Tender Grain
Tender Grain examines flora reliefs on Assyrian monuments as a way to pay hommage to plants that transgress across borders, despite and because of the shifting geopolitical conditions. These transformations open discussions about our relationship to land and to borders, and the series considers how plant migration echoes broader patterns of human migration, rooted in the fundamental need to evolve, adapt, and form diasporic communities.
The historical and botanical mapping of the Levantine landscape informs my interest in plants as symbolic carriers of continuity and displacement. This research resists romanticised notions of land, instead questioning how nostalgia and inherited identity shape our perception of connectedness and otherness. As a Syrian, I feel a strong affiliation to Syrian land, even when national borders attempt to redefine belonging. Jasmine acts as a sensory anchor that draws me into this process of identity-making. Differentiated culture and ancestry further inform how land is understood and remembered.
This series also explores how our perception of the past is constructed through recorded and therefore mediated histories. Many relics and monumental narratives are assembled and presented by specific institutions, which shape contemporary understandings of history.
The enlarged, pixelated images within the works reflect my interest in proximity and distance, creating distorted perceptions of connection and disconnection. The series examines how our relationship to land shifts as landscapes, borders, ecology, and geology evolve.
The collage pieces reassemble 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 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.
