Ghinwa Yassine

Multi-media installation, 3-channel film, 4-channel sound

Exhibition statement:

Anti-disciplinary artist Ghinwa Yassine writes an Arab female body as a secret in her multi-media installation When you pour something, it carries the memory of its mold. This work is inspired by secret codes, the appearance and disappearance of women's bodies in a public context, and responding to the various forms of oppression the artist witnessed firsthand or vicariously. She searches for freedom which is a right to carry oneself safely in the world, as one is, in their truth. 

Yassine spent the last three years researching the body as a site for the manifestation of individual and collective memory. She centers embodied agency, which she coins as a gestural agency or an agentic gesture, one in which a body is acting and not being subjected. Her past projectsKickQueen (2020) and How Far Can a Marked Body Go (2023) focus on the bodies of Lebanese women in the 2019 uprisings in Beirut, as an attempt to reclaim what Judith Butler calls “the right to have rights”. Since then, she has been wondering: what would it feel like to have an unconditional freedom to appear and to be? Furthermore, what would it feel like, in the body, to have no enemy, no need to resist or to fight, or rather, not to carry a fight within? These questions become even more urgent considering the unsettling events we are presently witnessing. The work turns into a response to, unfortunately, what today’s freedom is not.

When you pour something, it carries the memory of its mold combines non-fiction writing, sculpture, costume design, sound, and film performance, and is what the artist wishes for her work to be encountered as a relational story through space. 

Role:
Concept, Writing, Performance, Editing, Art Direction, Production

Contributions:
Sound design: Joey Zaurrini
Fabrication: Nathyn Sanche
Cinematography and color correction: Devan Scott
Assistant lighting and camera: Conor Provenzano
Costume design: Natasha Dennison
Research, admin, and production assistance: Melanie Whorton
Writing consultant: Mandana Mansouri
Special thanks to Meagan Woods

With the support of the Canada Council for the Arts.

“You hide in the underground shelter. Life becomes valuable.”

“You witness the appalling truth that genetics and coordinates determine your worth. Life becomes more valuable.”

“It’s worse than ever before. You’re an Arab. You were born an Arab. You will die an Arab. It will never change. You’re proud but scared. It will never change.”

“Sometimes you care so much that you lose your capacity to care.”

“So, shake that Arab hip of yours coz all you have left is dancing.”