Peregrinus

Description

Artist Notes

The collage for this work was created in 2018 and left abandoned until 2025. It reflects a moment when I was trying to return to art. The piece documents a period of my life in which statelessness, the struggle for identity, and fragmentation were overwhelming. The work goes beyond personal memory, offering a Palestinian reflection on exile, borders, and the human cost of displacement. I intentionally made the composition chaotic, as it mirrors the inner chaos I experienced—uncertainty about where I was heading or where I could settle. The work consists of fragments of boarding passes that allowed me to move, leave, and return to places where I had no roots. For me, these papers were never neutral; they are politicized and deeply embedded in institutions that define a person not only by citizenship, but beyond that, by their very existence. By assembling these fragments and marking them with red and green strokes, I sought to emphasize the contrast between memory and erasure. Green represents the olive tree and identity; red signifies wounds and suffering that leave endless scars; and black lines trace the unknown. The faceless silhouette represents the Peregrinus—a figure who could be anyone. Through this work, I search for memories, places, exile, and loss.

Preservation Notes

MATERIALS AND CONSTRUCTION Physical mixed-media painting and collage; not a digital-native work. The medium is recorded as "Acrylic and Mixed media on canvas", dimensions 41 x 33 cm. The collage layer is built from the artist's own archive of boarding passes from a period during which he could not travel outside Europe without a visa; these paper fragments are adhered across the support and overpainted with acrylic in green, red and black passages, with a solitary black silhouette in the lower corner. The archivist's original observation is retained: "Freshly painted 20 years old tickets and boarding passes throughout the borders of the Global South, the Mid East The EU." No claim is made here about the current physical condition of the object; nothing beyond the record's own text has been observed. CONSERVATION REQUIREMENTS Canvas support with acrylic paint: treat as stable. Keep in stable relative humidity, avoid direct sunlight, dust with a soft dry brush only, do not use solvents on acrylic surfaces, and support the stretcher when handling. Collage of tickets and boarding passes: these are acidic commercial paper stocks that were never manufactured to last, so continued deterioration is expected. Assessment by a paper conservator is recommended, along with encapsulation where appropriate and protection from light, moisture and oxygen. Lifting edges at the collage overlaps should be consolidated before the work is handled or framed. UV-filtering glazing is recommended in all cases. The saturated reds, yellows and oranges are the passages most at risk of fading; the red streaks are compositionally essential here and their loss would materially alter the work. DIGITAL RECORD The original capture was scanned in Sweden as a TIFF master in high, medium and low resolution variants. Those masters are held outside this archive, and the file uploaded here is a converted derivative. Current asset: PNG, 1199 x 844 pixels, 1581 KB. Maximum reproduction size at 300 DPI is approximately 4.0 inches on the long edge. WARNING: This file is a low-resolution derivative and is inadequate for print reproduction or detailed study. The high-resolution TIFF master must be sourced and uploaded before this work is sold, printed, or reproduced. .

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