As the American daughter of a Lebanese mother and Afghan father, my childhood and adolescence were shadowed by my long-distance and second-hand experience of their countries’ civil wars, which were intimately and inextricably intertwined with every detail of my family life. In the four videos that make up The Glass House Home Movies, I excavate my mediated memories of two key moments in this double history (the Israeli siege of Beirut, represented by footage from Jennifer Fox’s documentary Beirut: The Last Home Movie, and the U.S. bombing of Afghanistan, represented by official military footage) and connect them to other images of femininity and militarism appropriated and replayed from sources including network news, advertising, daytime television, and canonical performance art, in order to examine my compulsion to re-enact these traumas only dimly received as dramas of dangerous or embattled domesticity -- political histories transposed to the personal and re-written on my body, which is thus offered up as a bridge across the border zones littered with unexploded mines.

These private rituals or hauntings are performed for security cameras installed in my ordinary Brooklyn apartment; the recorded feeds, constantly interrupted and echoed by flashes and overlayers of received media imagery, are then repositioned within an existing, repurposed or reproduced space of surveillance within the museum, where viewers are given control over which of five alternate audio feeds (corresponding to the four videos composing the split screen, plus a mix of all four) they prefer to listen to while sitting in a security guard’s chair and monitoring my movements through the different spaces and times brought together by the coincidences of the grid and the recurrences of symbolic objects, including most importantly the fragments of broken glass that appear in every section of the screen, the house, and the intertwined histories.

The individual channels have also been installed as follows: on two monitors face-up in a white bathtub filled with broken glass, or resting on transparent shelves extracted from an industrial fridge (The Last Home Movie, 2001); projected onto the white pillow of the white twin bed used in the performance within the video (Friendly Fire, 2002); and on a monitor embedded in the freezer of an abandoned white fridge whose drawers are filled with shards of glass (Miraculous Dissolves, 2003).

The difficult position of the first generation born in the new country after migration is to embody the crossroads where different cultures meet to negotiate their claims – not on geopolitical territories but on the minute events, actions, and reactions of our everyday lives. We are compromised bodies; hearing one language with one ear and another with the other, we are equipped to understand only half of what’s said everywhere we go. Permanent Transit takes viewers on a journey through 11 countries between East and West (Lebanon, Syria, Jordan, Palestine, Turkey, Armenia, Italy, the Netherlands, Russia, the UK and the USA), glimpsed only through the frames of various windows. These constantly shifting landscapes are woven together with multiple layers of everyday sounds and the scraps of a dozen stories from the lives of expatriates, exiles, refugees, itinerants, children of divorce and children of immigrants.

All of these documentary elements ultimately feed into and complement the absurd, appropriated, overarching narrative of a traveler who becomes trapped in the nomansland between two borders and must find a way to make his home there -- retold through many gaps of memory by my mother from a television bit made famous by comedian Doreid Laham during the Lebanese civil war. Permanent Transit is an experimental documentary, a video database, a fractured narrative, a reconstituted journey, a memory experiment, and an extended conversation between friends and strangers: all designed to dislocate viewers from their ordinary lives and re-place them in the border zones inhabited daily by the hybrid generation, the contested territories we carry within us no matter where we are.

In the installation version of Permanent Transit, the video is projected onto a 60” x 80” dual-surface (front & rear) projection screen suspended so that its bottom edge is at waist height. The screen bisects the room and the five surround sound speakers are distributed around the screen in such a way that the mix creates the aural illusion of walking from the inside to the outside of a window when the viewer walks from one side of the screen to the other. When it is screened, the “inside” and “outside” of the window, which are most often sounds recorded in two different places but associated with the same image, are mixed together – creating a subliminal (rather than spatially delineated) sense of dislocation for the viewer/listener.
Read the texts about Permanent Transit.
Visit the web project Permanent Transit: net.remix.
See documentation of the related print series Transit Vistas.

The rural highways of Armenia are lined with a bizarre proliferation of near-empty, brand-new neon gas stations, whose ubiquity is made all the more mysterious by the observable fact that most Armenians still buy their gasoline from the backs of illegal vendors’ trucks. In Armenia dreams gasoline they are juxtaposed with a tableau enacted on the Yerevan Steps, which would have stretched from the central plaza of the city to the World War II monument on the hill above it if the fall of the Soviet Union had not halted the construction and left both steps up and steps down suspended over a void of air. Originally shown (when commissioned by the Armenian Center for Contemporary Experimental Art in Yerevan) as a two-channel projection with the video Progress, which documents the upward climb of a dangerously rickety chair-lift excursion on an Armenian mountainside.

My Name on Your Lips (sounds so foreign) juxtaposes audio appropriated from Lesson One of the Elementary Modern Standard Arabic audiocassette workbook, recordings from my daily environment documenting the many different ways my name is pronounced by the people around me, and two rituals performed for the camera in my apartment, to create a self-reflexive two-channel video installation that examines the often uncomfortable process of recognizing my identity as less or more than entirely American, catalyzed in the moment of studying Arabic as an adult and literally learning a new pronunciation of my own name. In the first projection, I inscribe my name in Arabic (one of the few words I have always known how to write in this language that I somehow feel should be my own) into the workbook of the iconic EMSA text, then repeat it in the lipliner shades of pink, orange and red on the cheesecloth panels onto which become the video's screen in the installation. In the second projection, I prepare my lips to speak that name, a task not without its complications, by applying the same lipliners to my lips, pulling the colors off with the backs of my hands and wiping them on my slip, which I then slit in two to become the screen for this projection in the installation. The slip and panels are suspended from the ceiling with transparent fishing line and the shavings from my sharpening of the lipliner pencils are scattered on the floor beneath.

Blind Crossing uses text from Middle Passages, a book by the Caribbean poet and theorist Kamau Braithwaite, to defamiliarize imagery of the harbor by Chelsea Piers and summon the spectre of forced migration in contemporary New York. Originally part of a two-channel installation with the video Crossing Blind, which uses the actions of a group of blindfolded performers to draw the same parallel with the lines and signals of pedestrian traffic systems.

For a brief period in October of 2000, the two top stories on New York network news were the Subway Series (the Yankees-Mets World Series of baseball) and the escalation of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict (the Al-Aqsa Intifada). At the same time, the New York Times began using digitally manipulated video stills as front-page cover images, almost exclusively when reporting on the Middle East. As I watched the TV news that month, I started to notice strange similarities in the way the two stories jockeying for top position were reported. The relative gravity of their journalistic content did not seem to correspond to the tone of commentary or change the predictability of the camera angles. And as I turned the images over in my head, it became clear to me how they could be manipulated to support either sociocultural narrative.

Universal Games began for me with the paired images of a young boy throwing a stone and a pitcher throwing a baseball. It grew into a video database of image pairs grabbed directly from the television, each of which was taken through 3 stages of digital processing and retouching and finally incorporated into black-and-white, digitally patterned graphic wallpaper in an allusion to the familiar regularity with which these very different games are played out in living rooms across the world.
When shown as an installation, Universal Games is presented as a constantly looping DVD on a monitor inside a TV cabinet or wall unit, with the 40” x 110” sheets of wallpaper covering the section of wall immediately behind it, and (space permitting) an armchair or sofa in front of it, in order to create the illusion that the video is playing live in your living room.