Aissa was born in 1969 in Palestine. Lives and works in Zürich.
Motherland is a video installation that aims to discuss Deebi’s complex and emotional relationship to the bio-political space between mother, homeland and exile. The project comes as a response to the need to understand his own relationship with his motherland and how he negotiates America and Switzerland as exilic spaces. It comes also an attempt to respond to a request made by his mother over two decades ago, to create paintings of flowers, aesthetic objects that can be affirming and peaceful and enable the enjoyment of nature on a small scale.
“Among the few items which I inherited from my mother are personal objects including a watch, a phone book, two pairs of glasses, a scarf, a rosary made from olive seeds, a small tape recorder, and the first camera that she gave me. Upon collecting them I was confronted with questions: what do you do with dead objects? What will I do with my mother’s glasses? I can’t wear them. I can only use them temporarily to see how she used to perceive the world, distorted by a heavy prescription and illness, a world full of scratches, which I found optically interesting.”
