The Virginia Commonwealth University School of the Arts in Qatar Gallery recently held a recpetion for the exhibition 'Elusive Homelands' by Camille Zakharia.
'Elusive Homelands' is an exhibition of a series of photo collages and paintings created by the Lebanese-Canadian artist Camille Zakharia. In this body of work Zakharia, who currently lives in Bahrain and has been a migrant himself, documents the living environment of a number of immigrant Middle Eastern families in Nova Scotia, Canada.
This exhibition addresses some of the major personal issues most immigrants have to live through and their acculturation in their new land of residence. The works are the result of a project to document the stories of immigration of Arab families and individuals from the Near East, particularly Lebanon, in the Canadian City of Halifax, undertaken by Zakharia in the late 1990's.
"We, as immigrants, constantly search our innermost selves to justify our selfishness, and our noble explanations abound." explained Mr. Zakharia
The works represent Zakharia's interpretation of the personal histories and current circumstances of each of the families and draws on some distorted memories of his own childhood and the lives of the people who lived in those memories. The most recurrent themes that appear in these works are the concept of time; the strength of, and the support provided by the extended family; the loss of loved ones for no understandable reason; the keeping alive of false hopes amid the destruction of war; and the sense of futility and impotence as the educated young are drained away from their own country to the West. Migration from one country to another often results in a fragmentation of identity, a feature that predominates in all the families shown in this series. Displacement, nostalgia, and the search for home with a quest for a place to fit in are furthermore intrinsic issues addressed by these works. The unforeseeable and unfortunate war in the Summer of 2006 that urged thousands of Lebanese and foreign citizens to leave Lebanon and seek shelter abroad, has once more brought back into public memory the exodus that had happened during that country's civil war between 1975-1990. The current exhibition could not be more relevant than at this very moment in time. A catalog accompanying the exhibition explains the exhibited works in some detail and contains a number of essays.
"This exhibition can reach a variety of audiences, people who have experienced the trauma of migration and exile. Camille Zakharia's work can provide a mirror to all of those affected by such life changing experiences" said Dr. J. Sokoly VCUQ Gallery Director and Assistant Professor in Art History.
