AMEERA KAWASH
"My work explores artistic, political, poetic, and psychological dimensions of alternative economies of digital care, as counter technologies and counter fantasies to current traumatic thresholds and abyssal politics. I consider traumatic thresholds within digital media and communication technologies as algorithmic, computational, and protocol-based violative practices connected to neoliberal, colonial, and racialised capitalism."
Current Projects
DIGITAL FLOWERS: COGNITIVE
ACCELERATIONS OF CARE
'Digital Flowers' explores attentional, emotional, and affectual forms of digital care, as material, economic, and emotional forces circulating connectivity across bodies and boundaries. The work recycles texts and digital correspondences from lovers, family, and friends, drawing from auto-ethnographic material as well as that of others.
The work reflects on my experience of pandemic time spent between hereness and elsewhereness, sending messages to loved ones in Beirut in the midst of unprecedented crises and daily unfolding political-economic collapse.
Post-capitalist media works against current flows of financialization in social media, entertainment, and online advertising, by speculating and creating alternative value systems that support aesthetic-
social-ecological-political forms of care. ‘Digital Flowers’ asks: how to design new forms of valuation for nomadic, affectual, diasporic, and collective forms of care that diverge from capital flows? What kind of system architecture supports digital pathways of care as
collective, distributed, decentralised, and multi-positional forces? How can digital care provide forms of support in the event of socio-economic or political collapse? Can digital care contribute to new forms of solidarity, co-resistance, co-vulnerability, and co-immunity?
Through video and texts, hereness and elsewhereness form alternate de-distancing and temporal intimacies,
reflecting on the nomadic-cartographic poetry of Etel Adnan.
A video and text-based work currently in progress.
DIGITAL AFTERCARE:
SELF-SOVEREIGNTY AND TRAUMA
A fantasy of recovery and healing from the perspective of a woman with PTSD. The work proposes speculative biosensors and digital feedback loops that quantify and datatify bodily rhythms and sensations expressed as self-sovereign agents. These data points join with the user’s thoughts and poetic reflections on preexisting and bodily trauma and the traumatic other, including digital trauma. The work spans video, text, auto-ethnographic experience, and poetry to imagine new healing modalities with digital nonhuman and other-than-human technologies
A video work currently in progress
Yomiyat / Daily is a nomadic collective of artists and cultural workers. We are experimenting with forms of diaristic correspondence as a way of building digital spheres of trust, forming collaborations, or simply marking time together. As we are all living through this pandemic and the intensification of borders, we hope that this exchange will be a way to connect with others in a safe digital space across boundaries.
DIASPORIC OBJECTS & IRRITABLE MATTER
Seminar on the Traumatic Object at the Freud Museum,
part of 'i Object', please see:
About
Ameera Kawash is a Palestinian/Iraqi/American artist, writer, researcher & PhD candidate at the Royal College of Art. Her work spans video, 3D imaging, writing, and collaborative practice. She also is pursuing Psychotherapy & Counselling certificate from Regent's University.
Recent Presentations & Seminars
Across RCA // Trauma-Informed Approaches to Arts, Design, and Critical Theory
'i Object' at the Freud Museum // Seminar on the Traumatic Object
RCA Doctoral Training Week // Cultural Ecologies of Beirut
RCA Student Union // Organs of Thought : Diagrammatics and Visual Organization Out of Chaos
For more info or CV please email: