Non Stop conversation

Overview

I try, always try, to create a space where I can probe my identities vis-á-vis the world around me. Using a wide range of mediums, I often attempt to explore the world of illusion against a background of memory, a memory nearly always based in reality. By sensing and exposing a metaphorical world that hides beneath the physical, I attempt to bring the unseen into a visual space. In the context of my work, I had come to sense the existence of a metaphorical room that hides behind the physicality of the body, a room that reflects the much bigger room outside, the one representing society, its customs, traditions, conventions and the factors conditioning it.

You Will be Killed is a video animation project. In the animation, my world depicts a person’s self – their memories. Their dreams are shown on the walls of my surroundings. However, they are shown through symbolic representation instead of illustration. Some content corresponds to where a particular event (in the person’s memory) is taking place, and other content corresponds to the person him/herself – hence the relation between a person and their surroundings. Therefore, any particular event in a person’s life will not only represent a geographical location, but also their feelings, memories, and emotional drives.

The starting point for You Will be Killed is my visit to an old camp from the time of the English colonisation 30 years ago and the memories stirred by that location. To me, war is the easiest way to depict violence. However, my aim was to depict that violence in a circle of imagination far from war itself, and to show how it affects oneself and one’s surroundings.

I plan to show memories of a person’s self and their relationship with their surroundings in such a way that s/he is an absent viewer, or a static one, yet their surroundings are dynamic. The location, spaces as intimacy spaces, and their relationship with the person, all switch roles throughout the animation until they lose their original function. Then violence takes over and becomes the main drive of the story.

Non-stop conversation takes place through the overlapping artificial sounds of the machinery, until it reaches the point at which the sounds occur simultaneously and the place is reconstructed architecturally through a projection aimed at changing architectural constriction and rearranging it according to the extension, the overlapping and the violence of the voice performance in an inversely proportional method. The place becomes more constricted, chaotic and of unknown dimensions.


This project was part of Sharjah Biennial 8.