Biography

Jayce Salloum tends to go only where he is invited or where there is an intrinsic affinity, thus his projects are rooted in an intimate engagement with places, 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 was usually counter whatever the dominant 'culture' happened to be at the time and involved people from various parts of the 'community' in liaison and/or at odds with each other.

Salloum has worked in installation, photography, drawing, performance, text and video since 1978, as well as curating and conducting a vast array of cultural projects. Lately the work has taken place in Afghanistan, China, Lebanon, Palestine/Israel, Aotearoa/New Zealand, Australia, the former Yugoslavia, France, Kamloops, Cumberland House, Galapagos Islands and other places throughout the Americas. My practise exists within and between the personal, quotidian, local, and the trans-national. In one sense it has consistently been about mediation - the gap between the experience and the accounting/telling/receiving of it, engaging in an intimate subjectivity and discursive challenge while critically asserting itself in the perception of social manifestations and political realities.

While he has lived in many locales Salloum currently resides in Vancouver. He has exhibited at lots of the usual places and some unusual ones, sometimes in storefronts or at the side of a road, a rocky shore or down in the woods. at a wide range of venues, from the smallest unnamed storefronts & community centres in his downtown eastside Vancouver neighbourhood to institutions such as The Museum of Modern Art, New York; National Gallery of Canada; Kunstlerhaus Bethanien, Berlin; the Musée du Louvre and Centre Pompidou, Paris; CaixaForum, Barcelona; 8th Havana Biennial; 7th Sharjah Biennial; 15th Biennale Of Sydney; Museum Villa Stuck, Munich; Royal Ontario Museum; Robert Flaherty Film Seminars; Biennial of Moving Images, Geneva and the Rotterdam International Film Festival. His texts/works have been featured in many publications such as; The Archive (Whitechapel, London/The MIT Press, 2006), Projecting Migration: Transcultural Documentary Practice (Wallflower Press, London, 2007), Practical Dreamers: Conversations with Movie Artists, (Coach House Press, Toronto, 2008), Third Text, Semiotext(e), Framework, Felix, Fuse, Public, Prefix Photo, and Pubic Culture. A monograph on his work, Jayce Salloum: history of the present, was published in 2009. Salloum is a recipient of the 2014 Governor General's Award in Visual and Media Arts. He is represented by MKG127, Toronto.

- IMDb mini biography by: Jayce Salloum