Maria Kassab - On Parallel Worlds & Changing Matter

The visual narrative is an ongoing project, it focuses on the relocation from Beirut to Berlin which happened during the pandemic and the extreme political turmoil in Lebanon. The cross-over felt like a threatening displacement due to restrictions and obstacles at the border control in Beirut. Having to leave Beirut during unsettling times, felt like a deracination, becoming almost a hostage and then a fugitive due to border complications. Suddenly memories from the civil war surfaced from cross overs to fleeing from one place to another. Then, the explosion happened in Beirut on August 4th 2020, the city got destroyed lives were lost, and people were displaced, images of implosion and explosion surfaced again from past memories. As an artist constantly questioning the deconstructed identity of home via photographic memories, I decided to examine the different possibilities the subject’s body and emotions endure in relation to space, memory, and identity on a personal and physical level. (A changing matter), from deconstruction to image manipulation, the series witnesses the dissection of brutal spaces and environments, using superimposition with different materials. The narrative navigates within variant transformations where the artist becomes a stagnating figure in a virtual space almost looking like an iconographic painting. The visual language uses different materials as tools aiming to decontextualize both the subject and object from their natural habitat.