Of Dreams & Terror, 2019.

Work in progress

This ongoing series focuses on family album photographs against the backdrop of Lebanon’s protracted history of war.
The images portray family members whose lives have been shaped by displacement, loss, and interrupted futures. Through collage and gold glitter applied to the subjects’ faces, the artist intervenes in the photographic archive, disrupting its function as a record of familial identity and belonging.

Engaging with Roland Barthes’s reflections on photography in Camera Lucida, the series considers the photograph as a trace of a past presence: evidence that someone or something existed, yet never a means of fully recovering what has been lost. The application of glitter complicates this relationship between image and referent. While the photographs retain the material trace of the subjects, their partially obscured faces resist recognition, unsettling the image’s capacity to preserve individual identity.

Situated between personal memory and collective history, the altered portraits examine how repeated political violence transforms the transmission of memory and the possibility of belonging. The scattered gold symbolises the interruption of imagined futures.

All images are copyrighted © by Maria Kassab. The use of any image from this site is prohibited unless prior written permission from the artist is obtained.