MIREAM SALAMEH
Current: Sun 9 August – Fri 4 September 2015
Miream Salameh was wrenched from her
Syrian home. After her family gathered piece by piece in Lebanon they moved on
to Australia in 2013. Although much of her art, and her ‘homeland’s deep-rooted
civilization’, was left behind and has been destroyed or looted, Miream carries
her sensitivities and capabilities with her, ‘between the folds of her soul’.
Her art addresses ‘women’s freedom and the suffering of people being crucified
for loving life and liberty’ (quotes from artist’s
website).
Woman in stone (2011)
Salameh’s work in clay, wood, stone, and
now 2D, materially speaks to the depths of her culture and the cry of her forced transitions. Her new 2D work
references the physicality of her sculpture but with the migrant’s edge, indeed
the migrant’s ‘double vision’. As Homi K Bhabha puts it: ‘the borderline work
of culture demands an encounter with the newness that is not part of a
continuum of past and present. It creates a sense of the new with an insurgent
act of cultural translation’ (Location of
Culture, 1994, 5). Art speaks too of urgent
transition, and the pain often
associated with unwanted mobility.
Untitled, Video still (2015)
Salameh’s new work in Australia has
resonance with that of Mona Hatoum. Hatoum was born in Lebanon to Palestinian
parents and stranded in London in 1975 when war broke out in her home country.
Salameh, from Homs, is similarly unable to return to her home country, Syria.
What do sedentary locals know of it … that distance, measured not by cold
kilometers, but by the breath of warm familiar forms become shadowy, forms and
sounds and calligraphy become chimeric, over time … thus Mona Hatoum’s
composite video, Measures of Distance,
(1988, video/stills/conversation over), in which the daughter gropes for the
familiar heat of the mother, the very steam of home. Where Hatoum measures loss
of ‘mother’, here Miream Salameh
‘measures’ loss of the motherland,
and self, pressed against a wall that will not give, in a vale of tears. Each
woman yearns for the motherland – perhaps in a way only women will admit, or
examine.
Untitled, Video still (2015)
In 1986 Nikos Papastergiadis observed:
‘Migration makes you more conscious of
the pattern of change and the requirements that change makes of you. You
continually have to negotiate the positioning of your body and its surrounding
space.’ (‘Culture, Self and Plurality’, Arena,
76, 1986, 51)
Displaced misplaced replaced – over time the
migrant becomes another, and might conjure another life, or might forever live
in the darkness of the past, among the discombobulating flicker of memories.
The pressing loss of a telling patina
is particularly acute for the artist – robbed, stolen from seminal
sensitivities, and familiar means and vocabulary of creation, tossed into a
vortex of the unfamiliar, the artist is particularly aware of the painfully strange,
the necessary insurgency.
The visual cries of Miream Salameh and
Hatoum, and many others, are a looking for ‘words’, a screaming for shapes –
that will fit loss and re-configuration. The two dimensional images here are
Salameh’s beginning, chaperoned as it were, by one of her few sculptures from
the past, necessarily small because it has had to journey from Syria to
Australia, with its breathless maker.
See more
of Salameh’s work at http://mireamssl.wix.com/mireamsalameh
AS 2015
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