Born 1970, Mosul, Iraq
Currently lives in Cardiff
Rabab Ghazoul’s work addresses the manufacture of narrative, within the personal, cultural and political realm. She began making experimental theatre in Wales in the 1990s, working as a director and later performer. Currently, her work brings together performance, site, video and installation around a series of encounters with ‘homeland’, selfhood and dislocation. Her interest lies in experiences of displacement, and the emergence of subsequent narratives which attempt to make concrete home’s immateriality.
Having left her country at the age of ten, her creative work finds her articulating a series of impossible returns, a kind of (re) presencing of home’s absence. In the wake of Iraq’s history of occupation in the last century and in the early years of this she is drawn to making very personal responses to a multiplicity of perceived fractures both local and distant. It is within these assorted tensions of placement and displacement which accompany the loss of ‘claim’ to cultural ‘legitimacy’ that she finds herself addressing both her own narratives, as well as the twinned currencies of public and political narrative essential to the polemic of all hegemonic projects. After many years away – from ‘home’ – identity takes on the form of a series of fragile ‘thread-bares’. In her abiding return to these themes, it would appear that these are the threads that bind.
Selected solo exhibitions
2004 ‘Where his hands decay, mine begin’, BHAC, Cardiff, Wales
Selected group exhibitions
2005 ‘Insomnia’, The Bargehouse, OXO Tower, London, UK
2002 ‘The Naming Of The Storm’, performance Chapter, Cardiff