After Image

After Image brings together two archives, one digital and one personal, and continues the long-term project Pixels of Memories. The work originates from an extended search through Google Street View imagery of Iraq, where fragmented and unstable images form an unintended archive shaped by war, technology, and power. Rather than focusing on what is visible, the project engages with absence: pixelation, glitches, erased bodies, and gaps in the image. These disruptions reveal how visibility is not neutral but regulated by technical systems that determine what can be seen and what disappears. This visual language extends into the artist’s family archive, where damaged photographs from the Iraq war carry physical traces of destruction and loss. The project reflects on what comes after what Harun Farocki describes as ‘operational images’, shifting to- ward images that carry Cracks, absence, and residue. After Image unfolds between these two conditions, where images shift from representation to fragile residues. The work reflects on how memory persists through fragments, and how the past survives as a layered field of presence and absence.

The publication Pixels of Memories بكسلات الذاكرة combines conceptual reflections on memory, destruction and the invisibility of history. The book takes up this visual language and creates a fragment of memories, image errors and gaps. It becomes a space of testimony and reflection in which viewers must decipher the layers of images and their meaning. Hameed has scoured the entire map of Iraq on Google Maps and compiled an archive of hundreds of screen shots. In Iraq, the 360-degree views are not uploaded to the platform by the company itself, but by private individuals. Hameed is particularly interested in the errors and gaps he comes across during his research. TYPE: Softcover Swiss Binding PUBLICATION YEAR: 2026 17 × 28,4 cm 144 Pages ISBN: 978-88-94895-91-9 LANGUAGE: English / Arabic PUBLISHER: Skinnerboox Text: Hanar Hupka Graphic Design: Anna Breit