Luma Jasim

Undesired Erasure

Undesired Erasure is a poetic multimedia work dealing with the metaphorical erasure of a language across time and place. The first two-channel video creates a conversation between animated ancient Cuneiform writing, Mesopotamian symbols, and modern Iraqi Arabic that stages the thousand year history of how, in one region, one language has erased or replaced another. In the second two-channel video, Jasim transcribes Arabic poems by Iraqi Poet Muhammad Mahdi al-Jawahiri (1899-1997) who lived a long time in exile, entrenched within a secondary language. In the other channel, she erases and smudges her charcoal writing. Jasim notes, “As immigrants, we find ourselves dealing with the dominance of using English or other languages instead of the language we were born and raised with. It is fascinating for me how, year after year, English use makes it hard to express myself in Arabic.”

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