I
2021
In an eastern part of Jaffa, there are three neighboring landmarks: an old cell site antenna, which I believed to be a divine entity when I was a child, the remnants of my grandparents’ home, demolished to make way for an upscale tower for residents, and the ground where a historical football stadium once stood.
In a video essay that is a component of the video installation “I,” I explore the historical and imaginative connections among these three landmarks.
Orient
2023
The title refers both to the historical colonial gaze directed toward the East and to the act of orienting oneself within space.
The work consists of approximately one thousand hand-laid and painted wooden pieces installed directly on the floor of a gallery in Jaffa. It re-situates a floor pattern common in Palestinian homes prior to the Nakba into a contemporary public site.
A compass geometry is embedded within the pattern. It bends and redirects itself toward the center of the installation.
2023-2025
2025-2026
2025 | Co-created with bowie bo gyung kim
Rift Zone No. 5
2025
Studies of Pierced Flags is a series of works based on digitally created flags. I modeled pieces of fabric using computer graphics and subjected them to wind simulations. Deliberate tears allow computed-air to pass through the surface, and the resulting images were exposed onto canvas using diluted cyanotype.
Works from the series “Studies of Pierced Flags” were exhibited in 2023 as part of “The Forbidden” at Wannsee Contemporary, curated by Avi Feldman.
Rift Zone No. 5 asks how sacred architecture anchors and holds the body. The sculpture draws from architectural forms found in sacred sites in Palestine and transforms these references into a palanquin or stretcher-like structure. An object designed to carry both the sacred and the wounded.
Studies of Pierced Flags
2022-2023
II
In July 2019, a dove entered the Jabaliya Mosque in Jaffa and refused to leave. She nested on an air-conditioning unit and raised her chicks inside, dividing worshippers between those who saw a sign of grace and those troubled by the mess. The work presents a short video loop manipulated from the mosque’s CCTV footage.
2023
2022
Epiphany
Epiphany is a Christian holiday celebrated in Palestine through a tradition known as “The Blessing of the Waters,” in which men and boys participate in a competition where a priest throws a cross into the waters of Jaffa Harbor.
The work investigates the complex relationship between the Palestinian residents of Jaffa and the sea, a place that holds both nostalgia and a constant reminder of exile and trauma.
WWWADI
WWWADI is a community-based digital archive that uses video game language to map memories of Wadi Nisnas, a Palestinian neighborhood in Haifa. Developed through interviews and collaboration with residents over two years, personal recollections were translated into digital dioramas within a virtual environment.
Sidekick
An asymmetric interactive work designed for two players using separate controllers. Each player occupies a distinct spatial viewpoint within a shared narrative environment. The work produces a condition of partial visibility. Players must act within incomplete information, negotiating trust, coordination, and misalignment.
The Pond
of Person A
“The Pond of Person A (2025) is a project that explores how we might reclaim or inhabit our subjecthood within an undefined entity that closely resembles ourselves. It asks: how do we take initiative and form a relationship when confronted with a presence that mirrors us throughout the process of subjective experience? The web space—often referred to as the "Sea of Data"—has become a contemporary site of self-reflection for users. As we know, the accuracy of this reflection has grown increasingly precise through algorithmic intervention.
The Pond of Person A constructs a web-based self-cognition through the artworks KISMET (2024) by Muhammad Toukhy. By navigating a virtual island and discovering a hidden pond, the audience moves as though surfing through a digital landscape. Upon finding and clicking on a "Mic-Bomb" within the pond, the artwork KISMET is activated, initiating a reflection of the audience’s action through both visual and auditory means. The Pond of Person A originates from the 2014 project The Lake of Person A by Bowie Bo Gyung Kim. That project explored multiple emotions evoked by a single object—an unknown lake in Warsaw, Poland. Inspired by the surface of that lake, The Pond of Person A reflects the varied emotional and perceptual responses triggered by another surface: the computer screen, or the “surface” of the web”.
Curated by Bowie Bo Gyung Kim
Special Thanks to Rene G. Cepeda
and Constanza Salazar