VRAL is currently showcasing Firas Shehadeh’s Like An Event In A Dream Dreamt By Another — Rehearsal (2023). To contextualize his work, we will be looking at several of his most recent project. We begin with There, Where You Are Not (2022), a series of performative screening on the nature of digital culture.
“I wander silently and am somewhat unhappy,
And my sighs always ask “where?”
In a ghostly breath it calls back to me,
“There, where you are not, there is your happiness.”
George Philip Schmidt
Firas Shehadeh, a Vienna-based Palestinian artist and researcher, fashions intricate artworks informed by digital world-building within the post-internet milieu. A distinguished alumnus of the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna, where he received a Master of Fine Arts in 2022, Shehadeh has long been preoccupied with the interplay between post-colonial narratives, technological landscapes, and historical resonances.
In his 2022 multimedia project There, Where You Are Not, a precursor to Like An Event In A Dream Dreamt By Another — Rehearsal, Shehadeh deconstructs the dialectic between digital spaces and physical reality, all set against a backdrop of post-colonial discourse. The work is a meticulous examination of the transformative journeys that lived experiences and concrete objects undertake as they metamorphose into their digital counterpart, only to be catapulted back into the material world, often in transmuted forms. Shehadeh’s layered narrative dissects the roles of digitality and internet memes, serving as a discerning commentary on such themes as identity, geopolitics, and cultural representation in an epoch marked by incessant digital proliferation.
The titular phrase, There, Where You Are Not, pays homage to an eponymous literary work by Kamal Boullata, a Palestinian artist and theorist of considerable renown. Boullata’s conceptual framework finds its roots in “The Wanderer,” a poem by German poet Georg Philipp Schmidt. The phrase, for Boullata, acted as a metaphorical articulation of an existential disjunction – his severed connection with his Palestinian homeland. It becomes a potent expression for unattainable realms, whether they be geographical, emotional, or conceptual.
Shehadeh augments this complex intertextuality by introducing an additional conceptual stratum: the borderless yet boundary-recreating universe of the internet. His project launches an investigation into the post-colonial ramifications of these digital realms. The work questions the ways in which the internet serves as both a liberating force that transcends traditional borders and a mechanism for the reinscription of power dynamics, cultural commodification, and appropriation. Utilizing an array of mediums – including digital art, video installations, gameplay footage, and textual exegesis – the project scrutinizes the functioning of memes as cultural touchstones within the digital ecosystem. These memes…
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Matteo Bittanti
Work cited
Firas Shehadeh, Meme Without Irony, digital video, color, sound, 6’ 21”, 2022, Palestine.
All images courtesy of the Artist
