Disturbance

Disturbance is a visual and performative memoir presented as a triptych video art project. The piece is comprised of three videos — 1990, 1980, and 2003 — years in which the First Gulf War erupted, the Iraq–Iran War started, and the U.S. invasion and occupation of Iraq took place. 1990, 1980, and 2003 correspond to the artist’s displacements due to the same events.

Set against the absurdity of infinite war, intimate vignettes uncover memory as presence. Disturbance functions as a cartographic device, charting the interconnections between these histories and their relationship to a trilogy of personal and familial displacements. Its temporality and narrative are fluid: it opens with 1990, circulates to 1980, and jumps forward to 2003.

In 1980, a woman walks away from an abandoned gas station toward a factory; blinded by the sun, her memories of the Iraq–Iran war, the Halabja genocide, and the deportation of her own family converge. In 1990, a woman sways toward an abandoned building and struggles to open its fastened doors, evoking the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait and her unforeseen displacement, the First Gulf War, and the thirteen years of sanctions resulting in the death of over a million Iraqis. In 2003, the protagonist untangles a rope in reverse in an absurd attempt to make sense of the U.S. invasion and occupation of Iraq and its disastrous aftermath. She disappears, reappears, and disappears again, signifying the everlasting impact of these past events and the impending unknown.