دلِ که سوز ندارد, دلِ نیست (the heart that has no love/pain/generosity is not a heart)
Alternator Centre for Contemporary Art (Kelowna)
Jayce Salloum / Khadim Ali
Co-presented with Alternator Centre for Contemporary Art
In April 2008, Jayce Salloum a Vancouver-based artist, traveled to Afghanistan to collaborate with Khadim Ali, a Hazara artist from Afghanistan living in Pakistan. During their travels they recorded their experience using video, photography and miniature paintings. The images and stories they have brought back focus on Afghanistan’s Bamiyan valley, where the Taliban destroyed two ancient statues of the Buddha in 2001. During their time in Bamiyan, Salloum was struck by the ingenuity of the Hazara people and their will to survive.
We are returning to some sort of feudal tribalism. Are we being torn apart from each other for our own protection, or are we protecting ourselves from tearing each other apart. Insecurity kills and desolate minds inhabit separate spaces. Coming together while respecting each others’ terms of existence must be accomplished so hope can spring eternal and we can move on to live more better.
— Jayce Salloum, Vancouver, 14 May 2008
This artistic collaboration raises the question of just what is the First World’s role and responsibility in the region? Is stability possible in Afghanistan? Is there hope for freedom?
The risks taken by both artists to realize this project suggest the possible dangers and collective will required to protect our overlapping values in this globalized world. As a cross-cultural collaboration their efforts raise important questions about migration, culture and imperialism.
Jayce Salloum’s practice exists between the personal, quotidian, local and the trans-national. He has been working in installation, photography, video, mixed media, text, and performance, since 1978, as well as curating exhibitions, conducting workshops and coordinating cultural projects. He has lectured and published pervasively and has exhibited at the widest range of local and international venues possible, from the smallest unnamed storefronts and community centres in his downtown eastside Vancouver neighbourhood to institutions such as The Museum of Modern Art, Centre Georges Pompidou, National Gallery of Canada, CaixaForum, Kunstlerhaus Bethanien, Bienal De La Havana, Sharjah Biennial, Biennale of Sydney and the Rotterdam International Film Festival.
Khadim Ali is a Hazara artist from Afghanistan living in Pakistan. He was trained in miniature painting at the National College of Art in Lahore and in mural painting and calligraphy at Tehran University. Now based in Pakistan, Ali is an ethnic Hazara whose familial connections are to Bamiyan/Hazarajat, a region occupied from 1998 to 2001 by the Taliban, which massacred thousands of Hazaras throughout Afghanistan. His exhibitions include shows at the Alhamra Art Gallery, Lahore; Chawkandi Art Gallery, Karachi; Hijran Art Gallery, Shiraz, Iran; Asia Pacific Triennial, Brisbane; The Bathhouse Gallery, Tokyo and the Fukuoka Asian Art Museum, Japan. His work is held in many private and public collections including the Fukuoka Asian Art Museum in Japan, the Queensland Art Gallery in Australia, and the Victoria and Albert Museum, London.
Edges of Diversity was commissioned by the Alternator Centre for Contemporary Art with assistance from Arts Partners in Creative Development and the Audain Foundation.
