Heather Canlas-Rigg curates solo exhibition of Joyce Joumaa, Prologue, for Galerie UQO in Gatineau
DVS Instructor Heather Canlas-Rigg curates solo exhibition of Joyce Joumaa, Prologue, for Galerie UQO in Gatineau. Exhibition essay excerpted below. To read full exhibition essay, and find out more about the exhibit, visit: https://galerie.uqo.ca/exposition/prologue
أنا أحب البحر, I Love The Sea, Egyptian singer Nagat El Saghirah’s famous ballad, fills the audible space of UQO with its romantic melodies and lyrics of infinite love and longing for the sea. The poetic and metaphoric possibilities afforded by the inescapable feelings of love, and the vastness of earth’s oceans, surface like a buoyant note transmitted throughout Joyce Joumaa’s exhibition Prologue.
Anchoring the exhibition is a July 1958 issue of Life magazine that reports on the Lebanon Crisis, the United States’ first military intervention in the “Middle East.” The Mediterranean sea is an important undercurrent in Prologue, as the ocean bore witness to the hundreds of ships and thousands of US Marines who used the water and shore as a way to enter Beirut and begin their occupation. Joumaa specifically examines how the so-called crisis was reported to Americans by honing in on how the story was narrated in the magazine, as well as through footage aired on television, two modes of transmission that reached everyday American citizens in their living rooms.......
.........Edward Said wrote extensively about the power of media and the West’s long standing ability to narrate their imperial pursuits in a manner that homogenizes and destructively stereotypes Southwest Asia and Arab and Islamic cultures. Life magazine’s extensive reach across the United States throughout the 20th century contributed immensely to the manufacturing of American superiority and Eastern inferiority that continues to manifest within the hearts and minds of Americans. This aided in the fueling of a dark global divide that was made more potent with the Cold War, with 9/11, with the ongoing genocide of Palestinians, and that continues into 2026. This narrative did not only materialize in “news” form, but in advertisements, objects, and in the way the United States (and the West) constructed values, morals and desires. The sustainability of the American way of life is predicated on the continued propaganda and rhetoric of such superiority, where those in “exotic lands far away” are in need of civilizing and conquering. The inseparability of imperialism and culture is evident in the pages of Life where Marine conquest in the “Middle East” is entangled with the ability to drink bourbon, take aspirin, use floor wax, purchase new car tires, or buy a new Chrysler. In many ways, the publication acts as a technological harbinger for the way war is now livestreamed through our phones, which we watch and consume while we simultaneously shop online and text with our loved ones.
