Annabel Daou. War Games

About

Language games invoking fissures within global society. Cards balanced to create makeshift dwellings. Worlds shattering into scattered words. Meaning lost in silence. A voice uttering sounds that become statements, claiming a place—”I am here,” “here I am”—amid the rubble, the ruins of understanding.

In this body of work Annabel Daou looks back at her wartime childhood to reimagine the games that were a part of it. In the sound piece from which the show takes its title, Daou asks persons, across generations and geography, whose childhoods were marked by conflict to tell her a story, a vaguely or vividly remembered moment during a time of chaos or deprivation, when the mind and body found themselves holding onto the human act of creativity, making do with very little, making use of what remains. Recollections of playing or not playing as the lights go out and the machinery of destruction crushes the right to to be free, to be carefree.

War Games, here, references the huge chasm between the structures of power that play inhumane games with lives on the ground and those lives as they struggle against all odds to survive. The sound piece creates a terrain of memories and speaks to dignity, humanity and creativity that resists being silenced.

The paper based works, raw and unstable, but reflecting a perpetual process of repair, emerge from remembered experiences of trying to build something out of what is always at risk of falling apart. The mix of bright and faded colors, and the traces of ink pooling and drying, suggest, by turns, organic possibility or the chalky remains of time.

Across eight threadbare seascapes, words and color figure uncertain horizons. A lullaby breaks through the cracks in the walls: hush, hush, dream, dream.

Excised and reattached letters form words that are neither here nor there: half English, half Arabic, transliterated, understanding always just out of reach. The condition of displacement, the duality of life in two places, each half competing to be the whole thing.

As in previous works by Daou, English phrases transliterated into Arabic interrogate forms of transmission and hierarchies of language. English letters are often used in text communication to sound out Arabic words. The domination of English in that context is reversed here. The words are meaningless on paper, but when voiced become comprehensible.

Language is a means of playing our way through the forces that position us as faceless and unnamed, collateral damage on a tattered game board of global domination. In these works language is both subject and object, a tether that harnesses us to our fleeting identities and a marker of our sameness and difference.