Separation I

Description

Artist Notes

I created these abstractions to signify my emotional disconnection to the terrain of my current state of grief, longing for my Family, to hug and touch my Mother, the loss of my Father, the warmth of our Family's gathering, inter connection of our shared love for one another. These rigid images are intentionally rigid to express how life in separation has made them harder, rougher, more rigid, they are intentionally never to touch, to signify the gravity and inertia of the distances between them, clearly belonging together yet never able to touch, and kept apart, seperated by the cruelty of a punitive authoritarian regime, that keeps us imprisoned by their hatred, and distorted fears, further distorting our shapes, shaping us into something rigid to the outside world. They have become symbols of fractured dissonance, the separation is deliberately painted, the simplicity intentional in the primary colors specificity, my reflection upon the irrationality of it all. Days I am without words to express or convey the heaviness of my longing for semblance cohesion for the simple act of gathering with family and loved ones to simply be normalized again. For me, and others like me, that is not the reality, like others who know this wound of separation; observing the rigidity that resisting this kind of separation creates in the body, acknowledging without numbing the impacts of this seperation has taken upon my life, and other like me. These pieces are the fragments of respect for the markings that injury has left upon my heart. I leave it on the canvas, and remove it from occupying my heart.

Preservation Notes

This painting is part one of a co-joined painting dedicated to his separation from his family before the October 2023 genocide began. Painted on linen mount composite canvas in 2025 with acrylics, sealed with polymer sealant, kept in climate control environment/gallery. Both Pieces have been preserved with professional Archival framing standards fully administered. Museum glass with UV-filtering acrylic that blocks up to 99% of harmful ultraviolet rays to stop fading. Must be pulled for maintenance every 5 years, coating treatments reapplied. Next maintenance date January 2031. Excellent condition. PAIRED WORK - DO NOT SEPARATE Part one of a conjoined two-panel work. Its matching panel is Separation II. The two panels are catalogued, conserved, exhibited, and sold as a single unit, including the paired print release. Neither panel is to be sold, loaned, or rehoused independently of the other. PAIRING KEY (machine-readable) Shared tag: separation-diptych-alijila This exact tag is carried by both panels and by no other record in the archive. It is the join key the public site uses to retrieve the pair. Do not reuse this tag on any other work, and do not remove it when editing keywords. Panel 1 of 2: Separation I, handle separation-i, document ID 043ec05a-9e9c-40b5-be9e-9ff370ec7722 Panel 2 of 2: Separation II, handle separation-ii, document ID bfe7d75e-2656-475d-97ae-93b9540e6118 Sequence: this record is panel 1 and hangs to the LEFT. Separation II hangs to the RIGHT. The order is fixed and must not be reversed. Retrieval query for the public site: *[_type == "art" && "separation-diptych-alijila" in tags] | order(title asc) DISPLAY AND RETAIL INSTRUCTION The panels must always be presented together, in sequence, on any page where either appears: catalogue, archive listing, search result, related works, cart, and checkout. Neither panel should ever be purchasable on its own. If a visitor adds one to a cart, both must be added. CRITICAL CURATORIAL CONSTRAINT: The artist's notes state that the forms are "intentionally never to touch" and that the separation between them is deliberately painted. The two panels must therefore be shown side by side with a visible gap between them. They must NEVER be merged, butted together, cropped into a single composite image, or displayed in a carousel that shows only one panel at a time. Presenting them as one continuous image would invert the meaning of the work. The gap is part of the piece. SCHEMA LIMITATION The art schema has no field that can hold a reference from one artwork to another. The links field accepts external URLs only, not internal document references. The shared tag above is therefore a workaround, not a proper relationship, and it depends on nobody editing the tag by hand. This pairing was previously set up and was subsequently lost when the tags on this record were reverted, which demonstrates the fragility of the approach. Recommended fix for the development team: add a reference or array-of-references field to the art schema, for example relatedWorks or pairedWith, pointing to type art, together with an optional string field for the relationship kind (diptych, triptych, series) and a number field for panel order. Once that exists, this pairing should be migrated off the tag and onto real references, and this note updated. DIGITAL RECORD The original capture was scanned in Sweden as a TIFF master in high, medium, and low resolution variants. The high-resolution master is held outside this archive and has NOT been uploaded to this record. CURRENT ASSET: JPEG, medium-resolution variant, 3166 x 4000 pixels, 3.1 MB. Filename SeparationAlijilaMed1.jpg. Uploaded 2026-08-17. This is the MEDIUM tier of the scan set, as the filename indicates, not the full-resolution master. Effective scan resolution: approximately 423 to 447 DPI measured against the recorded physical dimensions, above the 300 DPI archival standard. Because this panel is physically small at 24 x 18 cm, the medium-resolution file still resolves well past requirement. Maximum reproduction size at 300 DPI: 10.6 x 13.3 inches (26.8 x 33.9 cm). The physical panel measures approximately 7.1 x 9.4 inches, so the work can be reproduced at 1:1 with resolution in hand, and enlarged to roughly one and a half times actual size before dropping below standard. Status: MEETS ARCHIVAL STANDARD for reproduction at and above actual size. This is one of the few records in the collection where the medium-resolution file is sufficient, and it is sufficient only because the panel is small. The high-resolution TIFF master remains the preferred archival copy and should still be obtained, both for preservation and to allow reproduction beyond one and a half times actual size. FILE FORMAT NOTE: This asset is a JPEG, which is a lossy compressed format. Even at adequate resolution it is not an archival-grade preservation copy; compression artifacts are permanent and compound if the file is ever re-saved. Sanity accepts TIFF uploads directly, so the master can be uploaded without conversion. PAIRED PANEL, MATCHING REQUIREMENT: The matching panel, Separation II, holds a comparable medium-resolution JPEG at 3144 x 4000 pixels (filename Seperation-Alijila-Med2.jpg). The two files are within 1% of each other in resolution, so the pair is currently well matched for reproduction and the panels will print consistently side by side. This matching must be preserved. If a high-resolution master is uploaded for one panel, the master for the other must be uploaded in the same operation. A diptych reproduced from files of differing quality will show a visible difference between the panels, which would be particularly damaging for a work whose subject is separation. Recommended next step: source and upload both high-resolution TIFF masters together, and retain the medium and low resolution variants in the gallery field so all three tiers live in each record. VERIFICATION 1. DIMENSIONS APPEAR TRANSPOSED. The dimensions field records height 18 and width 24, describing a landscape panel. The image is portrait, 3166 wide by 4000 high. A portrait reading of 18 cm wide by 24 cm high fits the image orientation; the landscape reading does not. Height and width should be corrected to height 24, width 18 after confirmation against the physical work. Separation II carries the identical values and the same error, and both must be corrected together so the pair stays consistent. 2. There is a secondary proportional discrepancy. A perfect 18:24 ratio would be 0.750, while the image measures 0.792, about 5% out. The recorded measurements appear approximate. Both panels should be remeasured, and the DPI figures above recalculated once confirmed. 3. Depth is not recorded in the dimensions field. Both panels are framed and glazed, so frame depth should be recorded for handling and installation. 4. The gallery field is unpopulated, so the medium and low resolution variants are not held anywhere in this archive.

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