A discussion with the artist will take place on May 4 at 5:30 pm, at la Centrale galerie Powerhouse

Anti-disciplinary artist Ghinwa Yassine writes an Arab female body as a secret in her multi-media installation When you pour something, it carries the memory of its mold. This work is inspired by secret codes, the appearance and disappearance of women's bodies in a public context, and responding to the various forms of oppression the artist witnessed firsthand or vicariously. She searches for a freedom that is a right to carry oneself safely in the world, as one is, in their own truth. 

Yassine spent the last three years researching the body as a site for the manifestation of individual and collective memory. She centres embodied agency, which she coins as gestural agency or an agentic gesture, one in which a body is acting and not being subjected to. Her past projects KickQueen (2020) and How Far Can a Marked Body Go (2023) focus on the bodies of Lebanese women in the 2019 uprisings in Beirut, as an attempt to reclaim what Judith Butler calls “the right to have rights”. Since then, she has been wondering: what would it feel like to have an unconditional freedom to appear and to be? And furthermore, what would it feel like, in the body, to have no enemy, no need to resist or to fight, or rather, not to carry a fight within? These questions become even more urgent considering the unsettling events we are presently witnessing. The work turns into a response to unfortunately, what today’s freedom is not.

When you pour something, it carries the memory of its mold combines non-fiction writing, sculpture, costume design, sound, and film performance, and is what the artist wishes for her work to be encountered as a relational story through space. 

BIOGRAPHY

Ghinwa Yassine (Lebanon/Canada) is an anti-disciplinary artist, based on the unceded Territories of the Musqueam, Squamish, and Tsleil-waututh people. Her mixed media work includes film, installation, performance, sound, text and drawing. Yassine confronts in her work the ideological and patriarchal systems that she grew up in, while exploring collective feelings and what it means to be a marked body. She seeks a radical historicizing of individual and collective histories where embodied memories manifest through story, ritual, and gesture.

AKNOWLEDGEMENTS 

Sound design: Joey Zaurrini

Fabrication: Nathyn Sanche

Cinematography and color correction: Devan Scott

Assistant lighting and camera: Conor Provenzano

Costume design: Natasha Dennison

Research, admin, and production assistance: Melanie Whorton

Writing consultant: Mandana Mansouri

Special thanks to Meagan Woods

With the support of the Canada Council for the Arts.