Joyce Joumaa
Joyce Joumaa is a video artist based between Beirut and Montréal. After growing up in Lebanon, she pursued a BFA in Film Studies at Concordia University. Her work focuses on microhistories within Lebanon as a way to understand how past structures inform the present moment. Central to her work is an interest towards the political charge inscribed in spaces and the social psychology that unfolds out of this tension. Her current research revolves around the post-colonial education system in Lebanon and the maritime border conflict with Israel. Her work has been shown at the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, FOFA Gallery and Dazibao. She is the recipient of the 2021-2022 Emerging Curator Residency Program at the CCA, the Canadian Centre for Architecture.
Merging, Collecting, Dissecting is a video work that explores the concept of the reversed gaze. Using the binocular viewfinder, thought to be a colonial tool, the images interplay between footage that was shot in Istanbul, Turkey and in Tripoli, Lebanon — the former being a place where colonisation emerged and the latter a place where colonisation was practised. By juxtaposing the images with excerpts from history lessons from school textbooks which are used in Lebanon, the work aims at revisiting the history of colonisation by the Ottoman Empire in present time and how it is interpreted in contemporary educational knowledge.