Khamissy’s works document unresolved personal histories
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Marwa Arsanios on Dalia Khamissy’s Photographs of the Absent’
is part of a series of articles in which we asked nine artists to chose a colleague whose work has been on their mind.
Over the years, the Beirut-based photographer Dalia Khamissy has stored a vast number of images on the same 4TB hard drive. When I asked her recently about the website she plans to create with them, she told me: ‘I have a problem going through and making a selection.’ It’s understandable: these pictures carry the weight of unresolved histories, bearing witness to layered conflicts played out across time. From the disappeared of the Lebanese Civil War (1975–90) to those displaced more recently, these are documents of absence: a photograph of a photograph of a lost person, their clothes, their bed; a mother grieving her missing daughter. Khamissy’s photographs do not attempt to fill that void, yet her images show that absence is never only absence: a new presence takes shape after a person – or their home or homeland – is gone.