Mireille Eid (Astore)
Mireille Eid is an artist and a writer. She left Beirut during the Lebanese civil war in 1975 to live in Melbourne, Australia. She studied the Sciences at the University of Melbourne where she graduated before becoming a full-time artist and writer. Influenced by continental philosophy, her art draws on autobiographical notions of representation and the unheimlich; where the conscious intersects with the unconscious. Through her art and her writing she "explores human emotions" and "asks what it is to be human". Mireille Eid attained a PhD in Contemporary Arts from the University of Western Sydney. She was Research Affiliate at Sydney College of the Arts, the Visual Arts Faculty of the University of Sydney and Research Fellow at the American University of Beirut.
Exhibitions
Mireille Eid 's artworks have been exhibited and screened at the 2004 Sydney Film Festival; at the Freud Museum – London; at the Millais Gallery – Southampton; at Espace SD – Beirut; the Tate Modern – London; at the Centre Pompidou; the 8th Sharjah Biennial 2008; and the 3rd Guangzhou Triennial. She has exhibited her photomedia artworks at the Conny Dietzschold Multiple Box Gallery – Sydney. In 2003 she won the National Photographic Purchase Award.Of Mireille Eid 's Tampa artwork which referenced the MS Tampa Norwegian ship, it was said:
"Just as Benjamin noted the contextual aesthetic consequences of the circulation of photographic images through newspapers and magazines, Astore’s combination of photography with sculpture and performance, circulated via her website, rewrites both photography and the spatial and interpretive dynamics of this installation work.”
A short film directed by Eid that was based on the Tampa work, Tampa: a Walk on the Beach, was screened in Sydney and London.