Events

Still from Salma Aldoory’s video Meeting, 2026, 7'38"

Salma Aldoory

Meeting

2026, performance documentation,  7’38’’

 

The starting point for this performance was the artist’s discovery of her father’s slides from Iraq dating from the 1970s and 1980s, depicting her grandmother and aunts. Born and raised in Warsaw in a Polish-Iraqi family, Salma Aldoory enlarged these archival photographs to the scale of her own body, creating symbolic encounters with women she never had the chance to meet.

This personal narrative of memory, inheritance and cultural distance intertwines with an attempt to reconnect with her roots and to create new family photographs, made possible only through imagination.

 

In the photographs, I see the faces of women: my grandmother Safiyya and my aunts as beautiful young girls. One of them is always smiling. When I place the photographs side by side, I can see a young girl growing up and becoming a woman. I even resemble some of them. It is a comforting but also a sad feeling. I feel incomplete. I have never been to Iraq. I do not speak Arabic.

Looking at them, I wonder what their lives were like. Were they happy? Recently, I found a portrait of my grandmother. Holding it up to the light, I noticed that she had tattoos on her neck and chin. I was fascinated. My father told me that women in rural areas used to get such tattoos, and that they were considered primitive. I have a lip piercing myself; in a way, it feels connected to those tattoos. That made me happy.

 

In the coming months, Screen will present a selection of video works chosen from the portfolios submitted for consultations as part of the Artist: The Professional programme.

 

Screen, a large-format video art gallery, is located in the Plac Unii building at 2 Puławska Street in Warsaw and is accessible during the building’s opening hours.

 

Salma Aldoory

(b. 2002, Warsaw)

Salma Aldoory grew up in a Polish-Iraqi family, at the intersection of two cultures. Since 2022, she has been studying at the Academy of Fine Arts in Warsaw. Her artistic practice explores themes related to linguistic barriers, cultural conflict and the search for identity. Working across disciplines, she combines sculpture, photography and film. She is particularly interested in the ways people surround themselves with objects, which is why she frequently draws on found footage and found objects. Memory, family, childhood, belonging and exclusion are recurring subjects in her work.