Essa
Grayeb

An image records a specific moment. A moment that passes gets remembered and re(-)members the many moments that follow. An image not only preserves a moment but reproduces it. Images make memory, and vice versa. How images do this, and what the implications of this action may be, are central concerns in the work of Essa Grayeb. 

Trained as a photographer at Jerusalem’s Bezalel Academy of Arts and Design (BFA 2019 & MFA 2022), Palestinian artist Essa Grayeb collects, catalogues, and recontextualizes both found and developed images in an effort to re(-)member the long arc of Arab history. No image is off-limits for Grayeb: from darkroom photography to vintage cinema and print ephemera to beach litter and newspaper clippings, the artist’s dexterity between forms allows for an exploration of what lies within and beyond images. 

Grayeb’s images re(-)member differently. By recasting popular and everyday visual culture, histories of a united Arab world emerge amidst today’s fractured alliances. In The Return of Osiris (2019), by stitching together pieces of modern Egyptian film & TV footage and mixing their original audio with President Abdel Nasser’s 1967 resignation speech, Grayeb asks viewers to consider how the country’s famed president and moving image culture co-construct a broader Arab identity. 

By literally re(-)membering traces of Arab culture, Grayeb resurrects hope for solidarity in the region: in Separate Paths Can Still Be Part Of The Same Journey (2021) with beached waste from various Arab countries, collected along the coastline from Haifa to the closest accessible point near the Gaza Strip; in Utopian Arab Republic (ongoing) with print ephemera like postcards and stamped envelopes from the United Arab Republic (1958–61). 

Grayeb’s images work like memory: not in perfect pictures and clear images, but in the blur of forgotten tales and the fog of fading histories. Memory, for Grayeb, is not a linear recollection of events, but a struggle to re(-)member amidst time’s effacing march. 

Returning to Abdel Nasser’s resignation, Grayeb’s My Whole Heart Is With You and No Matter How Dim the Light Is (both 2022) emulate memory’s ambivalence and precarity. In the former, Grayeb crops the video frame to the president’s mouth and cuts all speech, creating an entirely new discourse of pauses, lapses, and losses for words. In the latter, the artist exposes photosensitive paper to a television monitor playing the speech—transferring moving to still image in haunting effigies of a blurred, almost unrecognizable figure. 

Relocating his practice to Berlin for twelve months in the context of the DAAD residency, Grayeb will continue exploring memory on the material level of the image and its circulation. By further expanding his interest in narratives of the past and their manifestations in popular culture—while connecting with Berlin’s arts community—Grayeb’s DAAD residency will be a milestone in the artist’s practice and contemporary engagement with Arab visual culture. 

Text: Darian Razdar