Zaynab Ghaïs-Mortada
زينب غيث ﻣﺮﺗﻀﻰ

Visual artist from Tiohtiá:ke/Mooniyang/Montréal, interested in the questions of time, the 'uneventful', memory, opacity and corporeity.

Featured in publications such as Périphérie, What Makes a Lake? Tracing Movement and Macaroni. 

Florist turned farmer, with over a decade of experience tending orchards, flower gardens and edible indigenous&heirloom gardens on the island.

Copy editor at Cheng Huai Art & Culture Association 澄怀美学会. 

Researcher at Institut F, whose present work lies at the intersections of phenomenology, critical philosophy of race, epistemology, and Québec history and politics. Other areas of expertise include museology, theory & history of photography, acoustic ecology & sound studies, sensory ethnography and medical anthropology.

Papers available on Academia.

Through her art practice, Zaynab seeks to remain in dialogue with and attentive to the world she inhabits. Drawn by the margins, textures and subtle elements that often escape notice, she attempts to collect and document the discreet hums of the world to share them with others. Her photographic projects are traces that map the slow and uneventful transformations of places, objects and people around her.

Because her work stretches over several years, a lot of it happens in the archive —mainly constituted of her own photography, spanning over 16 years, and photographic objects retrieved from her family archive. Sensitive to the question of intimacy and attached to the notion of opacity, the artist recovers and captures photographic objects that invite audiences to take a non-intrusive look at the subjects represented. These are images that suggest more than they show, that offer an 'opening to...' rather than an 'access to -'.

Drawn by the stories that bodies carry, traces of lived experiences that she re-traces indirectly, the artist offers a coded, camouflaged, diverted, fragmented visual transmission of these personal stories. Her photographic work takes the form of a personal exploration that refuses transparency and imposes a distance between itself and its viewers.