Artist Statement
"Shake that Arab hip of yours, coz all you have left is dancing." I’m an anti-disciplinary artist and shapeshifter whose practice is currently hovering in a gap between radical resistance and embracing an inner Barbie girl. My research is interdisciplinary and combines knowledge from neuroscience, spirituality, politics, and feminist and queer theory. My work uses various media, including film, installation, performance, text, sculpture, and drawing. It seeks a radical historicizing and insists on reclaiming the agency of silenced narratives whether embodied or personal. 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. Writing is central to my art which largely concerns the body as a site where personal and collective memory manifest. Using hybrid forms of storytelling, where the story manifests as somatic experiencing, ritual, and gesture, my projects are portals to factual/fictional dimensions. During the last four years, I’ve been researching the bodies of politically active women in the public arena looking for what I call an agentic gesture or gestural agency, attempting to construct a futurist speculative embodied archive through a feminist and queer lens. These projects employ an interplay between re-enactment, archival images, animation, sculpture, sound, and text. I have produced various multimedia installations that often include sculpture and video performances. In a video performance, I use the camera as 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. My work often lives in response to events that occur in my home country, Lebanon, yet deals with global themes, addressing the 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.