RE-MEMBERING (inquiry1)

re-membering, putting together pieces to re-create a new whole…

When my ten year old first experienced a strong episode of anxiety, I was terrified. After we could all take a deep breath, I reflected on lifelong anxiety for fleeing, fighting, survival and the passing down from one generation to the next the unwholesome habit of shallow breathing (My son’s psychologist gave me exercises for the whole family to re-learn deep breathing). I learned that for our self to be in harmony, our brain tries, via all of its different parts, to come together and work simultaneously, collaboratively  -  an image of neuron fireworks exploding in orchestra. This is, according to Drs Tina Payne Bryson  and Daniel J.Siegel in their book “The Whole-Brain Child” - what we call, an “Integrated Brain”. This integrated brain has the capacity to re-mix memories, re-wiring important notions we have about ourselves and the world around us.

A re-gathering is needed, all parts of the self need to integrate…

In an episode of the Makdisi Street podcast, Palestinian academic Dr Nadera Shalhoub Kevorkian, talks about her troubling obsession during the ongoing Gaza genocide with the concept of ‘ achla’ ’ or dismembered body parts that have become the visual motif of the violence inflicted against the Palestinian people and screened live on our mobile screens for our consumption.

Kevorkian draws a parallel between the dismembered bodies and the geographical dismemberment of historic Palestine. A process that has been unfolding over decades. 

In the face of this physical dismemberment on a bodily level as well as nation state level, Dr Nadera conjures the image of a bereaved father, his children killed in a shelling on Gaza, their body parts gathered in white plastic bags. Holding these bags up to the whole world to witness, the man screams ‘these are my children’. Dr Nadera remarks, the man has gathered the limbs of his dismembered children , reclaiming their wholeness made up of pieces. Despite the tragedy, “...there is power in this act, the father is reclaiming his fatherhood” she adds.

on re-rewiring…

According to Naomi Klein in her last YouTube conversation with Yanis Varoufakis, re-membering doesn’t always go so well - it could become re-traumatising. She calls this re-traumatising “a dismemberment…as re-membering tries to put together the traumatized pieces of the self together again…that’s what trauma does, it splits the self”.

My collage making with tactile or digital means is a form of re-membering, an attempt at making sense, at healing.

A way to create a new whole from past broken pieces - bringing them together in an act to re-member the present past and future, from the disparate shells create the most luminary of disco balls.

COMPLICITY (inquiry2)

“Complicity means in Latin folded together, not conspiracy…it’s time to reimagine our complicity with the colonies…” as scholar Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak explains in her 2022 March Meeting Keynote “Imperatives to Reimagine the Post-Colonial” at the Sharjah Art Foundation.

I acknowledge my first complicity in being a migrant, making a life on stolen colonised lands with family which is in itself dislocated from its own homeland - drawing on the parallel dispossession (that is ongoing) through colonial systems past and continuing. I currently live with my family on the unceded lands of the Dharug peoples and pay my respect to Elders, past present and emerging.

I consider complicity through a variety of activity including consumerism - material and digital and invite audiences to consider complicity from the various spaces of (sometimes shifting) privileges we all occupy.

I am an image maker and it’s become even more crucial for me to self check my complicity in a world where images are powerful tools for political cultural projects. Especially from my position as a woman, politicised identity in a colony, practicing in a context ripe with exotification and flattening of complex rendering of stories.

To unpack complicity , I work  closely again with lifetime collaborators daughter Yasmeen El Haddad and son Aram El Haddad as well as my parents.

Using new frameworks for the creative negotiation that happens between artist and other artist collaborators, parent and child. l also work with my husband, artist collaborator and videographer Ludwig El Haddad.

Centering the family as key figures animating the works, my work sits at the intersection of often jostling dynamics of family, political and cultural relations.