As recently as 2024, Radio-Canada, Quebec’s most popular radio station, was publishing news about the Israeli invasion of Lebanon and the genocide in Gaza on its website under the section heading “Proche-Orient, l’éternel conflit” (Near East, the Eternal Conflict). This header, which today bears the more sober framing “Conflit au Moyen-Orient” (Conflict in the Middle East), announces the biases preceding Western outlets’ media coverage of the so-called Middle East region, an indeterminate geographical space portrayed as inherently violent and terroristic. Orientalist visions continue to dominate narratives constructed through corporate media and Western historiography. The complex reality of a multitude of people is thus reduced, once more, to a history of conflict between two antagonists: the “Middle Easterners,” fanatical and irreconcilable with modernity, and the “First World,” guarantors of democracy and freedom. Meanwhile the role of Western countries, particularly through arms sales and the whitewashing of war crimes, continues to go unreported. 

Media constructions of a place called the Middle East are a focal point of Jayce Salloum’s artistic practice. Through his exhibition east of here . . . (re)imagining the “orient” (1996) and his filmmaking practice, most notably the experimental documentary he codirected with Elia Suleiman, Introduction to the End of an Argument/Intifada—Speaking for Oneself . . . Speaking for Others (1990), Salloum unravels caricatured representations of Arab populations in the Western imaginary. Found footage from American and Israeli films, television shows, and news reports produce a palimpsest that bears witness to the stereotypical vision of the region through the same strategies employed by dominant media outlets: decontextualized images, sensationalism, and repetition, the preferred tropes of twenty-four-hour news broadcasters. Introduction to the End of an Argument mixes fictional narratives and found footage from televised news, pushing audiences to reflect on the role of mise-en-scène in each of these excerpts. Is the televised news report any less fanciful than an Indiana Jones scene? 

In his earlier video works, the images Salloum recorded played a subservient role to repurposed broadcast media. But his principal strategy of montage eventually gave way to interview-based works. Beginning with Talaeen a Junuub (Up to the South, 1993), codirected by Walid Raad, his documentaries become opportunities to subtly and carefully explore the events that shape the contemporary history of the SWANA region, in the process expanding the possibilities of the interview form.  

Two of Salloum’s works, untitled part 3b: (as if) beauty never ends (2000–2002) and untitled part 1: everything and nothing (1999–2001), offer a window into histories both personal and collective that contravene official narratives which falsely frame the occupation as an inevitable conflict. In untitled part 3b, the voice of Abdel Majid Fadl Ali Hassan recounts his expulsion from Palestine from the point of view of the home he left behind. His voice, which testifies to the home he carries inside him, clashes with the image track: archival video documentation of the Sabra and Shatila massacre intercut with and superimposed on close-ups of flowers blooming. As the delicate blossoms, reflections on water, and images from the Hubble Telescope and an MRI machine layer on top of these morbid scenes, they offer a chimeric vision of nature and the technological exploits of humankind. Such a vision, overlapping lifeless bodies, evokes modernity and the sublime, two concepts central to Western self-righteousness. Here, modernity expresses itself through the technological sublime, using it to celebrate, legitimize, and extend its project of progress and conquest. How, the film asks, can such conflicting realities coexist within the same historical framework? 

Salloum created this work twenty years after the massacre that still marks the Lebanese collective memory like an open wound. In the untitled films, he makes tangible the link between Sabra and Shatila and the Nakba, thus inscribing the massacre in a much longer narrative of the region. More than a year and a half after the start of the genocide in Gaza, and the flood of morbid images that has come with it, images of the Sabra and Shatila massacre are less a reminder of a historical event and more a prophetic vision. 

It was these same images from Sabra and Shatila that compelled Soha Bechara to join the Lebanese National Resistance Front when she was only fifteen years old. At the age of twenty-one, she attempted to assassinate Antoine Lahad, leader of the South Lebanon Army and Saad Haddad’s successor, for his involvement in the Sabra and Shatila massacre. The two bullets she fired cost Lahad the use of his left arm. Bechara was apprehended on the spot, brought before Israeli authorities, and finally taken to the Khiam prison camp. She remained incarcerated there for ten years, six of them in solitary confinement, all without ever proceeding to trial. Upon her release from Khiam, she became the symbol of Lebanese resistance, and the event made international headlines, most notably in France, where there had been considerable mobilization for her freedom.

Salloum’s everything and nothing only briefly mentions this story, when Bechara introduces herself. The interview was filmed a year after her release, and after Bechara had already told her story innumerable times. Everything and nothing is not about the dehumanizing conditions she and the other detainees faced.{1} Instead, the work responds to a different imperative: offering a space where Bechara can speak about the many other forms resistance can take, in particular the ways she and other detained women expressed their solidarity with one another while at Khiam. With personal anecdotes in place of descriptions of traumatic memories, Bechara responds to questions no one has asked her before. Through everything and nothing, the memory of the prison camp and its detainees lives on, even after Khiam’s destruction by bombing on July 14, 2006, the first day of the Israeli offensive of that year. Bechara’s testimony survives as one of the only tangible traces of the torture camp. 

With and through Abdel Majid Fadl Ali Hassan and Soha Bechara, Salloum not only allows us to bear witness to the atrocities perpetrated against the Lebanese and Palestinian peoples; he also gives audiences access to alternative narratives, shedding light on lived experiences under Israeli occupation. (As if) beauty never ends hails land as if a loved one, when the voice of the ruins of Abdel Majid’s home (“When they [the Israelis soldiers] occupied me by force they told me that they would have killed you all had you stayed behind. By force they took me and asked if it was quite clear. But any bright person would have understood . . . my dear”) reinforces the personification of the land Bechara describes (“Even Lebanon, the land itself, is being detained”). By making the process of witnessing visible, Salloum redefines testimony as both an aesthetic and political gesture, one that reclaims the right to narrate and to belong.