Statement 2019
Transcription of the statement for the 21st Biennial
Death is something that we all fear, but which we all have to face eventually in our lives. Death is recurrent in life and in our minds—we cannot avoid or escape the fact that one day we’ll meet face to face. Death is our shadow, our unescapable companion.
As for my work, the way I bridge photography to death is through memory. Most of my work features a historical narrative—something that happened in the past, or that disappeared between the folds of the present. I find that the medium of photography can bring these narratives back to life, make us re-live these stories and remember them.
One of my main interests is photographing execution squares. The act of public execution in the region of Syria was initiated by the Ottomans during their occupation 500 years ago, and it was inherited later by the French occupation and the following Syrian governments.
In the old times, cities had one main public square, centrally located, where official announced were made to the public, and executing criminals was one of these statements. The succeeding governments in modern Syria used these exact same squares up until the late 1980s, especially in Damascus where the crime rate increased dramatically and the government started using squares nearest to the crime scenes because of the high crime rates.
All these photographs were shot at dawn, around 4:30 a.m., which is initially the time when they set up the platform and perform the execution by lynching, and leaving the bodies hanging until 9:00 a.m., so people could not avoid this encounter on their way to work. If you don’t read the title of the work you might find these photographs of squares like regular postcards, but once you read Execution Squares, your perception alters immediately and completely. The first thing the viewers would do is start looking for the bodies of the executed people, and at this point their focuses switch to only search for these bodies, and suddenly these squares and their surroundings become completely imperceptible.