A Moment Before You Close Your Eyes
Exhibited in ASpace Gallery, Toronto, and MAI Gallery, Montréal, Canada, 2011
The moment of shooting from a sniper in the dark. Through the rays of the night vision, consecutive shots towards two people who are raising their toast in an intimate moment. A series of successive photos of the artist and his female companions celebrating the construction of their first studio on their farm, in Baghdad, which they left behind forever, after the second Gulf War in 1991.
“Violence is often conceptualized as an event that begins and ends in a particular time period, and through memories, violence is re-lived and (re)articulated. A Moment Before You Close Your Eyes reminds us that violence is not a bounded event but an ongoing and lived experience that is expressed constantly through our relationship to ordinary objects, bodies, nature, others, and ourselves. In this sense, violence descends into the ordinary. The landscape in Iraq has been irrevocably altered in the past 30 years by militarized violence and cognitive violence. A Moment Before You Close Your Eyes is a series of slideshows and videos on how the surveilling gaze invades ordinary life. Night-vision cameras are used in military operations and are mostly associated with the U.S. Army’s mapping of people’s movements at night and navigating through public and private spaces in Iraq. Using modern technologies of war equipment, people’s bodies become constantly exposed, naked, and vulnerable. The feeling of safety is replaced by constant threats of being watched. Violence, here, lies in the very act of deprivation of the senses, of seeing and feeling the space; it is yet another form of displacement.
ASpace Gallery, text by Nayrouz Abu-Hatoum & Sarah Hamdi Green Night, slideshow and video installation, projected simultaneously in a loop on two adjacent walls, 600 x 400 cm, Toronto, Canada Exhibited in ASpace Gallery, Toronto, and MAI Gallery, Montréal, Canada, 2011 Selected Work