STATEMENT OF WORK

As the child of someone who fled a war and became a refugee, I have spent the last seventeen years making art about displacement and exile. For many years my artwork was based on archival architectural records of the Berlin homes and workplaces of Jews and persecuted artists and intellectuals of the 1930s, beginning with my father's childhood home, which he fled in 1938. 

In 2016, I suddenly found my project linked to a present-day crisis: I couldn’t continue to consider Berlin’s relationship to the experience of exile and place, identity and culture, without thinking about Syria. I shifted my focus to contemporary forced migrations; the aim of my studio practice became to find ways to represent displacement, statelessness, fragmentation, and strength. I began experimenting with building materials to convey the concrete-ness of the destruction of home and place, and at the same time the resilience of the people who survive that destruction. 

I found myself wondering about the process of migration itself and how I might integrate the experience of the journey—and the excruciating tedium and powerlessness of waiting—into my work. The majority of the displaced people I met in Berlin had traveled through Greece, so to learn more about that often treacherous part of their ordeal, I traveled to Athens to meet with individuals and organizations involved in refugee resettlement, a trip that was both informative and heartbreaking. 

I had hoped to return to Greece, but as Covid-19 emerged and lockdown made travel impossible, I left New York to be with my father who is in his late eighties and lives alone in rural Massachusetts.

I took the opportunity of this time near the ocean to develop Water Shapes. In this experimental work created at the ocean’s edge, painted plywood geometric forms placed on the water’s surface drift apart and recombine. Without being too didactic, I had in mind the small boats in which refugees make their dangerous crossings, the extreme vulnerability of the passengers, and the forced and unpredictable reconfigurations of their lives. And as I engaged with uncontrollable elements – light and shadow, tidal currents, wind – I began to embrace uncertainty as content.

Covid-19 and the resulting economic collapse exacerbated what was already an ongoing epidemic of forced migration due to war in Ukraine, renewed turmoil in Afghanistan, as well as the environmental pressures of wildfires, hurricanes, and tsunamis. The pandemic also deepened the meaning of home as a subject for all of us: I could not have predicted that work whose origins lay in the specific experience of Syrian refugees would now begin to speak to a now nearly universal experience of disorientation, loss, fracturing, and rebuilding.