Prologue

Artist : Joyce Joumaa

Curator : Heather Canlas-Rigg

Prologue 

أنا أحب البحر, I Love The Sea, Egyptian singer Nagat El Saghirah’s famous ballad, fills the audible space of the Galerie UQO with its romantic melodies and lyrics of infinite love and longing for the sea. The poetic and metaphoric possibilities afforded by the inescapable feelings of love, and the vastness of earth’s oceans, surface like a buoyant note transmitted throughout Joyce Joumaa’s exhibition Prologue.  

Anchoring the exhibition is a July 1958 issue of Life magazine that reports on the Lebanon Crisis, the United States’ first military intervention in the “Middle East.” The Mediterranean sea is an important undercurrent in Prologue, as the ocean bore witness to the hundreds of ships and thousands of US Marines who used the water and shore as a way to enter Beirut and begin their occupation. Joumaa specifically examines how the so-called crisis was reported to Americans by honing in on how the story was narrated in the magazine, as well as through footage aired on television, two modes of transmission that reached everyday American citizens in their living rooms.  

Biographies 

Joyce Joumaa is a visual artist and writer who is based between Beirut, Montréal, and Amsterdam. After growing up in Lebanon, she completed studies in cinema at Concordia University in Montreal. In her work, she examines the microhistories of Lebanon as a way to understand how the structures of the past influence the present moment. At the heart of her practice is an interest in politically charged space and the social psychology that stems from this tension. She has exhibited her work at the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, the E-flux Screening Room, the Stewart Hall Art Gallery, the Sharjah Architecture Triennale, the 60th Venice Biennale, and the 35th edition of the 35th Ljuljana Biennale of Graphic Arts. Solo exhibitions of her work were recently presented at the Canadian Centre for Architecture; at Plein Sud, centre d’exposition en art actuel; and at Galerie Eli Kerr. She was awarded the Hnatyshyn Foundation’s Emerging Visual Artist Award, and the Prix Plein sud 2023.  

Heather Canlas-Rigg is an independent curator and writer based in Toronto. Her practice is rooted in investigating how artists employ the materiality of camera technologies to interrogate imperialist structures, and in thinking critically about institutions. 

Credit : Numérisation du magazine Life, édition de 1958.