Working in three-dimensional spaces, Jawa El Khash’s practice investigates nature, architecture, and immigrant and refugee culture. Her fantastical virtual reality work The Upper Side of the Sky resurrects the agriculture native to, and destroyed architecture of, the Syrian desert around Palmyra. A chrysalis chamber is also featured in this digital world, positing the monarch butterfly as a protagonist to explore metamorphosis, migration and return. The Butterfly Effect will employ holography to further El Khash’s exploration of these themes.
Read the full interview here.
Curated by Heather Rigg
Jawa El Khash (born 1995, Damascus) is a multidisciplinary artist and researcher working in the mediums of virtual reality, holography and painting. Inspired by technology, nature and her own heritage, her work aims to build new relationships with cultural artifacts, plants, insects and architecture. Her work deals with political and geographic displacement, immigrant culture, digitization, archives and 3D world-building. She utilizes technology as a media to re-structure the narrative of species such as plants, butterflies, the Arabic alphabet and destroyed ancient ruins.
