Joyce Joumaa

Lives and works in Beirut, Lebanon

Artist statement

My work engages with histories shaped by conflict and crisis while specifically investigating the phenomenology of political performance, often rooted in my native Lebanon and diasporic experiences. Through documentary and experimental filmmaking, archival research, and photography, I attempt to create narratives that reimagine our relationship to past events, historical figures, or emblematic sites, examining how they continue to act upon us in the present. While I sometimes use fiction, I see this approach as a way to complicate our reading towards or against the history of a place in an attempt to critically contemplate an alternative state of being. In this vein, my work dissects politically charged spaces within and around Lebanon as well as collective memories that highlight the relations, power structures, and paradoxes embodied within them. Since the onset of the economic crisis in Lebanon in 2019, which marked the collapse of both the national currency and the banking system, the impact of this crisis has deeply influenced my practice where I intend to explore the complex layers that contribute to such a profound economic and social breakdown. Through an artistic investigation of the mundane, I seek to engage with the material and symbolic dimensions of this crisis, particularly focusing on how the systemic state corruption sustains it.

Artwork