[First name] Alaa [surname] Abu Asad (عَلاء أبو أسعد).
As an artist and photographer, my work takes the form of images, writing, performance, and installation. Language and plants are central themes through which I develop alternative trajectories where values of (re)presentation, translation, viewing, reading, and understanding can come together.
Ways of weaving political values into non-political affairs – if such things exist – constitute the core of my questions around how to approach and represent any particular place. How can identical words in different mother tongues trace personal relationships and common histories at once? How can a field-tour of observing flora be a pretext for addressing landscape, information, and colonial history? And how might attention to the influence of invasive species be a trigger towards thinking about society, culture, economy, and the human condition too?
These multilayered concerns on the essence of my art, its production and its politics—stimulate my ways of seeing, together with aesthetic matters of how to juxtapose static photographs with moving images , and written or spoken words. How can these concerns comprehensively convey personal and common experience/s of the individual and the collective, without ignoring actual events and histories that shape memory?
aboasad.alaa[at]gmail[dot]com
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