In her work, Joumaa is interested in the intersection of political events and the way people perform them as well as react to them. The political stage becomes a crucial field of research for her work where she tends to investigate how decision making is done as a way to normalize an aesthetic of politics that we do not see outside of newsreel coverage. She is also interested in experimenting with the ways moving images can be exhibited. During her residency at Parc offsite, the artist resumed yearlong research of working with the still frame by questioning its discourse once it is taken outside of the moving aspect. In Anxious Pixels, she questions the nature of YouTube broadcasted videos as videos that shift into an archive once it is stripped outside of its “live broadcast” nature. Still images taken out of these videos were printed in order to re-emphasize the idea of an archive that finds its roots in a moving image work. Thinking about the grey zone which exists between documentary and fiction, Joumaa is also interested in looking at how geographical distance from the place an image is broadcasted affects its genre from being documentary to becoming fiction as we watch it “from far.”
Joyce Joumaa is a video artist based in Montreal. After growing up in Tripoli, Lebanon, she pursued a BFA in Film Studies at Concordia University. Her work explores the political phenomenology of language, post-colonial education and video documentation as a fictional archive. She is the recipient of the 2021-2022 Emerging Curator Residency Program at the CCA, the Canadian Centre for Architecture.
