Marie Zolamian’s artistic work examines questions of individual and collective identity. Her works question the significance of belonging to a specific territory or community, and the social and spatial conditions that form a mentality. Zolamian, who paints and draws primarily, but also uses other media if necessary, succeeds in capturing those fleeting moments that shape cultural awareness and identity.
Her current exhibition, the title of which comes from an exclamation that the artist overheard on the street, includes watercolours, drawings, paintings and children’s drawings of a ruined castle in the village of Abwein in Palestine. They were produced parallel to a film and a sound recording, for which Zolamian – in the context of the Qualandiya International Biennale – had art viewers visit this castle. Here, she filmed a group of Palestinian boys whom she had invited to act as the ‘tourist guides’ and who cheerfully mingled historical facts and their invented stories in front of the camera. Before that, without any public, Zolamian recorded the stories the youths told her and into which they now poured a lot of their everyday lives, cultural background, and everyday fears and joys. Zolamian provided English and Arabic subtitles for the film, and now shows it to the Kreuzberg passers-by in the gallery window. Entering the space, the visitor is immediately surrounded by the children’s voices and can understand the stories from the subtitles projected on a wall of the gallery space.