Posterity and Expatriation 

To accompany the online exhibition The Upper Side of the Sky from October 12, 2020-April 30, 2021, curator Dana Qaddah hosted a conversation with the artist Jawa El Khash. The Upper Side of the Sky is an interactive virtual reality archive of the ancient ruins of Palmyra, Syria, created by the translation of collective and personal memory. In conversation, Qaddah and El Khash discuss the significance of Palmyra, a site destroyed by ISIS during the Syrian civil war, and the larger implications of such a loss. Drawing on concerns of posterity within majority diasporic populations, they illuminate their use of technology and art to synthesize the experience of personal and institutional archives.