Alaa Abu Asad

Formally, my practice is centered around developing, or rather experiencing alternative trajectories where values of (re)presentation, translation, viewing, reading, and understanding intersect. Yet “new” ways of weaving the political value of the artwork in non-political affairs–if such things exist–constitute the core of questions about how to approach and (re)present a certain place. How could a field-tour of observing flora be the pretext for addressing landscape, history, and colony planning? And why would studying the influence of invasive species be the trigger of accumulating consequences that provoke thinking about a society and its economy?

These multilayered concerns on the essence of the artwork, its production, and its politics, stimulate my ways of seeing, together with other aesthetical matters of how to juxtapose static photographs with moving images (video), and (written/outspoken) texts. How can these concerns comprehensively convey personal and common experience/s of the individual and the collective, without ignoring actual events and (past) histories that shape memory?