| Description |
The Mosaic Rooms hosts the first UK solo show by multimedia artist Dor Guez. Guez’s family heritage is both Christian Palestinian and Jewish Tunisian. His work focuses on depicting the history and experiences of the Christian Palestinian minorities in the Middle East, a dispersed community whose voices and experiences have been marginalized by the prevailing narratives of the region. Guez’s work addresses these disparities whilst exploring contemporary art’s role in provoking questions about history, nationality, ethnicity, and personal identity.
The exhibition includes recent work, including the European premiere of 40 Days, a two-channel video piece and photographic series about the destroyed gravesites in the Christian Palestinian cemetery in the city of Lod (previously known by its Arabic name of Al-Lydd).
The images originate from Guez’s ongoing work, begun in 2009, to build the first Christian-Palestinian Archive, the CPA, a growing collection of archival documents about the Palestinian Christians who were expelled from, and those who remained in, the State of Israel after the 1948 war. The archive’s starting point was Guez’s own family’s albums, three generations of the Monayer family living as a “minority within a minority,” but today it includes thousands of other images. Guez conveys these experiences using different photographic and video techniques, from scanned archival images, what he calls “scanograms”,to video installations, which are at once documentary, testimonial and experimental films.
Guez’s practise explores how these archival and documentary media can be used to record and validate as well as reframe and influence ideas of history, culture, and collective identity. Combining the often intimate nature of his material sources, from photographs taken by his grandfather to family testimonies, Guez’s work offers audiences a uniquely poignant insight into the complexities of the Middle East today, and wider discourses on the politics of place. |