Where is the end of the West and where does Orient begin?
In my series „Beyond Borders“ I have been searching for the "in between” – whatever
lies geographically as well as culturally between my world here in the midst of Europe and my long term focus of interest in the Middle and Near East. Being half Lebanese myself, nearly all my previous series have been dealing with the documentation of cultural interfaces between the Western and the Arab world.
Through reflections and fragmentation within the images, the viewer’s eye is being multiplied, inverted and divided in order to call into question the perception of cultural differences and their importance for the “present” and the “past” of our society. My pictures reveal an ambivalent point of view beyond current clichés of architectural monuments and existing borderlines. In my photographs, the Orient and the Occident overlay each other, and are further changed by ever-growing globalism. Photography in this case serves as a visual hinge and an interface between these multi-faceted worlds where the space between East and West is either expanded or reduced.
The project has been published as a book and is designed as a 11 meter accordion fold out, hand folded and glued together to a single strip of paper by the artist. By choosing this unusual format I wanted to enforce the reading of the the slow and sometimes uneasy transition of cultural symbols and values as one moves from Europe to the Orient.
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