, during a 2018-2020 Vera List Center Fellowship at The New School. It has been supported by the Vera List Center for Art and Politics and its Advisory Board. 
​
The project has also been supported in part through a 2022 Graham Foundation Grant Award, by the Beirut Art Centre and as part of being Artist-in-Residence as the Law and Theory Lab, School of Law, Westminster University.

EVENTS


Premier of film installation Frame of Accountability: (Un)Touching Ground as part of exhibition 'Fine Print' at Beirut Art Centre, June 2022. Info

​_______
2022 Graham Foundation Grant Award Announcement for Frame of Accountability', June 2022. Info

​_______
Artist-in-Residence announcement at the Law & Theory Lab Law Department, Westminster University, Feb 2022. Info

​_______
Publication of 'An Unbound Critical Lived–built Environment' for special issue of the Journal of Visual Culture on Testifying to Violence Environmentally: Knowing, Sensing, Politicizing, 2022. To View

_______
'On Poetic Testimony' Artists Talk at the Masters of Applied Human Rights, The University of Applied Arts, Vienna, Mar 2022. Info

View More
Helene Kazan, “Frame of Accountability: In Her View,” 2022. Digital film still. Courtesy of the artist
Picture
Helene Kazan, “Frame of Accountability: (Un)touching ground,” 2022. Digital film still. Courtesy of the artist