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Care of Raymonde (detail), 1997
Gelatine silver prints, paperboard, ink, postage stamps
Lent by the artist
With the support of the Canada Council for the Arts
(Photo: Harry Foster © Canadian Museum of Civilization Corporation)
" I had wanted to tell a story, almost a biography. [...]
Postcards are what people send when they visit a place. I think that all
immigrants feel that sense of transience. Sometimes people don't accept
the idea of being here permanently; they deny it. Their denial is a form
of hope, the hope of having the choice to return. "
Extracts from an interview with the artist
Rawi Hage was born in 1964 in Beirut to a family that, in 1978, would go into
temporary exile in Cyprus in order to escape the civil war. At the age of 18, he
again left Lebanon, this time for New York City, where he lived for nine years.
Towards the end of his stay in the United States, he began studying photography
at the New York Institute of Photography. In 1991, he immigrated to Montreal,
where he earned an Arts Diploma from Dawson College, then a Bachelor's degree
in visual arts from Concordia University.
![Rawi Hage](/web/20061029113017im_/http://www.warmuseum.ca/cultur/cespays/images/pay2_07p3.jpg)
Rawi Hage,
Montreal, Quebec, 1999
Camille Zakharia
Iris digital prints
Collection of the Canadian Museum of Civilization
It was during this time that one of his professors, Raymonde April, brought
him to see photography as a medium that can become very aggressive,
very unjust . . . at the documentary level, because it can be easily
manipulated by the media. Hage opposes that pernicious effect on the medium by
incorporating his photos—which deal mainly with immigration, war and racism—into
fictional contexts where many voices summon each other. Somewhat like a Vermeer
who has metamorphosed, through his art, the images of a camera obscura, he
transforms his photographs so as to make them unsuited to hurried consumption
or sensationalist use.
Care of Raymondev, 1997
Gelatine silver prints, paperboard, ink, postage stamps
Lent by the artist
With the support of the Canada Council for the Arts
(Photo: Harry Foster © Canadian Museum of Civilization Corporation)
In his work Care of Raymonde, for example, not only does Rawi Hage
transform his photos into postcards that he mails to April, but he also uses
them as the basis for an imaginary narrative with exile as its theme:
The images on some of the postcards reflect memories of
past existence, while the written texts express the living present or a longed-for
past. In this way, he creates an ambiguous realm, an undefined space between
the fictitious and the real, a paradox, a mirror of a persona caught between two
existences, or at least between two places, two cultures.
Rawi Hage has participated in solo and collective exhibitions in Canada, Lebanon,
France and Colombia. The Canadian Museum of Civilization and the Musée de la
civilisation de Québec have acquired some of his works.
http://artengine.ca/tpb/Rawi/
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