Video Out

untitled part 3: (as if) beauty never ends...

A more ambient work of many things, including orchids blooming, and plants growing, superimposed over raw footage from post massacre filmings of the 1982 massacre at Sabra and Shatilla refugee camps in Lebanon.  With the voice over of Abdel Majid Fadl Ali Hassan (a 1948 refugee living in Bourg El Barajneh camp) recounting a story told by the rubble of his home in Palestine, the collection of interview audio transforms the tape into an intense video essay on contemporary dystopia.  Working directly, viscerally, and metaphorically the videotape provides an elegiac response to the Palestinian dispossession.
 

Jayce Salloum has been working in installation, photography, mixed media and video since 1975. Salloum is known for installation works that sensitively investigate historical, social and cultural contexts of place. The grandson of Syrian (now a part of Lebanon) immigrants, Salloum studied in the United States. Central themes played out in his work include questions of exile, ethnic representation and cultural identity. Exhibiting nationally and internationally, his work is held in the collections of the National Gallery of Canada, the Museum of Modern Art and the Centre Pompidou. In 2014, Salloum won a Governor General’s Award in Visual and Media Arts.