"(as if) beauty never ends..." and Other Video Works

Jayce Salloum, New York City, May 8, 2004

Jayce Salloum will present his "untitled" project, an ongoing videotape addressing social and political realities, representations, enunciations, and the conditions of living between polarities of culture, geography, history, and ideology. In part 1: "everything and nothing" (1999-2001, 40 mins.), Salloum, off-camera, talks with Soha Bechara, the ex-Lebanese National Resistance fighter who was detained for 10 years in the notorious El-Khiam torture and interrogation center in South Lebanon. In a riveting and intimate conversation, Salloum inquires about home, being interviewed to death, resistance, survival, and the distance between Paris, where Bechara now lives, and Khiam.

In part 2: "beauty and the east" (1999–2002, 50 mins.), Salloum turns obliquely to the former Yugoslavia after the NATO bombing. In a kaleidoscope of interviews, refugees, migrants, asylum seekers, and cultural producers address topics ranging from identity and fascism to nationalism and monsters. In both anecdotal and theoretical recountings, they lay out the issues currently at stake in this region of displacement and redefinition; their words are located within images of cities and landscapes.

Also shown will be part 3: "(as if) beauty never ends..." (2003, 11 mins.), in which ambient footage including a montage of orchids blooming and material from the site of the 1982 massacres at Lebanon's Sabra and Shatilla refugee camps are juxtaposed with the voice Abdel Majid Fadl Ali Hassan (a 1948 refugee living in Bourg El Barajneh) recounting a story told by the rubble of his home in Palestine. The tape permeates into an essay on dystopia in contemporary times, and provides an elegiac response to the Palestinian dispossession.Jayce Salloum videotape screenings at Exit Art

Saturday May 8 - 6:30 & 7:30 pm

475 Tenth Ave, New York

(212) 966-7745

info@exitart.org

6:30 pm: untitled part 2: beauty and the east

7:30 pm: introduction to the 'untitled' project by Jayce Salloum.

7:50 pm: untitled part 3b (as if) beauty never ends, and untitled part 1: everything and nothing

Since 1975 Salloum has been working in installation, photography, mixed media and video, as well as curating exhibitions, conducting workshops and coordinating cultural projects. He has lectured internationally and exhibited extensively throughout the Americas, Europe, East Asia and the Middle East, at institutions including The Museum of Modern Art, New York; American Fine Arts; Artists Space; National Gallery of Canada; Canadian Museum of Contemporary Photography; Canadian Museum of Civilization; New Langton Arts; Los Angeles Center for Photographic Studies; Long Beach Museum of Art; Walker Arts Center; The Wexner Center; YYZ Artists Outlet; A Space; Contemporary Art Gallery & Western Front, Vancouver; Optica Gallery; Dazibzo; Mois De La Photo à Montréal; Miyagi Museum of Contemporary Art; Hara Museum of Contemporary Art; Kunstlerhaus Bethanien; Werkleitz Bienniel; Galerie Nationale du Jeu de Paume; American Centre, Paris; Cinematheque Française; Institute du Monde Arabe; Espace Lyonnais d'Art Contemporain; Shedhalle; Rote Fabrik; Rotterdam International Film Festival; Singapore International Film Festival; British Film Institute; Museo Nacional Centro De Arte Reina Sofia; Museo de Arte Contemporáneo, Seville; CaixaForum, Barcelona; and Théatre de Beyrouth. In 2003 he represented Canada at the 8th Havana Biennial.

For more information on Salloum’s work:

www.111101.net/

vdb.org

civilisations.ca

lot.at

wwvf.nl