Paradise Series 2013

Collage using magazines and digital reproductions on board with sound on headphones

Audio duration: 14 mins 57 secs

Courtesy the artist

Samah Hijawi's Paradise Series forms part of the artist's ongoing research project – entitled Chicken Scribbles and the Dove that Looks like a Frog – that looks at the relationship between aesthetics, art-making, trauma and loss in the Arab world.

As part of this project, Hijawi explores the ways in which Palestine has been represented, recorded and remembered in both visual and oral culture. The collages in Paradise Series borrow from oral narratives, magazines, family photographs, as well as paintings by Palestinian artists from the 1950s. Together, these disparate elements produce an image of a lost, paradisiacal land. The narrative voiced in the accompanying audio further complicates the line between fiction and reality.

On 18 July the artist will present a performance-lecture The Wandering Singer of Tales, on the life of a famous singer called Layla.

Samah Hijawi (b. 1976) lives and works between Jordan and Belgium and is a multi media artist, writer and curator. Since 2005 she has collectively managed Makan Art Space in Jordan with Ola El Khalidi and Diala Khasawnih, and co-curates the on-going platform The River has Two Banks with Toleen Touq and Shuruq Harb. 

Her artistic projects have been presented in Darat Al Funun; the Khalid Shoman Foundation, Jordan; MoMA, USA; Beirut Art Center, Lebanon; and Haus Der Kulturen Der Welt, Germany among others.