These images are part of a larger visual/literary meditation on the material, historical, and cultural landscapes of the Near East. The goal of the overall project is to consider ways of dynamically re-inhabiting these landscapes shattered and exhausted by war, colonization, forced acculturation, persecution, genocide, diaspora, and political and religious extremism. Motivating this project and my studio practice in general is my international upbringing in Pakistan, Turkey, and Afghanistan. It has occasioned a nuanced and complex experience of my Near Eastern heritage as an Assyrian-American.

The project is predicated upon the conviction that we cannot reasonably break ground for the vital re-inhabitation of shattered landscapes without first pouring over the record of what defines them and constitutes the conventions and legends to which they and their inhabitants are dedicated. The project is not a nostalgic return to lost forms, but a creative adaptation of them to present circumstances and needs. The project lies somewhere between preservation and the creative intervention of new, albeit derived forms.

These images and others in the series not included here represent the opening act of the overall project. They constitute an imaginary photographic response to the Ancient Mesopotamian Epic of Gilgamesh, especially to the account of the deluge caused by the gods, the names of whom the images bear. Their abstract nature, lack of context, and generous scale are intended to lend the series a mythic quality and sense. Other works on this site offer a glimpse into other aspects of the overall project: the Empire watercolors; the post-war reconstruction Ur Design Project; and Quietly, Privately.

The primary point of reference in the project is the Assyrian genocide known as Seyfo (1914-1924) and the subsequent diaspora of which I am a product. The Assyrian diaspora echoes many other recorded diasporas, but is lesser known. My point, though, is not to inform audiences about Assyrians and their plight, nor to underpin the perennial story of human suffering with the distinct factors of yet another ethnic catastrophe. My intent, rather, is to explore the notion that indigeneity is not reducible to land, nor erased by diaspora. In my work, I seek to understand indigeneity as a positive and productive pan-historical, pan-political reality of displaced people of any origin. My work interrogates indigeneity at the boundaries of place. Place, architect Arijit Sen says, “is mobile, carried with one, a sensory bodily experience that I carry with me, remember, selectively retrieve from memory, and deploy in difficult situations.” (Mitchell Lecture Series, School of the Art Institute of Chicago, December 2020). These retrievals of memory are part of what I, along with my wife with whom I frequently collaborate, call grief-work. Grief-work is not an absorption in or recuperation of insuperable losses; it is a creative adaptation to unsettled, marginalized conditions, a transient place-making informed by the archives of heritable material and cultural landscapes. Grief-work breaks ground for their vital re-inhabitation.