Asil Habara

This installation explores my Arab/North African immigrant experience, having grown up at the start of the new millennium amid social turbulence and the internet’s rapid rise. Through screen printing, video and interactive screen work, I capture social media’s dual role of proliferating images of societal upheaval interspersed with seemingly superficial content. Arabic ‘good morning’ memes embody a profound yearning for connection and a desire to bridge the cultural divide across the diaspora. I have inserted photographs of myself and my three siblings into these memes and contrasted them with the harsh realities faced in the Middle East and North Africa, particularly during the Arab Spring. The screen-printed wallpaper emulates how the image quality of memes becomes increasingly degraded as they are disseminated.  The viewer is invited to sit on a couch, as if in my childhood home, or to insert themselves into a digital social and political landscape in real time so that they can critically engage with complex contemporary narratives of cultural identity.