Archives Access: Jayce Salloum

Description:

Archives Access: Jayce Salloum was an evening of archival excerpts and discussion marking twenty years since Salloum’s 2004 solo exhibition and installation of video work was presented at Western Front from his ongoing untitled (1999–) project. Salloum was joined in conversation with Western Front’s content writer and editor, Trey Le, to screen excerpts of the work and discuss the approaches employed in his filmmaking and artistic practice.

The event contextualized untitled within the troubling lineage in which Salloum’s work is nested within. The first four tapes of untitled were in the group exhibition, The Lands Within Me: Expressions by Canadian Artists of Arab Origin at the Canadian Museum of Civilization (now Canadian Museum of History) in 2001, which was postponed after the events of September 11 following public pressure. Amid the anti-Arab sentiment, Salloum sparked controversy by his documentation of the conflicts in Lebanon, Palestine, and former Yugoslavia through the telling of experiences of displacement and political struggle as told by the subjects. Salloum moved past the inflammatory reactions and rhetoric of those trying to censor his work, unwavering in his commitment to represent social and political realities with a historicity that extends beyond political agendas and news cycles. 

Using these events as a vantage point to revisit two decades later, Le and Salloum reflected on the continued challenges of drawing out alternative and individual histories from monolithic narratives of dispossession, occupation, and violence. They discussed thematic threads in untitled such as the interstitial, beauty, and rejecting ethnographic conventions.

The screening included clips from part 1: everything and nothing (1999), part 2: beauty and the east (2001), and part 4: terra incognita (2005); and the entirety of part 3b: (as if) beauty never ends (2003).

The evening concluded with a question and answer session.

Curated by Trey Le.

Video documentation available upon request.