Tender Grain
Tender Grain comprises of sculptural photographs referencing reliefs of flora and fruit found on Assyrian monuments. The images contained within the forms depict their present-day counterparts, some of which no longer exist within Syria due to shifting borders, plant migration and extinction. Tracing these changes opens questions around our relationship to land and borders, and how plant migration can parallel human migration through processes of adapation, displacement and the formation of diasporic communities.
This botanical mapping of the Levant also considers smell and its ability to create a strong dientification with a particular place, and how this attachment cna limit our perception of connectedness beyond borders. As a Syrian, I feel a strong affiliation with Syrian land and, through that identification, can perceive neighbhouring territories as separate - even present-day Lebanon, depsite the two territories’ historically shifting political boundaries. Jasmine, in particular, acts as an anchor to this identification with place. The work asks whether differentiated cultures and our affinity wiht ancestral land ultimately reinforce separation.
The enlarged, pixelated images within the sculptural forms reflect my interest in proximity and distance in relation to Syria- my homeland, which was inaccessible to me for 15 years. As the images are enlarged, greater proximity produces less visual information, complicating ideas of connection and disconnection. Landscapes shift, borders evolve, and ecologies and geologies transform, raising the question of whether our relationship to land changes with them.
The collage pieces reassamble scraps from other flora images within the series to illustrate plants and people’s need to congregate into an evolving broader ecosystem. The background features an extremely magnified handshake of the now ousted Syrian president Bashar al-Assad, slowing down the gesture to explore how a simple act of two hands meeting can carry implications for people and their land.
(selected works)
