Post Your Map :: Posted Cards Online
We will regularly be presenting a featured artist, writer or performer who is exploring questions of identity and personal narrative through their medium of expression.
The map is your representation. No rigid lines, no defined routes. You direct it on your own account.
Artist: Nehal El-Hadi
Title: Posted Cards Online
Description:
Nomadic is the word that best describes my geographical history - stints in Sudan, Oman, and the U.K. I’ve lived in Canada since 1999, the longest time I’ve cumulatively spent in one country. During this time, I’ve received mail at 12 addresses, taken thousands of photographs and written countless words. Posted Cards Online uses photographs I’ve taken and recombines them with fragments from my writings, highlighting key moments that shaped different aspects of my identity. Each image and its accompanying text are brought together with the use of metadata tags. This project also explores the non-linear nature of memory, and the revisionist, romanticist nature of reminiscence.
because for half an hour, life was beautiful
Tags accompanying this post: Toronto, half of a pair, scorpio, Sizzla, romance, ten
and I wished for you with all my heart
Tags: Khartoum, ghazal, grandparents, Sufism, homesickness, heredity
they were always from somewhere else, like me
Tags: Regina, outcast, masculinity, acceptance, parole
I hide behind the video camera
Tags: Regina, ragheads, dollmaker, Afghanistan invasion, rodeo
and moments still disappear without permission
Tags: Toronto, epidemic, natural, fusion, dilution, Arabic
you’re sitting on that old couch
Tags: Ottawa, Erykah Badu, foreign affairs, alienation, betrayal
betcha that wasn’t the only thing
Tags: Havana, debt, mixed race, frustration, infidelity, gossip
we wear the deaths on our necks
Tags: Khartoum, purge, market, obligation, faith, superficiality
although I had nothing to do with it
Tags: Regina, instability, discounts, amnesia, three hours, psych ward
maybe I imagined it
Tags: Montreal, culture clash, fire escape, escape, dismissal
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Nehal El-Hadi is a writer and cultural producer. Born in Sudan, she has lived and studied in the United Kingdom, Sudan, and Oman. Nehal is currently based in Toronto, and her work explores the intersections of culture, identity, urban spaces, and environment.
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Boy it took me long enought to look at this. I enjoy the Joeness and I always have. I lived with Joe for a few years in Philly, we didn’t hit it off right away but grew to love each other and share deeply our feelings and experience great joy and sadness with and as witness to and for each other.
Joe is someone who’s life is expressing a response and a filtration of the here. I am biased becasue I love Joe but that doens’t mean he isn’t a great artist. Joe has said and written thoughts and elicited emotions in me.
My mother’s parents came to the US in 1912 from Ireland, they met on the boat on the way over. I never knew them and never felt particularly Irish. Not that those two things are connected I wonder if my grandparents had been Arab would I feel like Joe? More connected to the otherness, I guess not because this country was pretty full up of Irish people by the time they got here. They looked like they fit in.