Texting Syria: An Exhibition Across Photographs and Phones
Bringing the conversations into the exhibition
Liam Maloney photographed Syrians who had fled to Lebanon and were using their phones to keep in touch with family in Homs. His installation paired those photographs with text messages received at the time they were taken. The Moving Walls collection includes the photographs and exchanges translated from Arabic.
The messages gave visitors words that the photographs could not show on their own. To bring those exchanges into the exhibition, I built an application that sent them to visitors’ phones through an SMS service.
Building the SMS application
I wrote the application in PHP and integrated the Twilio API for message delivery. A visitor connected to the exhibition’s SMS service and received a sequence of texts drawn from the documented exchanges.
These were previously collected messages. Receiving them did not open a live conversation with the people in the photographs. Liam supplied the content and translations, and my work covered the software that made the SMS experience function.
The visitor’s phone as part of the installation
The visitor read the texts in their own message inbox, where they would ordinarily receive messages from people they knew. That familiar interface became part of the installation alongside the photographs on display.
The application connected the exhibition material to that everyday act of receiving a message. It used the phone already in the visitor’s hand as the place where the written exchange appeared.
Texting Syria’s Photoville New York exhibition record credits Liam Maloney, with coding by Daniel Arce. The Moving Walls 23 artist statement describes Liam’s documentary intent and the larger body of work to which the installation belongs.