Living Bones
My grandmother died in 1982, a painful death from two different types of cancer. I briefly lived with my grandparents when my mother, brother and I flew in from Greece (where we lived) to Beirut, to be with Téta, as we called our grandmother. I remember running into her room one day after preschool, donning an orange hat made of construction paper that I had just made, so eager to show it to her. I remember being so happy, and that happiness immediately being stopped in its tracks, either at the behest of an adult, cautioning me to stop and not enter, or at the sight of my grandmother vomiting red, everywhere. I thought it was blood; It was Jello. She died very shortly after and was buried in a cemetery in Beirut, not in our ancestral village of Marjeyoun, which is where she should have been buried. Years later, when I asked about her, and more specifically, asked about where she was buried, my uncle said that the cemetery was no longer there, that it was destroyed by an air raid at one point. It was no longer there.
In Hawaiʻi, where I lived for seventeen years, ancestral bones are sacred. Unearthing bones is sacrilegious, as it is believed that the spirits of the buried exist within the bones; to unearth them is to cause unrest. The idea of the sanctity of bones made me reflect on our own burial practices as Arabs, and it forced me to ask the hardest of questions: Where are the bones? The bones in question are those of my grandmother’s. This series in an angry one. It unearths and locates bones, bringing them to life again, and confronts the viewer with death without softening its blow. It is a reminder from the bones that the spirits remain. The grappling is painful yet urgent, as destruction en masse continues to happen. I continue to piece my grandmother together.
In Hawaiʻi, where I lived for seventeen years, ancestral bones are sacred. Unearthing bones is sacrilegious, as it is believed that the spirits of the buried exist within the bones; to unearth them is to cause unrest. The idea of the sanctity of bones made me reflect on our own burial practices as Arabs, and it forced me to ask the hardest of questions: Where are the bones? The bones in question are those of my grandmother’s. This series in an angry one. It unearths and locates bones, bringing them to life again, and confronts the viewer with death without softening its blow. It is a reminder from the bones that the spirits remain. The grappling is painful yet urgent, as destruction en masse continues to happen. I continue to piece my grandmother together.
Viscera
Viscera (Hands)
Warhead
The AMX-13 and the Panhard M3 are two of several types of tanks used in Lebanon during its civil war, which spanned 15 years. These tanks are juxtaposed onto portraits drawn from passport photos of myself and my brother, to create a militarized identity as a form of commentary on what becomes of the children born and raised into war. The marks which shape these warheads mimic the agitation the feeling of war and uncertainty brings, as experienced by myself. The title Warhead itself is a double entendre, signifying the literal head that has a war machine built into it and/or the warhead as weapon in and of itself. It becomes difficult to separate the self from the collective aggression of a country dissolved into chaos.
Pearl
Cannibal
In Prey/Pray, interwoven passages of Islamic pattern give way to an infestation of spiders which at first glance seem caught in a web of their own making, but upon closer inspection they break free and claim more ground. Opposite the spiders, toads parallel that action in a broader takeover where the infestation has broken through boundaries, claiming one territory after another. What the two animals have in common is the fact that they are both cannibals, consuming their own as they claim hegemony, which is symbolic of religious warfare which continues to plague the middle east. In some instances, intricate Islamic and Coptic design are stand-ins for these cannibalistic animals as they assert their presence on a city grid representative of Middle Eastern cities. This body of work offers critical insight into the state of affairs in the Middle East and the disregard of its people to the lives of “others” from their own communities. Factions seek to populate and expand in number to further religious dominance and hence participate in systematic elimination of their imagined opponent, here represented by the cannibalistic red back spider and cane toad.
Maps to Nowhere
Islamic patterns juxtaposed with familiar Christian icons give insight into the political situation in Lebanon. Religious symbols are set against a hand-drawn maze system made to resemble Kufic script and also mimic a city street plan. The seemingly disparate motifs are in fact deliberately chosen and carefully described as reiterations of the Lebanese cultural fabric, hinting at an apprehension for impending conflict.
