Today recurring images of covered or endangered Middle Eastern women indent themselves in our consciousness daily. Framed by the media, these images are presented to the West as ‘icons’ of otherness. Horizon is born out of the impulse to get close to the human behind the icon. Underneath this iconography of effacement and imprisonment lie many stories of the conflicting journey towards freedom and self-perception: stories of female exile. These resonant narratives awake a personal desire to treat complex feelings surrounding my own story of exile and self-finding at the age of eighteen (Spain - U.K). While reflecting female Middle Eastern experience of exile and drawing an understanding from my own autobiographical material, Horizon is foremost an installation about woman and identity.
Faced with issues of first person representation (Middle Eastern woman from a Western perspective) and wishing to present an essence rather than a given cultural context, I have chosen to construct a fictive character and environment which are drawn from various common denominators: Palestine (lead performer), Central Iraq/ Kurdistan/ Iran (interviewees), Jordan (nomadic desert culture), trans-national Bedhouin/ Iran/ Jordan (costumes), Saudi Arabia (call to prayer) and Armenia (music).
Taking into account the universality of key issues (belonging, effacement, rebellion) my main aim is to treat relationships between the landscape, the emotive and the physical. I have therefore opted to mingle distinct languages of representation; the real with the fictive, as well as distinct contexts; Atacama desert with Middle Eastern desert. Using the performative body allows for a language which is one step removed from the illustrative, therefore broadening the reading of the work.