Asma Khoury
Asma Khoory is an artist born in Dubai. She graduated in 2017 with a BFA from Zayed University, and in 2018 she was part of the fifth cohort of The Salama Bint Hamdan Emerging Artist Fellowship in partnership with the Rhode Island School of Design. Asma is currently pursuing her MA in Anthropology and Museum Practice at Goldsmiths, University of London. Her work has been exhibited locally and internationally at Meem Gallery, Warehouse 421, Al Serkal Avenue, Jameel Arts Center, Nieuw Dakota in Amsterdam, and Southeast Missouri State University. She investigates reality, memory, and narrative and how they often merge or contradict one another through materials. She is interested in the intersection of personal memory versus public memory in museums. Asma's artistic practice revolves around themes of manufactured time, human relations and conversations, hazy dreams, and collective memory through the mediums of painting and mixed media.
Asma’s work takes an indexical approach to charting memory, documenting a repetitive, almost ritualistic process of tea-dying. Her piece, Recollection, becomes a poetic nod to material as not only a courier of meaning but as proof of experience. Here, Asma’s process was almost performative, a meditative examination on the ebb and flow of memory in the intimate confines of the SEAF studio, as she dips the teabags, one by one, and hangs them to dry.
Memory is in constant change from one state to another; it is often manufactured, altered, replaced, stained, and disposed of, and its endurance is affected by time and remembrance. Every passing moment turns into collective memory, with fragmented traces formulating an inevitable cycle, without neglection and precise edges to determine beginnings and ends. Moments, and thus memory, fade into each other.
The filter is a material to evoke a sense of memory; mimicking false age, depicting the past, and exposing aspects of deception and simulation. Memory is in a cycle of visiting and revisiting, controlled and uncontrolled, from reality to fabrication, but what happens in the concealed in-between, where moments fade into each other?