| Project 19: Abdelali Dahrouch |
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Laura Kuo's Essay |
Images from the Exhibition |
Dahrouch Home Page Fall 2003 Archive |
The Project Series
Project 19: Abdelali Dahrouch
Abdelali Dahrouch’s video installation Desert Sin, Revisited reflects his
long-standing interest in issues of nationalism, globalization, and the
commitment to social change and justice. Emanating from a transnational
perspective, Dahrouch’s work is an art of consciousness. Born in Morocco, he
immigrated to France as a child, and then to the United States to pursue his
education. Filtered through this geopolitical migration and corresponding life
experiences, Dahrouch examines current global events—particularly the complex
sociopolitical relations between the U.S. and the Middle East—through the lens
of video and installation art. For this exhibition, Dahrouch has re-worked a 1995 video installation, Desert Sin, initially created in response to the 1991 Gulf War. In the 1995 version, he presented a searing composite of media imagery from the Gulf War. Given the urgency of the current situation in the Middle East, Dahrouch has “revisited” these powerful and haunting images. In addition to the original footage projected on the wall, Dahrouch has included new components: a floor piece made out of loose plaster upon which is impressed a fragment of text from the New American Century Project, a projection on the plaster surface of images of sand blowing, and the subtle sound of desert winds commingled with distorted excerpts from George W. Bush’s speeches.
Though the images are more than ten years old they still resonate with meaning—the battleground still exists, the death tolls continue to rise. In the accompanying catalogue essay, Laura Kuo discusses how Dahrouch created Desert Sin as a personal response to the daily bombardment of images and sounds by mainstream American media. Dahrouch manipulates images and information drawn from the media and reduces them to pixels in order to capture the murky reality of the battleground. Desert Sin, Revisited indelibly links the images of U.S. government officials, Iraqi parents, and dead soldiers. Through his depiction of the 1991 news footage, the once familiar images of the combat that flickered on our television screens are transformed into a suspended moment in time.
In other work, Dahrouch also has explored the role of the media in issues of gender, race, and ethnic and economic subjugation. In the 2003 installation Narratives, Dahrouch examined the silencing of Palestinian women’s lives and heritages. The 2002 installation Resolutions dealt with the unsuccessful role of the UN in relation to the occupation of Palestine. Liquid Cemetery (2001) explored the treacherous migration of Moroccan working class families across the Strait of Gibraltar in the hopes of a better life in Europe. By capturing the horror of ethnic cleansing of Muslims by Serbs in Kosovo, Another Day of Harvest (2000) encourages the viewer to again contemplate questions of equality, justice, and truth.
Abdelali Dahrouch’s exhibition is the nineteenth in the Pomona College Museum of Art’s Project Series, an ongoing program of small exhibitions that brings to the Pomona College campus art that is experimental and that introduces new forms, techniques or concepts.
Kathrine Marquez
J. Paul Getty Multicultural Summer 2003 Intern
Rebecca McGrew
Curator
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