Jayce Salloum: Untitled Videotape

Jayce Salloum, From the ongoing videotape, untitled, 1999-ongoing. Installation view Artspace, Sydney, 2010. Courtesy of Artspace. Photo: Silversalt.

Artspace - Sydney, Australia

Curated by Blair French

By Anneke Jaspers

Occupying only one gallery, but comprising a multitude of discreet video components, this exhibition of Salloum’s cumulative body of work untitled felt as much like a mini survey as a single installation. Collectively, the volume of content presented was overwhelming. Nevertheless, the impossibility, or at least unlikeliness, of viewers experiencing its totality seemed to neatly parallel the artist’s concern with the provisional processes by which knowledge is constructed and conveyed.

Over the past decade, Salloum has developed untitled as a series of videos that employ the conventions of documentary film, categorized and sequentially numbered as “parts” and “appendices.” The narratives presented in the parts draw upon the first-hand accounts of a range of individuals, including ex-Lebanese National Resistance fighter Soha Bechara, Palestinian refugees, and First Nations residents of Syilx Territory in Canada. The most recent installment, which premiered at Artspace, features Te Miringa Hohaia, a leader in the Parihaka Maori’s struggle to retain its land and culture in New Zealand. Notwithstanding the distinct geopolitical foundations that inform the context for each of these works, they cohere around a series of broader themes: identity, belonging, the process of accounting for and contesting specific histories, remembrance, and most powerfully, forces of oppression and of resistance. Many of the stories conveyed are captivating; however, the accumulation of so many hours of footage had the effect of flattening out their affective potential, foregrounding instead untitled’s more reflexive scrutiny of the acts of framing and mediation.

Despite appearing at first to be seamlessly grounded in the realm of documentary, certain stylistic elements within the videos acknowledge and play off assumptions about their neutrality. For example, Salloum makes use of montage and split-screen compositions, and on occasion disrupts the smooth correlation between image and audio. Moreover, attributions for the interview subjects - whose specificity is clearly significant to the agenda of the project - are absent from the footage, while the artist’s casual, even intimate, verbal exchanges with these participants from behind the camera are included in final edits. The interviews themselves present narratives that fuse different orders of knowledge, from personal experience to cultural mythology, and recitations of history based on secondary sources. Working at a nexus between the apparently impartial and overtly subjective, Salloum gently deconstructs the authority assigned to documentary material, and elicits awareness in the viewer of the tactical approach informing the archive they are navigating.

(January 29 - February 27, 2010)

Anneke Jaspers is an independent curator and writer based in Sydney, Australia.

Filed Under: Reviews