Haliz Jozef: Shadow of a meaning 24.04. - 25.05.2025
In a world of clarity, can my body choose opacity?
Opacity is visible in my mother tongue. Sometimes. Quite often I use AI programs to communicate with my mother. They communicate to my mother and my mother tongue on the other hand becomes a mere loose translation.
I have become a shadow in my mother tongue, what is left are the fragmented emotions from my past.
In parallel, I revisited personal family archives, scanning photographs taken by my father. On the reverse of each image: handwritten notes in Arabic— a hidden narrative surfaces: my father had a secret lover, not a unique story really.
But by confronting this story, long buried, I also confront inherited insecurities, the fear of abandonment, and the unspoken rules of love shaped by displacement.
As a refugee who has lost a home, a country, and a language in its full form, I grapple with what it means to belong to something you can no longer name.
What the viewer encounters is not a confession, but a layered offering—an exploration of voice, memory, and intimacy across broken lines of language, technology, and time.
In this work, opacity becomes an act of resistance, a way of reclaiming the right to remain unreadable, untranslatable, unresolved.