Jayce Salloum
2021مقدمة لنهايات جدال
Jayce Salloum, Elia Suleiman
This highly kinetic tableaux of uprooted sights and sounds works most earnestly to expose the racial biases concealed in familiar images. Relying on valuable snippets from feature films such as "Exodus", "Lawrence of Arabia", "Black Sunday", "Little Drummer Girl", and network news shows, the filmmakers have constructed an oddly wry narrative, mimicking the history of Mid East politics.
Introduction to the End of an Argument
Untitled part 3b: (As if) Beauty Never Ends...
Jayce Salloum
An ambient work of many things, including orchids blooming, and plants growing, superimposed over raw footage from post massacre filmings of the 1982 massacre of Palestinians at Sabra and Shatila refugee camp in Lebanon. Cloud footage, Hubbell space imagery, the visible body crosscuts, and abstract shots of slow motion water, add to this reflection of the past, its present context and forbearance. With the voice over of Abdel Majid Fadl Ali Hassan (a 1948 refugee living in Bourg El Barajneh camp) recounting a story told by the rubble of his home in Palestine [Israel], and the collection of audio accompanying the clips, the tape permeates into an intense essay on dystopia in contemporary times. Working directly, viscerally, and metaphorically the videotape rovides an elegiac response to the Palestinian dispossession.
Untitled part 3b: (As if) Beauty Never Ends...
Talaeen A lunuub
Walid Raad, Jayce Salloum
Up to the South is ostensibly a documentary on the south of Lebanon exploring the conditions of the time it was shot, the issues behind those conditions and their representation both in the West and in Lebanon itself. Within this we were trying to tackle two other concerns. One being the terms (and positions) inherent in the discourse surrounding the issues, i.e. terrorism, colonialism, occupation, resistance, collaboration, experts, spokespeople, leadership, the land, etc., and the other being the history and structure of the documentary genre specifically in regards to the representation of other cultures by the West in documentary, ethnography and anthropological practise and the problems/agenda involved from the perspective of the subjects viewed and the practitioners practising. Up to the South challenges traditional documentary formats by positing representation itself as a politicized practice.
Talaeen a Junuub
The Ascent of Man
Jayce Salloum
“The Ascent of Man..” Parts I, II, & III videotapes focus on the human psyche, its possible primordial essence and subsequent deviations thereof. This is expressed through the use of archetypal/stereotypical representations delivered by broadcast television (illustrating ‘mans’ interrelationship to ‘man’, nature & technology) juxtaposed with references to present a world view of scientific materialism’s analytical experiments and propagation of a standard social order. An order devised from the overwhelming and problematic intentionality enforced by the ontologically debased media industry predominate in our time.
The Ascent of Man
Once you’ve shot the gun you can’t stop the bullet.
Jayce Salloum
From accumulated live footage recorded over a period of three years, this piece weaves itself in and out of experiences of differentiation and distance, closeness and otherness and questions of discourse and construction in the viewing and constitution of the subject.
Once you’ve shot the gun you can’t stop the bullet.
