Leaving My Eyelids Behind
Visual / Records, Charlottesville
8 November – 13 December 2024

On a phone call with Los Angeles-based Iraqi writer Ali Eyal, he shares with me: “The brush is heavy. My head is in Beirut.” We are speaking in the aftermath of an Israeli explosion in Beirut, Lebanon—one of several that have taken place in this dreaded year of genocide.

When he left Iraq, Ali experienced his exile in Beirut through an interdisciplinary arts residency called Ashkal Alwan (which in Arabic translates to “Shapes and Colors” but is used often to refer to the vast variety and breadth of a thing). As he arrives at Visible Records, he carries with him the grief of watching the recorded destruction of Palestine and wonders how, amid this eternal pain, one can arrive at the site of creation. For us, as viewers, his art begins to unravel this question.

In the solo exhibition Leaving My Eyelids Behind, we enter a world in which transitory memory reigns supreme. But it is a kind of memory that seeks permanence by rooting in the body. Ali recalls a moment spent staring at an orange that had become inhabited by mold and feeling inspired. Is memory itself a kind of mold that grows slowly and inhabits the body? Or is the body itself the mold that overtakes memory? We may never know. But for Ali, the body—the hands, the ears, the head, the eyelids—are generators of images clearer than he can remember. And so too, must we think of his art: as a transient moment that invites us to look closer, and closer, and yet closer. Until we are almost inside the work itself.

The first time I saw Ali’s work in person, I was in Baghdad on the 20th anniversary of the U.S. invasion of Iraq. I found myself seated alone in a dark room revamped for the screening of a series of experimental video works. Each piece was created by an Iraqi artist who was formerly part of Sada, a makeshift art school created in 2011 to support artists in Baghdad working in the aftermath of the invasion and occupation. Ali’s work caused me to weep—not for its content, but for its still assurance. For the ways that it interrupts our idea of seeing, and asks us not to witness, but to take part in. To reexamine where we believe our body ends and where memory begins.

In Leaving My Eyelids Behind, we are asked to imagine how a body can be vacated. What does it mean to leave one’s eyelids behind? Is it an act of slowly obscuring the body limb by limb, body part by body part? Or is it a kind of sacrifice? What will take their place? You are invited to enter Ali’s work from any direction. Seek answers or end with questions. No matter where you begin, you will find yourself cast in a world that follows neither the logic of the body nor of memory, but of something else: a memory-body, a body-memory.

Text by Joumana Altallal