The Upper Side of the Sky

The Upper Side of the Sky was an online exhibition created by Jawa El Khash and curated by Dana Qaddah. As described by Qaddah, El Khash’s project was “an interactive virtual reality archive of the ancient ruins of Palmyra, Syria, created by the translation of collective and personal memory. Through a medium that resists the thresholds of space and temporality, El Khash materializes the ruins of a site, destroyed by ISIS during the Syrian civil war, among an ecosystem of architecture, animal and plant life. Agricultural archives, 3D models, and celestial scales generate an embodied experience of what is lost, forefronting the value of digital preservation and production within majority diasporic populations—much of whom are attuned to the orchestrated destruction of the homeland.” The online exhibition was a desktop experience that could be viewed from October 12, 2020 to April 30, 2021.

Additional programming occurred in the form of an online conversation titled Posterity and Expatriation between Qaddah and El Khash on Saturday, November 28, 2020 at 2pm. Dr. Laura U. Marks, a scholar in media art and philosophy with an intercultural focus, generated a written response to Posterity and Expatriation and El Khash's virtual exhibition in February 2021.