Representation of the political situation in the Middle East and how this relates to the West is an important theme in Jayce Salloum's work. Research into cultural/political manifestations, ethnographic representation and the methodology behind this, forms the basis for the (video)installations, publications and readings that Salloum has produced in the last ten years. The artist works at the edge of documentary or even (political) journalism. With his work, he attempts to directly influence developments in the question of war (in the Middle East). The showing of his video 'up to the south' (1994) in Paris in 1995 contributed to the release of Soha Bechara, writer and member of the Lebanese National Resistance, from the El Khiam prison camp in occupied South Lebanon in September 1999. Born in Lebanon in 1964, she joined the resistance movement in 1986 and was arrested two years later. Bechara is a national heroine in Lebanon. Photos of her decorate the living rooms of many families in southern Lebanon. In the nineties, her portrait was hung, poster fashion, in the streets of Beirut. She withstood ten years imprisonment in El Khiam, six of which she spent in complete isolation in a very small cell. Salloum interviewed her in her tiny apartment in Paris. She voices her thoughts about revising notions of resistance, survival and will without noticeable emotion. She is silent about the torture she had to endure. Instead, she talks about the distance between the subject and the loss, about what is left behind and what remains.
Excerpts from this interview - here shown in its entirety - were also part of Salloum's installation 'beauty and the east' (2000).
|
Jayce Salloum ° 1958 Kelowna, Canada
Lives and works in Vancouver, Canada
|
|
2 0 0 1 
