Aḏrāʾ Samar عَذْراءُ سَمَر
15 min, HD video, 2018

Aḏrāʾ Samar 15 min, HD video, 2018
(installation view) The Museum of Contemporary Art Toronto (2021)
Image courtesy of MOCA Toronto

Adraa Samar (2018) single-channel video (still), 14:34m 

Adraa Samar considers the role of iconography in the production of cultural and national identity. The work revisits a series of familiar iconographic objects that were cast in ice and employs visual strategies of composition to reconstruct and reposition these objects—materially, temporally, and contextually—to rethink the meanings inherent in them as sociopolitical and cultural sites. 

The video and accompanying exhibition of photography and drawings was a result of an extensive research conducted while in residence at the Lab, Darat al Funun, which investigated a group of objects collected from tourist shops across Amman, along with a series of sculptures made by the artists father, an archive that is evidently persistent in Bishouty’s practice.