Anna Sherbany

Israel

My granny taught me how to count in Arabic. There was so much more she could have told me. A language barrier stood between me and my granny’s world so we could never really communicate with each other and I never heard her stories. What were Baghdad and Palestine like and how did she feel about finally being in London where she could only talk with her immediate family? The world outside her home spoke a language she could not understand. How can we pass on our culture, our traditions and our stories without a common language?

My work is set between the anguish of cultural alienation and the enriching process of this same alienation with its transitional reality and inspirational exchanges. It is no doubt deeply influenced by my background and my grandmother’s relationship with her environment. As an Iraqi Jewish Middle Eastern woman, I am constantly negotiating issues relating to history, memory and location, as well as race, class and gender. These have provided the ‘conceptual banks of material’ from which my art practice has developed. I explore these areas as a strategy to articulate myself at a time when notions of boundaries are being investigated and transgressed.

Using the body as a metaphor, I investigate the visual markers of identity and its production, both public and private, visible and invisible, structuring the content of the image, exploring notions of masquerade, experimenting with materials and space. I try to explore the choreography of the exhibition space, re-evaluating the visual content of the final artwork to provide new narratives. I am constantly striving to create a context for dialogue and interaction with the viewer.

(Text: give(a)way catalogue, 2006)