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2020
Ghiyab
Ghiyab, 2021. Digital Collage Print. It is the outcome of my course-work with NYU Kevorkian Center in their Practitioner in Residence course seminar: Unraveling Collections and Practices: Rights Materialities and Photogenic Agency.
Ghiyab gathers the pictures from the Negol Bezijan collection of Arab Image Foundation (AIF) of Armenian survivors in refugee camps in Syria alongside excerpts of text from my favorite writer Radwa Ashour from her Novel “AlTanturiya” which covers the story of Al-Nakba & the displacement of Palestinians in 1948.
The work intends to highlight the intersectionality of forced-displacement & how stories align within our region within different frameworks. However, the pain is ever-going.
It was exhibited in Governor’s Island, New York with Protocinema on August 8th, 2021.
Ghiyab gathers the pictures from the Negol Bezijan collection of Arab Image Foundation (AIF) of Armenian survivors in refugee camps in Syria alongside excerpts of text from my favorite writer Radwa Ashour from her Novel “AlTanturiya” which covers the story of Al-Nakba & the displacement of Palestinians in 1948.
The work intends to highlight the intersectionality of forced-displacement & how stories align within our region within different frameworks. However, the pain is ever-going.
It was exhibited in Governor’s Island, New York with Protocinema on August 8th, 2021.
“The keys became hanged in my neck. Like my mother, the key will stay hanged in my neck. While awake & asleep. I never take it off, even in the toilet. Whenever the chain is worn out, I replaced it with a new one.”
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Moushahen. Children at play (0170be00002, courtesy of AIF).
“Our country is bigger. The houses are bigger and the neighborhoods and we have bigger fields.”
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An unidentified location. Probably the residents of one of the Alawite Arab villages near Moushashen.
Women grind and crush wheat in a stone mortar
(0170be00023, courtesy of AIF).
(0170be00023, courtesy of AIF).
“He was standing at the train station, waiting to go back from where he came from.
But which absurdity would demand him to register his stay and get an identity card for waiting?”
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The market of Rihanie (present-day Reyhanlı). A cobbler with his customers (0170be00034, courtesy of AIF).
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“May you rest in peace my mother, if god gave you more time you would have got acquaintaned with different times. Times that force you to familiarize yourself with distant cities thousands of kilometers apart from you. You would stumble in pronouncing their names and you’d get attached to them because the kids are there. Did I say I didn’t get used to it? I take my words back. I got used to it. No one is beyond taming time. “
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Moushashen. A woman baking bread in a tonir (0170be00004, courtesy of AIF).
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“What does a woman do when she feels that she stayed alive by mere coincidence? How does she walk in a world if her existence, all these years and months and days and good and bad moments that she lived are a consequence of arbitrary surplus of absurd faith?”
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Village of Hayashen, Antioch region. A mother and her child. The caption reads: “Village mother with baby whose life was saved when it was released from tight swaddling clothes, by member of NEF staff” (0170be00057, courtesy of AIF).
“What does a woman do when she feels that she stayed alive by mere coincidence? How does she walk in a world if her existence, all these years and months and days and good and bad moments that she lived are a consequence of arbitrary surplus of absurd faith?”
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Village of Hayashen, Antioch region. A mother and her child. The caption reads: “Village mother with baby whose life was saved when it was released from tight swaddling clothes, by member of NEF staff” (0170be00057, courtesy of AIF).