Jayce Salloum

Jayce Salloum’s work exists in/between the very personal, quotidian, local and the transnational. It takes place in a variety of contexts though has consistently been about mediation – the gap between the experience and the accounting/telling/receiving of it, engaging in an intimate subjectivity and discursive/dialectical challenge while critically asserting itself in the representation and perception of social manifestations and realities.

He has worked in photography since 1978, as well as curating exhibitions, conducting workshops and facilitating a vast array of cultural projects. Lately the work has taken place in Austria, Afghanistan, Lebanon, Palestine/Israel, China, Aotearoa/New Zealand, Australia, former Yugoslavia, Galapagos Islands, and other places throughout the Americas. After 22 years living in San Francisco, Banff, Toronto, San Diego, Beirut, and New York, he moved to Vancouver and has been based there since 1997.

Salloum tends to go only where he is invited or where there is an intrinsic affinity, thus his projects are rooted in a connectivity with place(s), and the people that inhabit them. He relies on the kindness of strangers, especially when he is in unfamiliar territory, speaks next to nothing of the language or knows less than he thinks he does which is most of the time. He has been producing art, collecting interesting objects, making things happen and mixing it up discursively for as long as he can remember. It was always part art and part social lubrication, or maybe that makes it all ‘art’, anyways it usually challenged whatever the dominant culture was and involved people from various parts in liaison and/or at odds with each other.

He has exhibited at the widest range of local and international venues possible, as well as at some unusual ones, occasionally on the side of a building or at the side of a road, bus shelters, a rocky shoreline or down in the woods, from the smallest unnamed storefronts & community centres in his downtown eastside neighbourhood to institutions such as the National Gallery of Canada; Museum of Modern Art–NYC; Musée du Louvre, Centre Pompidou, Galerie Nationale du Jeu de Paume¬–Paris; Kunstlerhaus Bethanien–Berlin; Museum Villa Stuck–Munich; Museo Nacional Centro De Arte Reina Sofia–Madrid; 8th Havana Biennial; 7th Sharjah Biennial; and the 15th Biennale Of Sydney.

His work has appeared in many journals e.g. Third Text, Framework, Prefix Photo, Fuse, Public and Semiotext(e) and in books including, Projecting Migration: Transcultural Documentary Practice (Wallflower/Columbia Univ.) and The Archive (Modern Reader Series¬–Whitechapel Gallery). Essays on his work featured in Image and Inscription: An Anthology of Contemporary Canadian Photography (YYZ/Gallery 44) and other anthologies. The monograph, Jayce Salloum: history of the present, was released in 2009. His most recent text on photography was just published in The Militant Image Reader (Edition Camera Austria–Graz), with a collaborative version to be published in Performing Utopias in the Contemporary Americas: Between the Local and the Global (Palgrave Macmillan). Salloum is a recipient of the 2014 Governor General’s Award in Visual and Media Arts. He is represented by MKG127, Toronto.