“Souvenir Trauma”

Site-specific installation / Beirut, 2011

Starting with Susan Sontag’s book “Regarding The Pain of Others”;

The subject creates a psycho-strategic discursive ground through the social position when looking at the traumas of others through the one “regarding the pain” and the one “whose pain is being regarded.” Within the context of this strategy, the artist is a third eye as a “temporary citizen.” Could there be a relationship between the geographies that the artist travels through and the artistic production? As a suggestive field set forth by the coincidental experiences, what are the problematics involved? What is the impact of the surrounding ideological pressures that surround the artist? With the new responsibilities of the artist, who is also a “witness” of the now, the artist assumes new responsibilites in the production in the framework of intercultural communication; how transformative are these said responsibilities?

Could the middle-eastern artistic practices—that were manipulated by the pressures of orientalism a century ago—be newly oppressive through the intuitive seduction of the post-traumatic? What are the expectations of Western artistic institutions from Middle-Eastern artists? Could these expectations be esoteric methods that were extended to our time by the tradition of prejudice? How should the Middle-Eastern artist use the right to “respond” at this point? How functional is art, also a means of provocation, in describing and subverting the expectation? The artist, in this first part of his production, “Souvenir Trauma,” triggered by his Middle-Eastern experiences chooses to show from within and aims to research whether there is a linguistic and methodological unity between artists who share a common geography.