Émilie SerriDamascus Dreams, video still, 2021.
Photo: courtesy of the artist

The Opacity of Dreams

Every dream has an inaccessible place — a knot around which it is articulated that resists interpretation. Freud called this the dream’s “navel.”¹ 1 - Sigmund Freud, “The Interpretation of Dreams,” in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, trans. James Strachey, vol. 4, 1900, First Part (London: The Hogarth Press, 1958), 111. For Émilie Serri, a Montréal-born artist of Syrian heritage, and Basma Alsharif, a Kuwaiti-born visual artist of Palestinian heritage, the omphalic topos at the centre of the dream — its impenetrable, unanalyzable, navel — conjures a connection to place wherein access is complicated.

Working between film and installation, Serri and Alsharif performatively elucidate the work of displacement that marks diasporic experience. They move energy from one image to another, transferring affect to an elsewhere that resists figuration. Echoing Susan Sontag’s interrogations of the ethics of representing war, they question how to show Syria and Palestine without repeating the aestheticization of violence perpetuated by the media.² 2 - Susan Sontag, Regarding the Pain of Others (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2003).