ZEINA ZEITOUN IN CONVERSATION WITH THE CURATOR

Can you discuss the role of language in your work?

The element of language plays a huge role in my collages and video pieces. From words that aren’t reciprocated to lyrics that were sung to me as a child, language brings forth a sense of history that’s hidden beneath the visual and tangible evidence of family. In my collages, excerpts from Etel Adnan’s The Arab Apocalypse and intentional repetition of the phrase “THANK YOU FOR FLYING” signal how I was feeling while making them, and also give the viewer an idea of what it’s like to live in the middle of memory and reality. In the video piece Happiness is the Sea and my Baba Smiling, a lot of the language comes from home videos and a comforting yet haunting song from my childhood. There is an element of language that feels lost. I try to ask my father questions about the past in broken Arabic, but these questions never have an answer.

How has your personal experience of migration influenced your artistic practice?

My personal experience of migration is heavily influenced by my parents and their journey to the so-called land of North America, but it didn’t stop there. Ever since I was born, my parents would take us to visit Lebanon every year. Something truly happens in your brain and heart when you’re forced to leave your loved ones every year. When you’re forced to sit on a plane you don’t want to be in and go back to a place you don’t feel genuine in, you find yourself in the middle of a messed-up game of tug of war. When you become old enough to make your own decisions, life has moved on. Cousins have moved on. Work life and personal life have moved on, but your heart never really does. Everything I’ve been doing thus far in my artistic practice hails from that.

How does water or the sea play a role in your collage work, and what significance does it hold for you?

You know the running joke that an Arab dad teaches their kids how to swim in the sea by literally flinging their tiny bodies into the water and hoping for the best? Yup, that was my sisters and me. The significance of the sea comes from my dad, Samer Wajih Zeitoun. With family, many of the negative stories about living in Beirut get swept under the rug, but the positive ones don’t. I remember waking up before sunrise to fish at Raoushe rock, my father teaching us how to fish like a boss, and hearing the words mitlel fishy (“like the fish”) while swimming underwater until we couldn’t hold our breath anymore. These were integral parts of my childhood that I see in my artistic practice and in my everyday life.

Can you talk more about your process of collecting and deconstructing family videos, photos, and other items for use in your collages?

It’s borderline hoarding at this point. With all the uncertainty in the region, maybe it comes from the fear of things being forgotten and wanting something to hold onto. Maybe it’s just to have the feeling of reliving a memory in the tiniest way. I keep my boarding passes and passport photos, VHS tapes that eventually must be converted into digital copies, photos with writing on the back, and even cool wrapping paper from Beirut as souvenirs. With some collages, I like to use different mediums from the same moment, and in others, I tend to grab moments from each medium to create a whole new moment. These moments usually have people in them, faceless or not. I also collected a lot of personal items that belonged to my jido (grandfather) after he passed. Naturally, it took a little more time for me to truly look through these and utilize them, but I hope they did my jido the justice he deserves.

As an Arab American artist, are there ways in which you try to challenge stereotypical or traditional forms of representation?

My work comes from a loving and authentic place. So much of Arab American art does the same, and we’re all trying to challenge forms of representation that feel stereotypical while making an impact in the art world more generally. Our stories, histories, and memories are important, and lately, I’ve seen more artists work toward demanding space for a type of representation that centers these varied and nuanced stories. Every Arab American has a distinct, yet somehow familiar experience navigating this world and this country. The notion of these distinctions and connections themselves is a challenge to what we consume about Arab American identity in mainstream spaces everyday.

Zeina Zeitoun (b. Arlington, Virginia) is a New York City based artist, photographer, and photo editor born in America and raised in between the US and Lebanon. She was born to two Lebanese immigrants, and is the youngest of three strong and courageous daughters. During her formative years, Zeina realized that her passion for visual arts could be combined with her natural need for activism and education. She now creates personal bodies of work across multiple mediums that document familial and self discovery. These bodies of work hail from the many complicated corners of being a Lebanese-American woman living in the US. Her creative storytelling has recently morphed itself into collaging, using an ever-growing archive of home photos, videos, songs, poems, collected artifacts, objects hoarded throughout the years, and more.