Edward Salem // Work / Statement / CV / Contact
Roughly half of the living Palestinian population resides outside of the occupied Palestinian territories and Israel. I was born in the United States, to Palestinian parents who fled their home after the 1967 War. My expulsion from a home I was never permitted to inhabit shaped a consciousness that lies at the center of my work. My repeated attempts to return to my home, and my repeated exiles, inform a politic of struggle and resistance inseparable from my creative activity. Encompassing a range of media and strategies, my work traverses the border between art and social activism. Alongside my involvement with underserved communities in Detroit, Gaza, and the West Bank, my videos, photography, performance, and social interventions link political commitments with the affective realities of exile. In recent years, I have developed a focus on performance as a dominant strategy; my training as a writer and filmmaker inform an emphasis on singular, poetic actions and images. The body in my work is a site where the collective trauma of banishment resides. The exiled body is a habitat for anger and longing. It is both metaphor and instrument. Each body in my performance acts in a discrete, iconic environment. In The Example Set by The Soil (2011), I shroud my mother’s grave in Michigan with soil from her Palestinian land. Figurative dreams of home clash with her inanimate body. Where political conflict is the vortex, the body is the nadir of trauma. Its partner and counter is the earth/land/home. In He Came to Stay (2010), a durational performance in which I laid overnight in a Palestinian house destroyed by the Israeli military, my body unites with the disfigured symbol of home. In the past couple of years, since my completion of graduate school, I have spent as much time as legally possible in Palestine. I have participated in residencies with al-Mahatta Gallery and the Khalil Sakakini Cultural Center, and formed a community of Palestinian artists. There is a tension between my privilege as an American when I am in Palestine, and my limitations as an Arab when I am in America. In each case I am constrained by a diluted identity and liberated by a dual one. A deep commitment to the right of peoples to return to their lawful land continues to propel my work. 2011 |
