Jayce Salloum
Jayce Salloum is a Canadian multidisciplinary artist.
Early life
A grandson of Syrian immigrants from what is now Lebanon's Beqaa Valley, he was born and raised in Kelowna and since 1997 has been based in Vancouver. He earned a BFA degree from the San Francisco Art Institute in 1980, followed by a Master of Fine Arts degree from the University of California, San Diego in 1988. Salloum has lived and worked in Beirut, New York, San Francisco, Toronto and elsewhere.Career
A multidisciplinary artist, since 1978 Salloum has produced work in installation, photography, video, performance and text, as well as curating and coordinating a vast array of cultural projects.His work is included in over one hundred permanent collections, including the Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto, the Asia Art Archive, the Centre Pompidou, Paris, J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles, Museum of Contemporary Art, Belgrade, the Museum of the Americas, Managua, Nicaragua, Museum of Modern Art, New York, National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa, National [Museum of Contemporary Art, Athens], Saradar Collection, Beirut, Lebanon, Sharjah Art Foundation, UAE, Vancouver Art Gallery, British Columbia. In addition to these museums and galleries, Salloum's work has been collected by numerous universities, including the American University of Beirut, Lebanon, Birzeit University, Ramallah, Palestine, Carleton University, Ottawa, Centre for Contemporary Arab Studies, Georgetown, Columbia University, New York, Concordia University, Montréal, Duke University, N. Carolina, Northwestern University, Evanston, Illinois, Ontario College of Art & Design, Toronto, University of British Columbia, Vancouver, University of California, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, Yale Film Archive, New Haven, Connecticut.
After first attending the Banff [Centre for Arts and Creativity|Banff School of Fine Arts] in 1975, Salloum returned in 1978 to study photography, after spending one year at the San Francisco Art Institute studying drawing, photography, and painting. Under the guidance of Hubert Hohn, Salloum learning the technical, formal intricacies of making a photograph. The centre, at the time, was a site of collaboration and camaraderie where artists pushed one another to develop their capabilities. It was at this time that Salloum started working with colour photography. His body of work "location/dis-location"—part of the "untitled" series—began in Banff, and continues through to today. The constitutive photographs of the ongoing "untitled" series are largely documentations of the margins and the periphery within numerous cities. These images are varied and present an archive of the city when installed and exhibited by Salloum. Salloum notes that his photographs offer "partial glimpses or fragments of understanding" and, further, there is no "fulfillment of knowledge." After attending the summer 1979 photography masterclass at Banff, Salloum returned to the San Francisco Art Institute.
In 2001, Salloum was invited to exhibit at the Canadian Museum of Civilization. The exhibition was set to open in October of that year but was cancelled in the aftermath of 9/11. Central to the museum's decision to cancel the exhibition was Salloum's video installation, untitled part 1: everything and nothing, in which Salloum interviews Soha Bechara who was detained for nearly ten years at Khiam prison in Southern Lebanon, which was at the time occupied by Israel. In the video, Bechara expresses the need to resist the Israeli occupation, which was seen as controversial by the directors of the Canadian Museum of Civilization. The bigoted gesture to cancel the exhibition and censor the voices of Arab-Canadian artists was widely condemned by the public. After a discussion ensued in the House of Commons, in which Prime Minister Jean Chrétien voiced his support for the exhibition, the show opened on schedule.
In 2005, Salloum was commissioned by Kelowna's Alternator Gallery to create a new video work for their compilation video project, "Temporal Transmissions," part of the city's 2005 centennial celebration. Salloum created a 38-minute video, untitled part 4: terra
In 2014, he won the Governor General's Awards in Visual and Media Arts. In 2016 he was a nominee for the Scotiabank Photography Award.
A living archive
From 1982 onward, Salloum accumulated vast amounts of research materials for what would become the installation Kan Ya Ma Kan/There was and there was not. For Salloum, this material constituted a living archive that "called into question notions of history and research methodology, their role in the effacement of histories, and the mediated process inherent in the representation and understanding of another culture…" This notion of a living archive recurs throughout Salloum's body of work and can be seen in both his installation work as well as his curatorial engagements. Archival interventions are a mode of artistic production in Salloum's native Lebanon that became common place after the 1975-1990 Lebanese Civil War, and much of the work of Salloum's colleagues—in particular, Walid Raad, Akram Zaatari, Joana Hadjithomas and Khalil Joreige, and Lamia Joreige—is in some manner oriented towards the archive. The archives employed in Salloum's untitled series, for example, are not static but are instead dynamic.Much of the ongoing untitled series centres around questions of resistance and representation. The traces that one leaves behind in place—the traces of the self that form what Salloum refers to as the histories of the self—are videotaped by Salloum in an effort to bring the personal space into "the context of the intrinsic social and political site." As Jim Drobnick and Jennifer Fisher note, "Salloum's practice of taking photographs works as a kind of visual diary of the act of 'passing by.' Countering touristic 'first-glance' snapshots, he is committed to knowing a place well before photographing it." Salloum enacts the role of a "curator-collector" in his "untitled" series, in which he is not only active in making the photograph, but in grouping in with others as well. Images take on another meaning when amassed together, as an archive of the city and its margins. When exhibited, Salloum's "untitled" photographs are "constellations" of the city, where meaning is multiple and uncertain, to be determined in part by the viewers themselves. Displayed as such, Salloum's photographs give the impression of seeing while walking through a city. Photographs are arranged in varied manners, including isolated individually, paired, or collected in clusters. This representational strategy presents not simply a static archive of the city, but an ever changing, dynamic, living archive that the viewer is invited to walk through, or past.
In 1992, two years after the end of the Lebanese Civil War, Jayce Salloum visited Lebanon with his then assistant, artist Walid Raad. Over the year, Salloum recorded over 200 hours of videotape, as well as several thousand photographs. He also accrued a half ton of documents and found film. This archive would form the basis of two films, This is Not Beirut and Up to the South , as well as the series of photos titled demarcations. By drawing upon large volumes of media, from photography to video, Salloum's installations try to capture the significant number of images that attempt to capture the MENA region. The 1995 installation Kan ya ma Kan was a culmination of a process of accumulation from 1982 onward, and included some of the 1992 material, and explored the production of middle east history and knowledge and the role of the artist in producing such a history. Museum viewers were encouraged to physically interact with the material. They could touch and reorganize what was presented in front of them, becoming a part of the exhibition and reconstruction of a history.
Representing resistance
Much of Salloum's video and photographic archival practice concerns questions of visual representation. For example, the untitled video series confronts issues of representation by drawing one's eyes to the margins, asking us to engage with—and look at—what lay on the periphery. What is found at the edges of being asks us to reconsider any meaningful distinction between modes of fact and modes of fiction. His early film Introduction to the End of an Argument/Speaking for Oneself...Speaking for Others..., co-directed with Palestinian filmmaker Elia Suleiman, marks Salloum's interest in refusing any distinction between modes of documentary and contemporary art. The documentary blurs into the fictive in his continued investigation of the terms of representation.Intertwined with the issue of representation is, for Salloum, the issue of resistance. In his video untitled part 1: everything and nothing, Salloum interviews Soha Bechara, a member of the Lebanese National Resistance/Lebanese Resistance Front who was detained in the Khiam detention camp in Southern Lebanon from 1988 to 1999. The camp was run by the South Lebanon Army and the Israeli Defense Forces, who occupied Southern Lebanon at the time. Over the decade, Amnesty International issued numerous reports on the squalid conditions of the camp, and Sallum notes that "various tortures inflicted upon the detainees included electric shock, beatings, confinement in a cube, soaking, hanging, and long term sleep deprivation." Salloum's video interview with Bechara provides a representation of resistance, in both Bechara's capability to provide testimony to the conditions in Khiam, as well as her ability to be a figure of resistance as a popular figure in Lebanon.
Selected works
Source:Video/film
- "..In the absence of heroes.." Part IV: Warfare/A case for context - Introduction, 60:00, VHS to 3⁄4" 1984
- "..In the absence of heroes.." Part IV: Warfare/A case for context, 43:00, VHS to 3⁄4" 1984
- "The Ascent of Man.." 24:00, Part I: Silent Running, 4:42; Part I: Appendix, 4:40; Part II: Conditions of Mercy, 6:15; Part III: Acts of Consumption, 8:00, VHS to 3⁄4", 1985-1987
- Once you’ve shot the gun you can't stop the bullet, 8:00, 8mm videotape and Super-8 film, 1988
- Muqaddimah Li-Nihayat Jidal /Speaking for oneself... Speaking for others, 41:41, 8mm & VHS, English, Arabic, French, and Hebrew, 1990
- '/Up to the South, 60:00, Hi-8 & Reg-8, BetacamSP final, Arabic, English and French, 1993
- ' کان ها پا کان Kan Ya Ma Kan//There was and there was not, 49:00, Hi-8, VHS & 35mm orig., BetacamSP final, Arabic and English, Lebanon/USA/Canada, 1994
- untitled part 1: everything and nothing, 40:40, DVM, Arabic and French with English subtitles, France/Canada, 2001
- untitled part 2: beauty and the east, 50:15, DVM. Former Yugoslavia, Austria, USA, Canada, 2003
- untitled part 3a: occupied territories, 23:00, DVM, Arabic with English subtitles, Lebanon/Canada,
- untitled part 3b: beauty never ends.., 11:12, Arabic with English subtitles, Lebanon/Canada,
- untitled part 4: terra cognita, 37:30, DVM, N’Syilx’cen & English, Syilx, Canada, 2005
- untitled part 5: all is not lost but some things may have been misplaced along the way of endings and beginnings and some points in-between, 113:00, DVM, Syilx Territory, Canada
- untitled part 6: upon the resonance/weight of histories, 146:45, HD, Aotearoa/New Zealand, 2010
- untitled part 7.1: scenes/settings, 5:11, from: the heart that has no love/pain/generosity is not a heart, HD, 2010
- untitled part 7.2: assembly, 14:13, from: the heart that has no love/pain/generosity is not a heart, Deri/Farsi & Hazaragi subtitled in English, HD, 2010
- untitled part 7.3: shahnameh/band-e-amir, 30:30, from: the heart that has no love/pain/generosity is not a heart, Deri/Farsi & Hazaragi subtitled in English, HD, 2010
- untitled part 7.4: cave interiors, 4:42, from: the heart that has no love/pain/generosity is not a heart, HD, 2010
- untitled part 7.5: statue fragments, 6:16, from: the heart that has no love/pain/generosity is not a heart, HD, 2010
- untitled part 8: esquina caliente, 11:55, Spanish with English subtitles, DVM, 2016
- untitled part 9: this time, 6:13, Deri/Farsi & Hazaragi with English subtitles, Afghanistan/Canada, HD, 2020
Installation, sculpture and photography projects
nite/day photographs: San Francisco, Death Valley & area, silver gelatin photographs selenium toned, 1977–78thru the stillness that flies behind me.., 50 selenium toned silver gelatin prints, SX-70 Polaroid & Type 58 & 59, Polacolor photographs, Precarious Acquiescence, "..The Ascent of Man..", dimensions variable, recent maps & occurrent stages/progenous routes, from a group of 30 silver gelatin prints, "... In the absence of heroes..." Part I: progenous routes, from a group of 55 chromogenic photographs, "...In the absence of heroes..." Part III: Paradigmatic Shifts, 30" x 40" photographs, "...In the absence of heroes..." Part IV: Relentless Verity, ink & photographs, mixed media maquettes; prints courtesy, Public Archive Canada, Instant Design Predetermined Values, from A case for context. 8" x 10" Polaroid photographs, precarious acquiescence, 8.5" x 11" collage on letter paper pages, series, re-membering you , 8" x 10" painted/inked black and white photo reproductions and sound loop installation. Dimensions variable, re-engagements, 16 x 20" chromogenic photographs from videotape with text superimposed, Stupid pleasures..., 20" x 24", Polaroid photographs with text, untitled photographs: NYC- کان ها پا کان