The State of Disappearance: Collection

My constant questioning of the state of disappearance led me to its counterbalance - the necessary act of preservation. I began examining two subjects and setting them against each other: the Arabic language that acts as a gateway to understanding and the terminology/lexicon utilized often is integral to comprehending a subject matter. The beauty and complexity of the Arabic language, with its multitude of descriptions for any given word, has been repeatedly lauded.

I selected my words from the ancient book of Abu Mansour AlTha’alby AlNaysaboury “Jurisprudence of a Language: The Secrets of Arabic.” This book, written in the late 10th century during the Abassid era, stands unique over the centuries for containing a detailed categorization of thousands of Arabic words.

Who creates these groupings and whose selection determines the descriptions that fall under them? The act of labeling immediately places individuals – it is an act of erasure, rather than one of preservation. The somewhat contradictory act of documentation functions as a double-edged sword; we archive selected images and memories of individuals and of the collective, creating our version of history through a preservation which, far from being objective, is specific to our selection, thereby fuelling active forgetting.

 

In my execution, I use typical media images that I have collected over the past two years and place descriptions that have always been linked to the persona of the woman. Love, courage, happiness, and intelligence. Creating a struggle between the word and the images they lay on. They are awkwardly linked to each other highlighting the negligence in how women are portrayed and the danger of continuously evoking this imagery. There is a danger of instigating what Nietzsche termed “active forgetting” by continuing to repeat an inclusive grouping at the cost of the unique individual.