Artist Statement: Zena Assi

MY CITY-WALL reflects the relations and conflicts between the refugees/migrants and the cities they are aiming to get to.

Through Zena’s work, for more than a decade now, she have been trying to visually translate the city life of our modern society. Zena believes that the structures we build, the architecture language we adopt, and the borders we draw, all witnesses of our ideologies in one moment in time.

They are the dialect history uses to write itself with.

And now, unfortunately, we are witnessing the rise of walls again?

The first series of 5 paintings.

The titles are taken from the song ‘London Bridge is falling down’. It tackles the idea that the behavior we are now adopting towards each other is more like vertical inaccessible Towers, instead of horizontal connecting bridges.

The 5 bridges pieces are each 170x70cm

WOOD AND CLAY WILL WASH AWAY

BRICKS AND MORTAR WILL NOT STAY

IRON AND STEEL WILL BEND AND BOW

RICOCHETS #1

RICOCHETS #2

The video /movie ‘CHRONICLES OF A MIGRANT, is a short experimental animation of 3minutes, narrating the story of a migrant.

The visuals are her own series of paintings on canvas, they are put in motion by her friend and colleague, Amandine Brenas, who is a French artist/animator living in Lebanon. The idea is to describe the daunting trip that any migrant/refugee takes to survive. The movie tells the story of a migrant’s awakening to the horrors of war and death in his home country; obliged to flee on a dinghy, he faces the dangers of the ‘passers’ and the sea. He is trapped in turmoil, where countries re-draw their borders, erect walls, demolish bridges and enforce segregation… all in the name of containing traumatized masses on the move. These are the chronicles of his passage, surmounting one conflict after the other… in a desperate attempt to reach the shore, bury his dead and finally build a new home.