Jayce Salloum

In 2014, he won the Governor General's Awards in Visual and Media Arts. In 2016 he was a nominee for the Scotiabank Photography Award.

Much of the ongoing untitled series centres around questions of resistance and representation. The traces that one leaves behind in place—the traces of the self that form what Salloum refers to as the histories of the self—are videotaped by Salloum in an effort to bring the personal space into "the context of the intrinsic social and political site."

A grandson of Syrian immigrants from what is now Lebanon's Beqaa Valley, he was born and raised in Kelowna and since 1997 has been based in Vancouver. He earned a BFA degree from the San Francisco Art Institute in 1980, followed by an Master of Fine Arts degree from the University of California, San Diego in 1988. Salloum has lived and worked in Beirut, New York, San Francisco, Toronto and elsewhere.

Jayce Salloum visited Lebanon with artist Walid Raad in 1992, shortly after the end of the Lebanese Civil War. Over the year, Salloum recorded over 200 hours of videotape, as well as several thousand photographs. He also accrued a half ton of documents and found film. This archive would form the basis of two films, This is Not Beirut (1994) and Up to the South (Talaeen a Junuub) (1993), as well as the series of photos titled (sites+) demarcations (1992-94). By drawing upon large volumes of media, from photography to video, Salloum's installations try to capture the significant number of images that attempt to capture (and represent) the MENA region. The 1995 installation Kan ya ma Kan (كان يا ما كان) (There was and there was not) was a culmination of a process of accumulation from 1982 onward, and included some of the 1992 material, and explored the production of middle east history and knowledge and the role of the artist in producing such a history. Museum viewers were encouraged to physically interact with the material. They could touch and reorganize what was presented in front of them, becoming a part of the exhibition and reconstruction of a history.

From 1982 onward, Salloum accumulated vast amounts of research materials for what would become the installation Kan Ya Ma Kan/There was and there was not (1995). For Salloum, this material constituted a living archive that "called into question notions of history and research methodology, their role in the effacement of histories, and the mediated process inherent in the representation and (mis)understanding of another culture…" This notion of a living archive recurs throughout Salloum's body of work and can be seen in both his installation work as well as his curatorial engagements. Archival interventions are a mode of artistic production in Salloum's native Lebanon that became common place after the 1975-1990 Lebanese Civil War, and much of the work of Salloum's colleagues—in particular, Walid Raad, Akram Zaatari, Joana Hadjithomas and Khalil Joreige, and Lamia Joreige—is in some manner oriented towards the archive. The archives employed in Salloum's untitled series, for example, are not static but are instead dynamic.

A multidisciplinary artist, since 1978 Salloum has produced work in installation, photography, video, performance and text, as well as curating and coordinating a vast array of cultural projects.

Jayce Salloum (born 1958) is a Canadian multidisciplinary artist.