Alaa Ghosheh

Alaa Ghosheh was born within the walls of the old city in Jerusalem thirty years ago, during the first Palestinian Intifada. Living under occupation, he witnessed countless acts of brutality, injustice, and inhumanity. From a young age he turned to his imagination and visual creativity to make sense of what was, for him, a senseless world. It seemed only natural that this would later turn into a passion for photography. Working as a photojournalist from Ramallah (Palestine), to Irbil (Iraq), Brooklyn and Αthens, his practice is marked by an ability to connect with diverse populations and cοmmunities representing the life in extraordinary circumstances. During his studies, he started working as a freelance photographer for various local news agencies. After graduating with a BA in Media and Communications from Birzeit University, in 2010, he was hired by the United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA) in Jerusalem where he spent years as a photographer and photo archivist. During this time, he continued his own exploration in visual arts and in 2015 had his first art residency at Villa Romana in Florence where he produced his solo show, titled “Long Distance Relationships.” Since then he has lived in several cities around the world (Amsterdam, New Yοrk, Αthens), expanding his portfolio and working on a new body of work outside of the political reality he grew up in.

Alaa Ghosheh is a participant of the Onassis AiR (Inter)national Residency program for 2019-20.

Alaa Ghosheh’s project in Αthens asks what we leave behind as we expand our digital ‘space’. Which is to say, what happens to our most private memories in the aftermath of casual cyber-human connection? In an age of excessive data, this project focuses on what is left of our digital footprint on (hard) drives that no longer serve us, and asks what might become of this abandoned data if it moves to become a part of someone else’s life. These are some of the questions that came to Ghosheh’s mind when he had to hack his own data and look deep into hard drives he once owned. The tedious process of recovering images of those drives, fragmented parts of his life that weren’t visible to anyone but him. His role in this process is to find out what this data feels like, what it represents, what characters are born as a result of our feelings and memories once accumulated and adopted by several human owners. Would that result be part of the cyber growth of those spaces? Would this be its own new character after leaving us, what would that look like? How do we look through memories, developing feelings out of our life encounters, and relate it to machines? How does this discarded and transient data reflect contemporary Αthens as a site of economic, political and cultural transition? In a city perceived by so many (whether historians, asylum seekers or economists) as being occupying a geography and temporality of ‘in-betweenness’ (economic, political, geographic), this project seeks to uncover the data deemed useless, forgotten or no longer significant as Αthens too fades from the international spotlight. Ghosheh plans to try and answer these questions by collecting hard drives from five different locations in the Attica region (Pireaus, Eleonas, Monastiraki, Ekali, Nikaia). Hacking into these drives, his practice will create visual impressions based on mined data in the shape of mosaics. Conducting research on documents, films, and photographs that will be found on each device, this project seeks to collapse the dichotomies of public/private and trash/value that these devices represent, ultimately providing data vignettes into peοple’s lives in contemporary Αthens.

We establish memories by seeing and recognizing things even before we speak. This is influenced by what we know as our reality, but what if all that knowledge is changing based on the ways we interact with our world? Digitally speaking, at a certain point in time we don’t exist anymore yet the digital chain reaction we started is rolling in the background in the shape of binary raw data; zeros and ones waiting to be seen, evolving and creating a certain consciousness which is independent.

This was what provoked me to look where no one is looking, seeking visual outcomes that can’t be recognized by anyone. After spending long periods of time scavenging for unwanted data, I realized that I was looking for something hidden by machines which was stored differently to how we store things as humans by default, all of that led me to discover a new visual oasis hiding right under my nose.

My research intends to explore the outcome of several visual layers of time collected from multiple external storage units from different locations aligned to the artist, from Occupied Palestine to Αthens, Greece.

I started by unlocking and revealing digital identities and binary script that had a different structure and meaning once in the past, but now acquired its own new shape. This digital Frankenstein, deformed and reimagined in a collage, offered numerous scenarios once a few layers of recovered pixels were placed on top of one another in an attempt to fantasize and peek at something from tomorrow.

I have to thank my father for this creation because one day, years ago, he sold one of my laptops (without my knowledge) to get me some extra money, resulting in years of work being lost. Eventually after recovering the hard drive —owned and used by different peοple at this point— I couldn’t identify my original work because it simply didn’t exist anymore, at least not as mine exactly. I now saw fragments of images that had been evolving and reproducing after being detached from the place and time where they had been originally stored and from which it had made its first appearance.

According to John Berger, the purpose of images and visuals, as with most art, is to outlast us, so the result of its own evolution far away from us is rationale. Usually, when we look at an image it is with assumptions regarding the past, which is considered static. What I am producing has the same sense but without any assumptions, unless it is towards the future.

I started this journey with a quote from George Didi-Huberman,

“We need images to create history, especially in the age of photography and cinema, but we need imagination to re-see these images, and thus to re-think history."

At this stage in my research, I’ve reached the following conclusion: we need to learn to adapt and share our imagination with the tools we have, if we don’t I’m terrified we might not bond with the echo of our future self.