holy land of the infertile crescent 2020

Exhibited at Green Hall, Yale School of Art Gallery, New Haven, CT.

holy land of the infertile crescent is a three-channel video installation that renders land and body as interconnected and entangled domains, both marked by extraction, surveillance, and erasure. Weaving together familial oral histories, found footage from American drone strikes, and repurposed church pews, the work forms an immersive environment that confronts the viewer with the violence of distance—how abstraction in military tactics facilitates the dehumanization of bodies and the flattening of place.
The installation positions the viewer within a spatial dissonance: the pews—symbols of faith, congregation, and reflection—become sites of witnessing, complicity, and mourning. Stories passed down through generations echo alongside grainy footage of targeted landscapes, collapsing personal memory and state-sanctioned violence into the same temporal and visual frame.
By drawing connections between the body and the terrain, holy land of the infertile crescent explores the lingering scars of imperialism, the trauma encoded in inherited stories, and the ways in which remote warfare fractures not only flesh and soil but also lineage, belonging, and the sacred.