qais assali

This project is about Afghanistan, is a xerox print installation using copy papers in a process-based photo installation, to map a life scale images of my art studio installed just outside my studio. These tiled images resemble the graphing of a map and the ephemerality of my nomadic life as artist, student and Palestinian subject. Turning the studio into a foreign place, the camera lens provides a distance and objective eye to the familiar space in order to see the studio as unfamiliar. The title is taken from a letter from 2004 describing an accompanying DHL package of artworks sent to a former art administrator in Chicago whom I happened to live with. Meditating on this artist’s work and his subsequent immigration to the US, I feature this Afghani artist’s words and creations in my documentation, blurring the lines between my own research, authorship and the limits of appropriation. Making connections to his own struggles and overt politicization, the desperation in his tone and desire to move to the US, calls to questions the sincerity and urgency of my own work.