Sarah-Rose Antoun
Read Thesis
This work examines the personal and political experience of witnessing war from a diasporic perspective, shaped by my family’s history between Lebanon, France, and, more recently, my relocation to the Netherlands. It investigates how memory, both collective and intimate, is formed, interrupted, and transmitted through images circulating across WhatsApp, family photo albums, and the fragmented visual debris of war online.
Anchored by two metaphorical hills, one stable, overlooking Paris, the other unstable, facing the Lebanese coast, this work assembles personal images and screenshots to trace how conflict lingers beyond marking the headlines.
At the centre of the installation is a suitcase, packed in the 1970s before what is commonly referred to as Lebanon’s civil war, now reactivated in a different moment of instability. The suitcase becomes a method for holding contradiction: being close yet far, knowing only partially, yet a bit. Visitors are invited into a one-on-one conversation, where they unpack memories, distance, and what it means to witness together.
The work asks: How do we engage with images of war and everyday intimacy when they arrive on the same screen? How might these visual traces resist historical erasure and carry not only evidence but emotional and political weight?
