I grew up interested in borders and
separation because I never really felt
their presence I’m urging the Assyrian
born in London grew up in Dubai and now
I live in Paris I felt that my roots
weren’t geographically fixed but were
more connected to the communities that I
was a part of having said that whenever
asked where I’m from I’ve always said
Syria I’m so proud to be from such a
beautiful land with such inspiring
people and because I was raised abroad
we would visit each summer into the war
began and seven years later from that
distance I’ve grown to almost exotic
eyes my own country dreaming about the
intense smell of jasmine for my
grandmother’s garden planting plums in
the soil and eating cactus fruits or
Sebata on the street as we would people
watch on these white plastic chairs but
recently I was in Athens speaking with
this year in refugee who didn’t believe
that I was Syrian the way I dress and
how I spoke she said made her see me as
a foreigner and for the first time I
thought outside of a culture that I so
closely felt with him but in this
context we were both foreigners dressed
and speaking differently to our
surroundings and that connected us
together even more than if we had had
this conversation in Damascus so this
feeling of outsider an insider
actually became our connection because
we’ve all experienced what it’s like
being in both positions it’s actually
one of humanity’s strongest bonds and
when we look beyond the separation of
where you stands and where I stand we
allow each other to be more connected on
an atomic level there is no clear
division of space between our U stands
and our I sound and there’s hardly a
difference in what’s you and the person
that you’re sitting next to is composed
of you sit together as just two
densities of matter and things that seem
like solid objects are mostly composed
of empty space besides my new particles
so it’s
dreamily distant from each other that
they seem as though they hover in empty
space I love this illustration of
electrons orbiting the nucleus because
there resembles planets orbiting the Sun
perceiving scale is interchangeable like
this can help break the boundary between
the micro-macro world and can also free
the tensions between other polarities
like insider and outsider or
other nests and sameness for example I’m
a visual artist and through my practice
I aim to describe this notion of non
boundary and therefore the
interconnectedness of matter years ago I
heard a fact that I couldn’t let go of
and it profoundly influenced the way I
work it goes visible lights within the
whole electromagnetic spectrum only
occupies one thousandth of 1% one
thousandth of 1% I was overwhelmed by
how little we could actually see and I
felt a powerful impulse to explore
beyond that fraction of a percent this
fact triggered me to explore the unseen
not only of other wavelengths but on
other scales as well by expanding our
sight we can expand our perception and
when we do we can connect to the things
around us in a different way so about 10
years ago I started using the light
microscope and scanning
electromicroscope to magnify and
photograph my dead skin cells as you can
see here I sampled for my fingertips
because it’s the part of the body that
connects us to the external world it’s
that sense of touch that we understand
the things around us the skin suggests
to be a division of the internal and
external body but what it constitutes is
extremely similar to the matter that
surrounds it to illustrate this with a
practical example since I came up on
stage you shed around a hundred thousand
skin cells as you remove your arm from
the person next to you that means one
year from now you will have lost
one-and-a-half pounds of dead skin which
is probably one of the easier diets to
sustain these days I was able to explore
the skins elusive boundary by magnifying
my skin by
twenty fifty thousand times at this
scale borders broke when a single cell
resembled the galactic landscape I
continued the shift in proportion by
making these images into large format
photographic prints
I chose photography as my medium to
explore this because it operates within
the realms of truth but a truth that I
could manipulate and I like that
psychotic because then I could create
works which would be considered more
fact than fiction imagination or opinion
even if it was staged or entered into
abstraction and now I could visually
address a truth of matter that both of
my nudes and vast shared the same
content and space
I mean if electrons protons and neutrons
do not have a definitive shape the nor
will their sum and if these are the
elements which inform the basis of our
reality then within the language of
human experience lines and their borders
cannot exist I’m going to show you now
that by visualizing or imagining such a
connected space may actually allow us to
experience it but the room is gonna
become dark can we please turn the
lights off romantic as I’m sure you know
your pupils just dilated to compensate
for the lack of light but now the room
is gonna become bright again can we
please turn the lights on and now
they’ve shrunk obvious stuff right well
what if I told you that when I announced
that the room is going to become dark
you people’s already started to dilate
and that when I said that the room would
become bright before the room brightened
your people’s began to shrink our our
pupils can adjust by just the thought of
lightness and darkness the mechanisms of
our pupils are helping researchers to
understand the connection between
imagination and perception this study
conducted by cognitive neurosciences
from the University of Oslo suggests
that imagination and perception used
similar neural processes and that
imagination triggers some of the same
physical mechanisms involved in actual
sights therefore we can shape how we see
based on what we think and how we
perceive it I was encouraged by this
relationship between imagination
option because in some ways then by
abstractly visualizing
interconnectedness could have the viewer
actually experience it so I continued
working in the lab to photograph my skin
cells when glitches started to appear
through the lag and the images rendering
these glitches became my way to describe
the relationship one has to their own
internal body inherent but unfamiliar
who always carry our bodies but will
rarely see inside it I started to see
these glitches as vulnerabilities and
the technology’s Anatomy abstractly
exposing themselves likewise although we
will never see our internal workings
human emotions do physically manifest
themselves through involuntary
malfunctions like a stream of sweat on
your forehead when you’re anxious or
your face turning red when you’re
embarrassed or a choke when you’re lost
for words this image is called choke and
others from the series include sweat
tremble twitch palpitate and blush I
developed this tension between internal
and external body in this video work
which records myself screaming for as
long and as loud as I possibly could
with a breath of between which was 16
stress for these thing minutes because
the film is silenced it leaves the
internal voice to speak through the
tongue quivering the skin reddening the
eyes tearing and the veins bulging but
actually I had to reshoot this film
because the neighbour barged into the
studio thinking something terrible had
happened so I explained that I needed to
scream for the next 15 minutes and he
said listen I understand it’s a Monday
and at the moment I’m creating a new
series for my next show where along with
my skin cells I’m examining soil and
Jasmine for my grandmother’s garden and
soap from Aleppo under the scanning
electron microscope when I first started
using the microscope I was most
fascinated by spending eight hours
exploring something one centimeter wide
I was also overwhelmed by all the
details that we don’t see I mean looking
as a choice at the end of the day so I
asked my grandmother for a squared
centimeter of soil soap and Jasmine to
examine and being a Syrian grandmother
she sent me three kilos of each and of
course I got salt in the airports so I
said that I was a farmer I’m not sure
what kind of farmer travels with three
kilos of dead plants well an
unsuccessful one so they sympathetically
let me through but with these works I
wanted to get closer to this pace which
is no longer accessible to me I wanted
to get closer to its earth and to its
smell and to Hyper examine this
invisible force called nostalgia but
actually the closer I looked the further
I felt I was lost into its abstraction
glitched and disconnected that same
magnification made the landscape foreign
I’m sure everyone can relate to me so
consumed by something or by a thought
that you paradoxically find yourself
with no perspective but in the end one
needs distance in order to understand
closeness and when there’s a push there
is always a pull and sometimes
abstraction can lead to clarity being
lost in a landscape of soil soap jasmine
and flake of my skin made me see and
understand the connectedness of it all
and that although they take different
forms they are one in the same thing and
that physical and metaphysical reality
of connectedness can break borders I
also hope that one day this will extend
to devaluing countries borders and the
arbitrary and
elusive lines that govern them these
borders shape of false other nests and
separate us from feeling as
interconnected as we really are so what
does separate us from each other and the
things around us very little but we do
have a mental separation because it’s
hard to visualize where one stands
amongst the other when there are so many
unknowns in between I had an art curator
come first duty visit last year and he
asked me a question that I had never
asked myself before what’s at stake for
you I didn’t understand what he really
meant until after he left and then I
realized absolutely everything
interconnectedness it’s fundamental and
one of the greatest things about it is
that it’s a truth you don’t need to be a
scientist to comprehend it you don’t
even need to comprehend it because you
know it its inherent it’s in you it’s in
me and it’s everything in between thank
you [Applause]
separation because I never really felt
their presence I’m urging the Assyrian
born in London grew up in Dubai and now
I live in Paris I felt that my roots
weren’t geographically fixed but were
more connected to the communities that I
was a part of having said that whenever
asked where I’m from I’ve always said
Syria I’m so proud to be from such a
beautiful land with such inspiring
people and because I was raised abroad
we would visit each summer into the war
began and seven years later from that
distance I’ve grown to almost exotic
eyes my own country dreaming about the
intense smell of jasmine for my
grandmother’s garden planting plums in
the soil and eating cactus fruits or
Sebata on the street as we would people
watch on these white plastic chairs but
recently I was in Athens speaking with
this year in refugee who didn’t believe
that I was Syrian the way I dress and
how I spoke she said made her see me as
a foreigner and for the first time I
thought outside of a culture that I so
closely felt with him but in this
context we were both foreigners dressed
and speaking differently to our
surroundings and that connected us
together even more than if we had had
this conversation in Damascus so this
feeling of outsider an insider
actually became our connection because
we’ve all experienced what it’s like
being in both positions it’s actually
one of humanity’s strongest bonds and
when we look beyond the separation of
where you stands and where I stand we
allow each other to be more connected on
an atomic level there is no clear
division of space between our U stands
and our I sound and there’s hardly a
difference in what’s you and the person
that you’re sitting next to is composed
of you sit together as just two
densities of matter and things that seem
like solid objects are mostly composed
of empty space besides my new particles
so it’s
dreamily distant from each other that
they seem as though they hover in empty
space I love this illustration of
electrons orbiting the nucleus because
there resembles planets orbiting the Sun
perceiving scale is interchangeable like
this can help break the boundary between
the micro-macro world and can also free
the tensions between other polarities
like insider and outsider or
other nests and sameness for example I’m
a visual artist and through my practice
I aim to describe this notion of non
boundary and therefore the
interconnectedness of matter years ago I
heard a fact that I couldn’t let go of
and it profoundly influenced the way I
work it goes visible lights within the
whole electromagnetic spectrum only
occupies one thousandth of 1% one
thousandth of 1% I was overwhelmed by
how little we could actually see and I
felt a powerful impulse to explore
beyond that fraction of a percent this
fact triggered me to explore the unseen
not only of other wavelengths but on
other scales as well by expanding our
sight we can expand our perception and
when we do we can connect to the things
around us in a different way so about 10
years ago I started using the light
microscope and scanning
electromicroscope to magnify and
photograph my dead skin cells as you can
see here I sampled for my fingertips
because it’s the part of the body that
connects us to the external world it’s
that sense of touch that we understand
the things around us the skin suggests
to be a division of the internal and
external body but what it constitutes is
extremely similar to the matter that
surrounds it to illustrate this with a
practical example since I came up on
stage you shed around a hundred thousand
skin cells as you remove your arm from
the person next to you that means one
year from now you will have lost
one-and-a-half pounds of dead skin which
is probably one of the easier diets to
sustain these days I was able to explore
the skins elusive boundary by magnifying
my skin by
twenty fifty thousand times at this
scale borders broke when a single cell
resembled the galactic landscape I
continued the shift in proportion by
making these images into large format
photographic prints
I chose photography as my medium to
explore this because it operates within
the realms of truth but a truth that I
could manipulate and I like that
psychotic because then I could create
works which would be considered more
fact than fiction imagination or opinion
even if it was staged or entered into
abstraction and now I could visually
address a truth of matter that both of
my nudes and vast shared the same
content and space
I mean if electrons protons and neutrons
do not have a definitive shape the nor
will their sum and if these are the
elements which inform the basis of our
reality then within the language of
human experience lines and their borders
cannot exist I’m going to show you now
that by visualizing or imagining such a
connected space may actually allow us to
experience it but the room is gonna
become dark can we please turn the
lights off romantic as I’m sure you know
your pupils just dilated to compensate
for the lack of light but now the room
is gonna become bright again can we
please turn the lights on and now
they’ve shrunk obvious stuff right well
what if I told you that when I announced
that the room is going to become dark
you people’s already started to dilate
and that when I said that the room would
become bright before the room brightened
your people’s began to shrink our our
pupils can adjust by just the thought of
lightness and darkness the mechanisms of
our pupils are helping researchers to
understand the connection between
imagination and perception this study
conducted by cognitive neurosciences
from the University of Oslo suggests
that imagination and perception used
similar neural processes and that
imagination triggers some of the same
physical mechanisms involved in actual
sights therefore we can shape how we see
based on what we think and how we
perceive it I was encouraged by this
relationship between imagination
option because in some ways then by
abstractly visualizing
interconnectedness could have the viewer
actually experience it so I continued
working in the lab to photograph my skin
cells when glitches started to appear
through the lag and the images rendering
these glitches became my way to describe
the relationship one has to their own
internal body inherent but unfamiliar
who always carry our bodies but will
rarely see inside it I started to see
these glitches as vulnerabilities and
the technology’s Anatomy abstractly
exposing themselves likewise although we
will never see our internal workings
human emotions do physically manifest
themselves through involuntary
malfunctions like a stream of sweat on
your forehead when you’re anxious or
your face turning red when you’re
embarrassed or a choke when you’re lost
for words this image is called choke and
others from the series include sweat
tremble twitch palpitate and blush I
developed this tension between internal
and external body in this video work
which records myself screaming for as
long and as loud as I possibly could
with a breath of between which was 16
stress for these thing minutes because
the film is silenced it leaves the
internal voice to speak through the
tongue quivering the skin reddening the
eyes tearing and the veins bulging but
actually I had to reshoot this film
because the neighbour barged into the
studio thinking something terrible had
happened so I explained that I needed to
scream for the next 15 minutes and he
said listen I understand it’s a Monday
and at the moment I’m creating a new
series for my next show where along with
my skin cells I’m examining soil and
Jasmine for my grandmother’s garden and
soap from Aleppo under the scanning
electron microscope when I first started
using the microscope I was most
fascinated by spending eight hours
exploring something one centimeter wide
I was also overwhelmed by all the
details that we don’t see I mean looking
as a choice at the end of the day so I
asked my grandmother for a squared
centimeter of soil soap and Jasmine to
examine and being a Syrian grandmother
she sent me three kilos of each and of
course I got salt in the airports so I
said that I was a farmer I’m not sure
what kind of farmer travels with three
kilos of dead plants well an
unsuccessful one so they sympathetically
let me through but with these works I
wanted to get closer to this pace which
is no longer accessible to me I wanted
to get closer to its earth and to its
smell and to Hyper examine this
invisible force called nostalgia but
actually the closer I looked the further
I felt I was lost into its abstraction
glitched and disconnected that same
magnification made the landscape foreign
I’m sure everyone can relate to me so
consumed by something or by a thought
that you paradoxically find yourself
with no perspective but in the end one
needs distance in order to understand
closeness and when there’s a push there
is always a pull and sometimes
abstraction can lead to clarity being
lost in a landscape of soil soap jasmine
and flake of my skin made me see and
understand the connectedness of it all
and that although they take different
forms they are one in the same thing and
that physical and metaphysical reality
of connectedness can break borders I
also hope that one day this will extend
to devaluing countries borders and the
arbitrary and
elusive lines that govern them these
borders shape of false other nests and
separate us from feeling as
interconnected as we really are so what
does separate us from each other and the
things around us very little but we do
have a mental separation because it’s
hard to visualize where one stands
amongst the other when there are so many
unknowns in between I had an art curator
come first duty visit last year and he
asked me a question that I had never
asked myself before what’s at stake for
you I didn’t understand what he really
meant until after he left and then I
realized absolutely everything
interconnectedness it’s fundamental and
one of the greatest things about it is
that it’s a truth you don’t need to be a
scientist to comprehend it you don’t
even need to comprehend it because you
know it its inherent it’s in you it’s in
me and it’s everything in between thank
you [Applause]
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