The photographs wished not just to be looked at, but also perceived and remembered in a certain way. Perception and memory entertain twisted kinds of affiliation, and twisted was the space in which the images appeared in one of the side wings of the Museum Fridericianum in Kassel. Solid walls divided the space into three differently sized, interconnected parts: a corridor between the two entrances, a foyer and a picture gallery. The walls were white. A lot of light filtered in through the windows. The world outside was very much part of the experience of the viewer, who was the one single blind spot that kept moving in between the images. The display appeared as if it were a dynamic tool-kit for the fabrication of subjectivity as visual agency.

But fabrication is too instrumental a notion. Contingency was at the heart of the visual experience. The pictorial motifs were not substantial, although they conveyed a great deal of political, religious and, yes, aesthetic weight. The space both allowed and forced the images to contextualise themselves - in the mind of a viewer, of course, who was asked implicitly not only to look deep in time but also to come back, again and again. Over the course of the exhibition, the images changed. Different constellations of large-scale images were generated out of a repository of thirty smaller photographs displayed in one single row along the wall of the corridor. Like billboards, these images were pasted directly on the wall.

With two of the large images displayed in the foyer and five in the picture gallery, Lidwien van de Ven's installation was laid out in eighteen different episodes over the hundred days of documenta 12 in 2007. These episodes, however, were not closed chapters. Images appeared with some remaining while others disappeared. The images that disappeared did not just vanish but were whitewashed. Traces stayed on as their own memory or ghost before a new image took their place.

For the total experience of the visual narrative, the viewer could always consult the repository. Here, a kind of itinerary suggested itself, a camera travelling from some of the capitals of Europe to cities and places in the Middle East such as Jerusalem or Tulkarem, and on to Armenia. The photographs looked precious in the repository, more objects than mere images, as each one was face-mounted behind a sheet of Plexiglas: a pearl-like surface betraying seductive depth. The large-size images, the billboards, had by contrast a rough paper-skin, and the photographic grain was quite prominent. If the visitor came too close, the motif disintegrated. But visual ambiguity could also be part of the motif itself. The last image of the itinerary, a spectacular colour photograph that was displayed in the final episode on its own with all the other images whitewashed, was taken in Isfahan, Iran and showed a couple, probably mother and son, outside a mosque in broad daylight. The woman in the photograph wears a black chador, the boy, dressed like a man, in Western-style clothes. While the woman bends over the boy, he somehow manages to disappear in her generous black cloth. And although the scene clearly radiates a strong sense of intimacy, the intimate act itself is hidden from view, that is, it is revealed by the camera precisely as being intimate. The voyeuristic temptation is thus counteracted by an ethically distanced look, a look neither possessive nor enraged. In their intimacy the couple becomes an ornament, abstracted from its surrounding whilst being very much there. A Western viewer fishing in his or her own repository of memories might beget the strange association of a Muslim pietà.

One billboard, displayed in the foyer, remained there for the duration of the exhibition. It showed an arabesque made of a tree's bare branches. Every single branch is covered under a thick layer of snow. Contemplation is celebrated here as the art of frozen vision but also exposed in its utter precariousness: a single gust of wind will do. The image opposite the tree, by contrast, was dark.

During the first six episodes of the itinerary this black-and-white image showed a little place in the Marais quarter of Paris by night. The scenery looks rather inconspicuous. As with a photograph of Eugène Atget, or a crime scene, there is no living soul in sight. The viewer, a witness, is left on his or her own. A few glaring streetlamps - three to be precise - absorb all the visual attention. The lights of one are reflected in the window of a huge door to a building. An imaginary trapezoid of light intrigues the eye. The building looks somehow official. Yes, 'Liberté, Fraternité, Égalité' is carved in stone above the entrance gate - the infinitely contradictory mantra of the French Revolution. But only by entering the next space, the gallery with the five images, did the mystery of meaning allow itself to be addressed. Photographs seemed to remember other photographs, as the eye is fed with formal features that remember features already digested.

There were more photographs shot at night in the room: one of a tunnel in Brussels, and one of another site in Paris. Both places were dimly lit and look hopelessly deserted. There were more writings to be detected, expressions in public, informal traces of an engagement, on the walls of some buildings. In Nanterre, 'Paix en Algérie' has been painted on the wall of a house. To the left of the graffiti is a street sign that forbids entry. On a purely visual level, access to France's colonial war memory seems prohibited. A fence is connected to the wall. Oddly, the fence cuts into the writing, which means that it must have been added later, and also that someone made the conscious decision to preserve the graffiti.1 There is still no peace in Algeria. The other shot of Paris at night was taken on a street corner, again in the Marais. Here, as well as with the revolutionary mantra, the state has intervened. A part of Rue Grenier sur l'Eau is being renamed Allée des Justes, as a plaque next to the new street name explains.2 The old name, while kept, is crossed out. The new street name is dedicated to those French who courageously saved Jewish fellow-citizens from the death-machine of the Nazis during the German occupation.

Two more photographs are displayed in this space. Their one common feature is the human figure. One billboard shows a group of Moroccan boys lingering on the steps of the Royal Palace on the Dam in Amsterdam. The group looks slightly disjointed. All the boys' eyes are directed towards some spectacle that takes place outside the frame and, evidently, subjects them to their position of just watching. In the background, on the façade of the Nieuwe Kerk, a banner reads 'Liefde' ('Love'). This is an announcement for an art exhibition with masterworks from the Hermitage Museum inside the church. As a consequence of the image's strong perspectival composition, the viewer's eye is drawn almost naturally towards 'Liefde', while the boys' eyes are drawn towards the mysterious non-event. In the Dutch media, Moroccan boys play a particular role: they allegorise a perceived Islamic threat to Western welfare. Here, they are exposed as a rather helpless bunch and out of synch. Interestingly, their structural position within the image equals that of any viewer in front of the image. Both occupy a threshold, both are banned. The boys are banned by an event that visibly excludes them, the viewer by a camera that reveals its true subject as being invisible or, rather, out of frame. Is there a solidarity created by this structural égalité?

A sense of complicity? Both questions, as I am well aware, are impossible to answer. But they are posed. The second photograph with human figures shows two Turkish women with headscarves in a park in Berlin-Kreuzberg. Also here a church looms in the background, an imposing Neo-Gothic façade. Equally imposing is the huge tree under the canopy of which the women are bent over a grill. The women appear tiny in relation to both the tree and the façade of the church. They look perfectly at ease with what they are doing, and the whole scenery has a pastoral ring to it. The smoke emanating from the grill fire partly clouds the outdoor chapel. Looking back at the Moroccan boys, is this an image of successful integration in relation to their disintegration? With all those visual hints in mind, and with a few more - such as the graffiti reading 'Allah' and 'Vlam's blok' in the tunnel in Brussels³ - the visitor might have felt an urge to go back the ten metres or so to the foyer opening onto van de Ven's space and consult the empty place in the Marais once again. And, yes, the place might not seem so deserted anymore, as one could easily project oneself into it, standing there, much like the Moroccan boys, waiting. The revolutionary mantra has shaped the Western subject as much as it has become fundamental for the idea of the modern state, both conceived in terms of universal human rights and secularism. The three words are not just ornamental; they are dead serious. They are also not words, but rather a call. Equally fundamental for the Western subject is the Rousseauean ideal of a direct encounter between the citizen and the state. And here they meet. The little place in the Marais reveals itself to be the site of a perpetual rendezvous.

It has become clear by now that van de Ven's visual itinerary, in passing, takes issue with some of the internal contradictions of the Western republican ideal, the Shoah and the Muslim presence in Europe. And while people tend to take a position in a heated debate, being for or against headscarves, for or against Israel's Palestianian policies, photography's frozen vision offers a rare chance to contemplate the political consistency of the world. But it is not photography's frozen vision as such that works in favour of contemplation. The aesthetic consistency of van de Ven's singular vision does the trick because it tends to undo the elements of self-assurance that inform every position taken. Thus van de Ven's viewer is invited to look at least twice, to come back to an image, to compare one image with another, to make proper sense of the space in between images, and to look more closely while taking some distance. The discipline of looking retroactively is not necessarily nice and comfortable but generates energy in terms of transference and countertransference.

However, in contrast to the deeply alienating nature of mass-mediated imagery - alienating precisely because of its suffocating familiarity - the ethically distanced look aims at psychic nearness. There exist behind all political ossifications more-or-less ephemeral, unstable life forms, and they correspond to the viewer's own ephemeral, unstable life form which, in a way, is betrayed by any position taken. Rather, or so it seems, a position should be given.

The constellation of images in documenta changed after a week. Gone now were the tunnel, 'Paix en Algérie', and the street corner of Allée des Justes. Or, better, almost gone. The two figural images, the Moroccan boys and Turkish women, still shared the space with the memory traces of the other three images that had been whitewashed, leaving the motifs barely discernible. A few days later, a new image appeared where that of the tunnel had been. The new motif, in colour, was also taken in Brussels. A crowd of people, a demonstration, moves towards the viewer. In order to contain the flow of protesters three young men, informal security guards, are toying with a red rope. The centre of the image is occupied by a rabbi and a mullah, who march next to each other. A Star of David appears between their heads while further to the right a placard condemns Israel for ignoring peace petitions. Based on the date when the photograph was taken, the demonstration is directed against Israel's invasion of Lebanon in July 2006. The conventional flatness of commercial media worlds, from TV to the internet, does not really work in favour of complex or multi-layered images, images that are more than a shout. This is the reason why the juxtaposition of a rabbi and mullah feels slightly surprising. It is less surprising if the political heterogeneity of Israel and Jewish orthodoxy are taken into account.4 One other actor deserves to be mentioned because of his highly identifiable dress code: a boy wearing the tricot of the équipe tricolore, the French national football team. In this photograph, too, integration is an issue, albeit with a difference. The composition is not static. The people are shown to have an agenda; they are clearly moved, even though neither their faces nor their bodily gestures betray much passion. The whole impact of the protest seems to be held in the red rope or, more precisely, in the young men who are forced by it, much like Laocoön, into bearing its weight. Close observers of the scene, they negotiate a flexible threshold that can be perceived in between the viewer's position and the moving crowd.

A week later, the two black-and-white photographs of Amsterdam and Berlin were whitewashed. The red-rope performers in Brussels were joined by two more colour photographs. The ghost of 'Paix en Algérie' was covered with an interior view of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem, while the former Allée des Justes was replaced with a close-up in a London street, opposite the French embassy. In the latter the camera is focused on a quite spectacular bouquet of paper held by a group of chanting Muslim women. The irregular geometric pattern formed by the sheets of paper provides the otherwise non-representable acoustic experience with a visible rhythm. The song lines are easily readable: '1-2-3-4, Stop Chirac's racist law' or 'If this is demo-cracy, Then we will say "non merci"'. From the sheet we learn that the protest was organised by the MWS (Muslim Women's Society) on International Hijab Solidarity Day (4 September).

The other photograph, Jerusalem, 16/04/2006, confirms what one would have imagined anyway: the Holy Sepulchre, the site where Jesus is buried, is a crowded place. The centre of the image is taken up by a black man who faces the camera frontally. He is wearing a sweatshirt that says, or rather announces, 'Miracle Time', and also indicates that he is coming from France. Another call, this time from the other side. His absolute absorption in the hic et nunc, while in communion with eternity, is not only acknowledged but also conveyed by his blankly earnest facial expression and pose. His look addresses the viewer in an unexpectedly direct way, as if mimicking the viewer's own visual attention. However, the projected encounter between the viewer and his or her reciprocal self seems to be under threat from at least two angles: a tourist pushes his camera dangerously close to the black man's right ear, the camera's shining metal almost touching his skin, while on his left side, a Greek Orthodox priest, who is evidently in a rush while turning back, is certainly bound to run into the viewer's reciprocal self the very next second. As it were, 'Miracle Time' is a precarious event.

To put it differently, attention is revealed here to be a category of risk. And attention is what van de Ven's photography and installation is mainly about. Attention to detail and to the big picture. Attention to traces. But what precisely is attention other than a condition of conscious alertness? In her book World Spectators (2000), Kaja Silverman makes an argument for attention as an activity by which the human subject, conceived 'in its most profound sense [as] nothing other than a constellation of visual memories', addresses the world around him or her with a particular wish: the wish that his or her visual memories be matched by perceptual forms.⁵ Perceptual forms that may just lie in wait, somewhere out there. For Silverman, it is basically the drive for psychic affiliation that makes people scan the world. To come back to van de Ven's work by way of its engagement with memory and perception, one must ask where in the visual experience wishes filter in, and where political unconscious comes to the fore, while someone looks attentively. These are tough questions, I think, in the midst of all this political and religious imagery. The questions become tougher in the face of the sliding layers, a phenomenon that is explicitly acknowledged by the installation's form. Associations can be made, and correspondences detected. A red rope or a bouquet of paper come to symbolise and organise the social. Perception unites a man in a light-blue shirt among the protesters in Brussels with the light-blue dresses of the group of black pilgrims inside the Holy Sepulchre with the light-blue hijabs of the chanting women in London. Is there, after all, a politics of forms and colours? Is there a way to account for the impact of precisely these features of the phenomenal world - forms and colour - that is not merely aesthetic? But then, why must this question be phrased that defensively? What has the political, as a possible venue for art's appearance in an exhibition or an art magazine, to offer beyond an utterly repressive discourse of legitimation and control?⁶

There is one single man, a Bedouin on a bicycle in a little piece of mostly littered land next to what looks like his hut. 'Hut' is already a euphemism for the improvised construction of mostly scrap metals with what must be a burning hot zinc roof on top. The hill in the background, whose Palestinian name is Abu Ghnaim, is occupied by an Israeli settlement called Har Homa ('wall mountain'). As the two cranes indicate, the settlement is visibly under construction and the image therefore one of becoming rather than being. In between the two dwellings, the layout of an elaborate street system is destined to keep Israeli roads apart from Palestinian ones. Just look at the massive stone blocks along the side of the road (which pose no obstacle to the bicycle). A political narrative would have to dig into all the issues and concerns that give themselves to be seen in this and other photographs: the Shoah and its still perceptible shadow; the founding of Israel in 1948; the Six-Day War and the ensuing saga of the occupied territories; nondemocratic Arab rulers who were systematically supported by the West in the latter's narrow interests; a modernity largely denied to Arab and Middle Eastern peoples with the ensuing frustration largely ventilated through religion; the Intifadas; suicide bombers; a lack of credible Palestinian leaders; a credible one that is imprisoned in Israel, and on it goes.

Now, what particular issue could still be worth the viewer's attention? A certain type of image is too well known, the propaganda type. There is probably no area in the world more closely observed, more obsessively photographed and mediated than the Middle East. As a consequence, the place has become too familiar to be properly recognised. Its presence is suffocating; its identities predictable. The Bedouin pictured is one of about 50,000 people, many of them refugees, who are stranded in between the front lines, trying to live a semi-nomadic lifestyle within the confines of ever-increasing restrictions, while traditional Bedouin areas are being cleared for settlement expansion. But does all that matter when it comes to the image? By contemplating this photograph, the obvious signifiers of 'place' and 'subject' loose their prominence amidst the grainy surface. The subject of the image might be neither Abu Ghnaim nor Har Homa, nor the road system or the Bedouin hut. In a subtle defiance of the hyper-visible world an altogether different, highly abstract and yet utterly concrete subject stages its appearance: a possible subject-position in spite of all this. No, in spite and in the middle of all this. Like the black man in the Holy Sepulchre, the Bedouin on the bicycle is looking into the camera. While the territory can be easily consumed by the viewer's identifying look, the man introduces into the image a single blind spot. This is the point where the viewer's own consciousness might reside, the navel, so to speak, from which the image becomes intelligible as an image of the viewer. It is here that the two subject-positions - the Bedouin and the visitor - possibly coalesce, thereby risking a structural affiliation that goes beyond mere identification. The key question is psychic involvement, an involvement stimulated by the very particular way the image feeds the viewer's attention and makes him or her remember the sources of his or her own looking. Psychic involvement is singular, which is not at all the same as individualistic. It just means that there is a point at which everyone is responsible for his or her own memories. And also for the kinds of transfer that take place when memories match perceptions and things are recognised for what they are, what they can be, and what they are not. Or where precisely this transfer fails. Van de Ven's work offers a great learning experience in this respect. In her ludicrous competition with the planetary one-sidedness of the ideological factory she allows the world to reappear, to appear again but transformed in a way that exposes and, yes, aestheticises its contradictions and conflicts. Not in order to arrive at an image, finally, but a condition. An affective condition in which the snow, despite its evident beauty, melts - and the tree starts to blossom.