Artist Statement

In my artistic practice I have often explored the concept of memory as an interior landscape that stands in contrast to the reality of the places we occupy.  Memory is evoked through the use of images and materials, and triggered by different senses, such as touch, smell or sound. As an immigrant I have become more aware of the breach between my interior geography and my surroundings, and more sensitive to the concept of nonplaces. I’ve addressed political issues, mostly in a poetical way, turning facts into sensations and treating the historical through the personal.

In my work there is also a concern with language and its limitations: the incapacity of language to make sense of the experience of life or to account for the irrational.  I have often worked with text in such a way that it loses part of its capacity to communicate as a set of signs. The text is fragmented, layered on top of other texts, moving uneasily or revealing part of the code (in the case of internet text). At times it is sensually charged, appealing more to the senses than to the intellect. All of these are attempts to destabilize meaning, but are also attempts to release new ones, which are communicated at an aesthetic level.

I have used nonlinear video narratives in conjunction with physical objects to express my concerns about migration, history, and the fragile nature of memory. In my most recent video installation, “Findings” (2007), which I carried out with the support of the Ontario Arts Council, I worked with video fragments and testimonies of relatives regarding my family’s migration from Palestine.

Conceptually, I’ve been recently concerned with the way personal history is constructed in relation to more official accounts of events, and the role of photographs and other historic documents in the creation of memories. Photographs, as Susan Sontag states, are not only a presence, but also a token of absence. “They are an invitation to deduction, speculation and fantasy”. I want to further research this intersection between memory and history, documents and imagination, documentary and fiction.

I want to reflect on my work from different perspectives, including traditional film documentary theories, new media theories, the visual arts, psychoanalysis, and literature, in order to further explore the meaning of memory in relation to the physical traces and documents that aid in the reconstruction of a subjective history.  Formally and technically, I want to further develop my skills in putting together interactive new media works and explore the relation of such works with the viewer/ participant.