| Jawa El Khash, The Upper Side of the Sky, 2019. Screen still. Courtesy the artist. As part of Recollective: Vancouver Independent Archives Week, Western Front is pleased to present an online exhibition of The Upper Side of the Sky by Jawa El Khash, curated by Dana Qaddah. As described by Qaddah, El Khash’s project is “an interactive virtual reality archive of the ancient ruins of Palmyra, Syria, created by the translation of collective and personal memory. Through a medium which resists the thresholds of space and temporality, El Khash materializes the ruins of a site, destroyed by ISIS during the Syrian civil war, among an ecosystem of architecture, animal and plant life. Agricultural archives, 3D models and celestial scales generate an embodied experience of what is lost, forefronting the value of digital preservation and production within majority diasporic populations – much of whom are attuned to the orchestrated destruction of the homeland.” The online exhibition is a desktop experience that can be viewed at theuppersideofthesky.com Additional programming includes an online conversation between Qaddah and El Khash on November 21, 2020 and a written response by Laura U. Marks, a specialist in media art and philosophy with an intercultural focus. |
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