Shuruq Harb: The Keeper

At the core of The Keeper are more than 2,000 photographs that artist Shuruq Harb inherited in 2010. They are the remnants of a vast archive assembled by Mustafa, a young image entrepreneur who collected photographs online, to be printed for sale on the streets of Ramallah. Mustafa positioned himself as an intermediary between the explosive proliferation of photographs on the internet and an audience eager to participate in a form of image consumption otherwise unavailable to them. Acting as a content filter, he selected and composed a catalogue of Turkish soap opera stars, political figures, wrestlers, militants, musicians and other characters that would appeal to his clientele. Printed on the glossy stock of automatic photo labs, the images pivot between online spaces of frictionless circulation and zones of infrastructural limitation that would normally block their dissemination.