Melissa Ghazale, born in 1992, is a Lebanese visual artist. She has a Master’s degree in Visual Arts from the Académie Libanaise des Beaux Arts and a Bachelor in Filmmaking. Her work includes video installations, short films and audio-visual installations.
Melissa’s work exposes the confusion between her experience of subjectivity and digital memory. She made the mistake of recording herself constantly, and projecting it publicly. She also has the bad habit of going through other people’s diaries.
Residency and solo show: Yours truly
At a time when the practice of self-documentation has become a mass obsession, it seems crucial to reflect upon the effects of instant digital technology on our experience of the present. Yours Truly curates the personal video archive of Melissa Ghazale in an attempt to re-conceive the notions of memory and subjectivity as re-framed through new modes of recording.
In .prcssn Melissa shreds all of her ex’s relationship footage in an ever falling attempt to erase him from her memory. She slices her videos visually and chronologically as a symbolic imitation of paper shredders that were previously used to destroy private, confidential, or otherwise sensitive documents. The glitch is a result of an encoding formula (byebyte) that supposedly deletes all the empty digits from the different video files.
Cumulus is a Universal Personal Archive, puzzled out of banal, random, and everyday home videos from around the world. This assimilation of personal yet unrecognizable footage engages the spectator to familiarize with foreign spaces and relate to their inhabitants. What was once somebody’s personal video is now rendered permeable to the spectator’s own recognition.
(RAM) is an installation, a form of computer data storage that stores data and machine code currently being used. A random- access memory device allows you to review my archive. Feel free to have a glimpse into Melissa’s life. Her memory is open to be read and corrupted by you so you could also copy some of your videos that would be her new material for Cumulus.
Melissa keeps watching herself watching me.
