Artist Statement
My work is auto-ethnographic and considers the body as a site where personal and collective memory manifest. My research is interdisciplinary and combines knowledge from neuroscience, spirituality, politics, and feminist and queer theory. It seeks a radical historicizing of individual and collective traumas and insists on reclaiming the agency of silenced narratives whether embodied or personal. Using hybrid forms of storytelling, where the story manifests as somatic experiencing, ritual, and gesture, my projects are portals to factual/fictional dimensions.
Many of my works confront the ideological and patriarchal systems that I grew up in, an attempt to delineate collective feelings and what it means to be a marked body. In my video performances, the camera is an interface between the bodies of the performer and the viewer. Extending from the bounded space of the body, a gestural concept pervades a film’s temporality. A video installation becomes a transcription of story and emotion through movement and space, a potential for an embodied relational encounter with a historical narrative.
Although my work often lives in response to events that occur in my home-country, Lebanon, the themes it deals with are universal in the way they address a human condition of the politic-al/ized being. For instance, investigating the visual and embodied language in protests and public space has led me to look at the body in terms of its realness and un-realness, in other words, its erasure or disappearance from political realms, its disenfranchisement and disempowerment when it doesn’t fit certain categories. When I speak about women asserting their agency in public, I’m often speaking to the set of circumstances that deny it this agency or, as Judith Butler describes, denies it “the right to have rights”. And those circumstances can only be understood when one looks at all these relationships: the private/public, the personal/collective, the local/global.