Lebanon-Canada, via Bahrain, 1998
Photo-collage and gouache on paper, mounted on triangular wooden columns Lent by the artist
(Photo: Harry Foster © Canadian Museum of Civilization)
" The project is about a passenger being driven by circumstances,
an unplanned trip, being here and remembering where I once belonged,
being torn between cultures, a fading memory of an experience once lived,
a celebration of a space ahead of me [...]."
"Maybe the fragmentation of my
identity accounts for why I always ended up working with collage. "
Extracts from the artist's statement and an interview
Camille Zakharia was born in 1962 in Tripoli, Lebanon. He studied in
Beirut, at the height of the civil war, and after various stays in the United
States, Greece, Turkey and Bahrain, immigrated to Canada in 1995. He resides
in Halifax, Nova Scotia.
![Camille Zakharia](/web/20061029120518im_/http://www.civilization.ca/cultur/cespays/images/pay2_24p3.gif)
Camille Zakharia,
Halifax, Nova Scotia, 2000
Rawi Hage
Gelatine silver prints
Collection of the Canadian Museum of Civilization
A professional engineer, he has always entertained a passion for
photography, taking photographs in all the countries he visited. But it was
in Bahrain, in 1992, that a change was triggered and he began to view the
world differently, as if I were seeing things through a prism, in a
fractured way. Upon arriving in Canada, he enrolled in the Nova Scotia
College of Art and Design in Halifax. He is currently working as an engineer
in Bahrain, all the while pursuing his artistic career.
His favoured medium is the photo-collage: Maybe the fragmentation of
my identity accounts for why I always ended up working with collage, he
explains. In his photo-installations, he deconstructs the portraits,
landscapes and architectures of the countries where he has lived, in order
to recombine fragments and splinters of them, borrowing from the motif and
unidimensional perspective of mosaics and Byzantine icons. His themes have
also changed: the nostalgia, the childhood memories, depicted in his first
collages and gouaches have given way to works based on the experience of
immigration and on the life of immigrants—works often autobiographical in
nature, even when he is portraying fictional characters.
The traveller, the outsider, displacement, fragmentation—all these
are essential elements repeated in the works I have completed in the last
few years. The common thing is identity, the search for a place to fit in.
[I guess] every place I've been, I have had a room. And maybe if you
combine all these rooms in different places, that would be my home.
Camille Zakharia has a large number of solo and group exhibitions
to his credit, notably in Bahrain, the United States and Canada; and his
works are exhibited in many private collections. One of his works is part
of the Canadian Museum of Civilization's collection.
czakhari@batelco.com.bh
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