*A Thing-World ….

The assemblage of ‘fables’ have been filmed ‘on set’ in an antique miniature armoire cabinet from the late 1800s that becomes a miniature stage where the smallest most insignificant seeming things perform, speak, create and transform identity. Evoking early modern curiosity cabinets of wonders and marvels that held objects curated to show the ‘strangeness’ of others, often displaying ‘exotic’ specimens of newly ‘discovered’ worlds and ‘bizarre’ hybrid creatures that spanned the boundaries between categorical types, her own cabinet becomes a metaphorical space to explore her identity as always the Stranger in-between.

Markers used to construct racial identity like eye colour, hair colour and texture are repeating imagery that point to the ways in which societies create belonging and dispossession.

The miniature cabinet full of small Things is also suggestive of a dollhouse, a place once used by wealthier European women to curate self-image, exercise control of the domestic space and to explore her own interiority. The cabinet, the shell and the dollhouse point to interior worlds, to liminal chambers of wondering, becoming, belonging, longing and the desire to know.

The film is a sequence of ‘acts’ where the ‘collector’ curates arrangements of things, and then proceeds to activate them through repetition of various gestures, taking them out of the cabinet, peering closely at them, turning them over and over to experience their materiality and sensuous surfaces and to ponder their meanings. These gestures also evoke the quasi-scientific and philosophical processes of examining strange species under the microscope and questioning their relationship to dualities like ‘body’ and ‘soul’. Shells and feathers are strange residues of what was once both living and non-living.

Reflective surfaces, iridescences, glass and crystals, all create mise en abymes suggesting infinite recurrence, self-reflection and introspection. Eyes are looking, hands are touching and trembling.

Each Thing acting within the cabinet is a disruptive Fragment that can never really be pinned down or catalogued. Any notion of nationality, identity or fixity is constantly disturbed, any attempts to curate wholeness or completeness fails.

* Filmed using a digital camera with a vintage 1970s vidicon lens aperture constant at 2.8 creating a very limited depth of field.

Salma Ahmad Caller was born in Iraq to an Egyptian father and a British mother and grew up in Nigeria and Saudi Arabia. She now lives in the UK. An artist, art historian and writer, Salma considers herself a disruptive body, a hybrid of cultures and faiths. Her work explores her mixed- race identity, cross-cultural experiences, text/image relationships and forms of embodiment, materiality and memory, drawing on personal intimate family histories and vulnerability as a way to destabilise larger narratives. Uncanny juxtapositions and hybrid forms are used to investigate how the private and political collide and intertwine, using techniques of collage, assemblage, drawing, watercolour, photography, projection, installation/sound and more recently film. Salma also writes art theory, poetry and creative non-fiction. Her theoretical background in research on the meanings of ornament in non-Western cultures through frameworks of anthropology of art and cognitive science/physiology, are used to decolonise and break down boundaries, categories, typologies and terminology that characterise hegemonic colonial and patriarchal formations. With a Masters in art history and art theory, and a background in medicine and pharmacology, and several years teaching cross-cultural ways of seeing via non-Western artefacts at Pitt Rivers Museum in Oxford, she now works as an independent artist and teacher.