From The Creases of My Eyelid
As part of The Quebec City Biennial
Curated by Marie Muracciole
At the fine arts in Baghdad, then at the Ashkal Alwan program in Beirut where his exile began, Ali Eyal developed a practice of drawing by accumulating lines and superimposing figures and writings. These intricate images, like embroidery, spread from a simple postal envelope to a wall, from a table to a canvas or a performance setting. They convey a family fiction where roles are shared between spaces, objects, people and historical facts. Eyal sees it as a crime scene whose clues he encrypts. He opens and closes chapters without chronology or outcome. The Iraqi context, the colonial and internal violence, with the resulting divisions, coexist with traces of the formation of his gaze – he saw his first mirror long after the frescoes on the walls of his house, and just before discovering the photography. The darkest space in his own head is a camera obscura where he develops the "fertile zone between wakefulness and sleep", as the curator of the exhibition held at the Saw center writes, from which some come elements displayed here. This imagination fertilizes an unlivable reality and records it at the same time, inscribing gestures of resistance in poetic forms.
Photograph by Renaud Philippe