" Continuing my series of projects (1979–99) addressing cultural-political manifestations, ethnographic representation and states of being, this installation focuses on borders, nationalism[s], movement[s] (shifts, transitions and interstitial space/time) and subjectivity, and the conditions of moving and living cross-culturally and trans-culturally. [...]

I am interested in creating a collision between the intensely personal space of the dialogue moment and the context of the intrinsic social and political site, different with each subject but with overlapping and overarching points of contention/correspondence: sense of place, notions of community, disenfranchisement and transnational ties. "

The grandson of Lebanese immigrants, Jayce Salloum was born in Kelowna, British Columbia in 1958. After studying arts in the United States, he began his artistic career in 1975, the year that civil war broke out in Lebanon. Already marginal because accompanied by "shock-texts," his first photo exhibits were rapidly transformed into installations as he progressively associated his photographs with archival objects and documents, and as he resorted to other mediums, such as video. Jayce Salloum gives special weight to the constituent elements of representation and, more particularly, to their underlying historical, social and cultural context. This deconstructionist approach allows him, on the one hand, to attempt to define that place from which I relate with the world and, on the other hand, to transgress the structures that limit and shape how we look at the world.

A great nomad, he has lived in several of North America's largest cities. But it is Beirut and Lebanon, where he has also lived, that most radically influence his work: The use of images/representations of Lebanon and Beirut has an extensive history in the West and in Lebanon itself. . . . My own position as an image maker is situated somewhere between being a family member, visitor, tourist, guide and unwilling orientalist . . . never occupying any one position for too long, fluctuating peripatetically between the act of re-producing and the deconstruction of such an act and its object. Lebanon's historical richness and the power of its metaphorical evocation allow him, moreover, to deal directly with questions that are for him central: exile, ethnic representation and the notion of identity.

Jayce Salloum has participated in numerous solo and collective exhibitions in North America, Europe, Japan and Brazil. Many institutions, including the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the National Gallery of Canada and the Centre Pompidou in Paris, count his works among their collections.