Video/Installation Work 2005
Luxor-Qurna Diaries
This site is also both documentation of a piece--a 3-projector video installation--and a piece itself. It has some large videos, so you may have trouble if you do not have a very powerful web connection. (DVDs are available by request.) However, anyone can see the page documenting the first installation of the videos; that page is comprised of still images. This piece is cross-listed under "websites."
Miriam and Hatshepsut
--explores the theme of empathy with the "Other." I think this is the fundamental value that is missing in our competitive, militaristic, consumerist, dominance paradigm-based culture today.
Miriam was Moses' sister in the Old Testament. Hatshepsut may have been the mysterious (never named) "Pharoah's Daughter" in the same story. Said pharaoh ordered the death of all Hebrew baby boys in Middle Kingdom Egypt. His daughter defied the edict, took in a Hebrew boy who had been set to sail upon the Nile by his mother for his safety. She raised him as her own son. Miriam looked after her baby brother until he was rescued, and then helped Pharaoh's Daughter to find a wet nurse for the child: his biological mother.
Together these 2 women, who were supposed to hate each other politically, cooperated from a place of humanity and empathy to save a child. How can this story influence our perception of war and conflict today? Not incidentally, both of these women became fierce leaders in their own right later in their lives. Hatshepsut became one of Egypt's most powerful pharoahs herself, and Miriam led her people out of Egyptian slavery.