Skip to main content

Untitled Part 2: Beauty and the East

Jayce Salloum

2003 00:50:15 United StatesEnglishColorStereo4:3Video
Tags:
Documentary, Eastern European, History, Memory, War

Description

Produced in former Yugoslavia (Bosnia-Herzegovina, Croatia, Macedonia, Serbia & Montenegro, Slovenia), Austria, USA, Canada, 1999-2003.

Part 2 in a series of attempts at concretizing the notion of interstitiality, this videotape addresses issues of nationalism and the nation state, polarities of time, alienation, the refusal and construction of political identities, ethno-fascism, the body as object and metaphor, agents, monsters and abjectness, subjective affinities, and objective trusts. Material was taped while leaving home, arriving in New York and Vienna, then moving through the former Yugoslavia (stopping in Ljubljana, Zagreb, Sarajevo, Belgrade, and Skopje) shortly after the NATO bombing. The subjects conversing come from a range of constituencies; migrants, refugees, asylum seekers, residents (permanent and transient), students, workers, and cultural producers recounting experience, locating sites, shifts, events, and the theorizing and accounting of the issues at stake, and associated ambient imagery forming specific histories of locations, and locations of histories at the intersection of cultures in this/these particular place(s) and time(s). The speakers are framed closely, creating a complicity with and acknowledgement of the ongoing framing/mediation. Moving landscapes and cityscapes are used to materialize the verbal and localize the discourse through levels of physicality, materiality and immateriality.

With Boris Buden, Marina Grzinic, Eda Cufer, Renata Salecl, Dunja Blazevic, Zarana Papic, Slavica Indzevska, Mihajlo Acimovic, Ella Shohat, Ammiel Alcalay, and Carmen Aguirre, among others.

About Jayce Salloum

Jayce Salloum has been working in installation, photography, mixed and new media and video since 1975, as well as curating exhibitions, conducting workshops and coordinating cultural events. After 22 years living and working in San Francisco, Banff, Toronto, San Diego, Beirut, and New York, he now lives/works out of Vancouver.  His work takes place in a variety of contexts critically engaging itself in the representation of cultural/social/political manifestations and other cultures. 

He received his BFA from the San Francisco Art Institute in 1980, an MFA from the University of California, San Diego in 1988, and participated in the Whitney Museum of American Art, Independent Studio program in 1988-89 and the PS1 International Studio Program in 1989-90.

Salloum has had numerous exhibitions throughout North and South America, Europe, Japan and the Middle East, including solo exhibitions at American Fine Arts, Artists Space, ABC No Rio, Collective for Living Cinema, Millennium Film Workshop (New York); New Langton Arts, Pacific Film Archives, SF Cinematheque, ATA (San Francisco); Los Angeles Center for Photographic Studies; CEPA Gallery, Buffalo; YYZ, A Space, Music Gallery, The Photography Gallery (Toronto); Contemporary Art Gallery, Western Front, Pacific Cinematheque, Video In (Vancouver); Optica Gallery, Oboro, Articule, Cinéma Paralléle (Montréal); Plug-In (Winnipeg); Hamilton Art Gallery; Galerie 101 (Ottawa); Southern Alberta Art Gallery (Lethbridge); FAVA, NFB, Metro Cinema, Latitude 53 (Edmonton); The Photographers Gallery (Saskatoon); British Film Institute (London); Kunstlerhaus Bethanien, Botschaft/Friseur, Shin-Shin Galerie (Berlin); The American Centre, and the Institute du Monde Arabe (Paris); and Théatre de Beyrouth (Beirut).  In 1998 he had a solo installation on exhibit at the National Gallery of Canada and in 2002 at the Museum of Civilization, Ottawa.

He has been in many group exhibitions at institutions including the Museum of Modern Art, American Fine Arts, The Kitchen and P.S.1. (New York); Galerie Nationale du Jeu de Paume (Paris); Espace Lyonnais d'Art Contemporain; Rotterdam Film Festival, Kijkhuis World Wide Video Festival, The Milkyway (The Netherlands); Shedhalle, Rote Fabrik (Zurich); Viper (Lucerne); Semaine Int’l de Vidéo (Geneva); Filmladen-Kassel; Kunsthalle Exnergasse, Vienna; Weltbekannt, Hamburg; Retina Festivál, Hungary; Museum of Contemporary Art, Belgrade; Museo Nacional Centro De Arte Reina Sofia; Valencia; Institute of Modern Art, Filmoteca de Andalucía (Córdoba); Museo de Arte Contemporáneo, Seville; Filmhouse, Granada; Arab Screen Film Festival, Qatar; European Media Art Festival; Fotoptica Int’l Video Festival, Sao Paulo; Athens Int’l Film & Video Festival; Robert Flaherty Seminars; PhilaFilm; Louisville Film & Video Festival; ATA, Mill Valley Film Festival (San Francisco); LACE, Los Angeles; Long Beach Museum of Art; Santa Monica Museum of Art; Walker Arts Center; The Wexner Center, Ohio; Visual Studies Workshop, Rochester; Maryland Institute College of Art; Kansas City Art Institute; Canadian Museum of Contemporary Photography, Ottawa; Dazibao, Montréal; YYZ and The National Film Board Theatre (Toronto).

His work is in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art, New York; Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris; Bibliotheque Nationale, Paris; Canadian Museum of Contemporary Photography and Artbank, Ottawa;  Polaroid Europa International Collection, The Netherlands; International Polaroid Collection, Offenbach, Germany; Art Gallery of Windsor; Long Beach Museum of Art, California; The Banff Centre for the Arts; Everson Museum, Syracuse; and Visual Studies Workshop, Rochester, New York

Some of the institutions he has received grants from are the Canada Council, Ontario Arts Council, British Columbia Media Arts Program, New York State Council on the Arts, New York Foundation for the Arts, Long Beach Museum of Art, Art Matters Inc., Banff Centre for the Arts and the Polaroid Corporation.