Juana Awad

Shattering taboos about the politically correct and debunking dominant social constructions Ideology takes a sudden turn into the dichotomy and the contradictions of love beyond ideological commitment.

"This work emerges from my research into the relationship between the actor and the character; what is the diving line? What are the elements that make them what they are? When does the self seep through the character? When does the self seep through the performer? When does the self seep through our daily life roles? This video documents what happens when Oriana sits in front of the mirror to look into her eyes. I have asked her to look at herself in the privacy of her home and let herself just be until the private begins to seep through her mask." - Juana Awad

Deconstructing the actor’s process in rehearsal… deconstructing the character as the film is deconstructed... a transition from the inside to the outside, unraveling, in a spiral, the circumstances that hold both actor and character in their separate places, while asking them to be one.

Using as a starting point Barthes’ notion of the Punctum, this installation investigates the relationship between the body-live, the body-object (as cinematographic body) and the lack of body.

"My father died four years ago. Over a period of 16 years, he wrote me several letters that he never gave me and that I got when I went back to Colombia to bury him. I've kept the letters but have not been able to read any of them. So I asked Lorena to read them to me while I videotape her." - Juana Awad

Single channel installation created to be exhibited in a loop before the Punctum & Back physical performance. Installed in the space it operates as the shadow of a gallery spectator entering the wall, in front of which the performance will occur.

"A video work that stands between conceptual art and documentary. My grandmother tells the story of my father’s death, 25 years ago, while my hands become the lens that holds my mother’s life today." - Juana Awad

Love Effect is a poem born out of the need to shorten the distance between you and me. The form and the action mirror one another: two layers are superimposed while two bodies make love. The relationship of the two bodies/layers creates new shapes, and turns the space between them into moving light.

The futility and absurdity of the rhetoric and politics of extermination, is explored in this work, through the juxtaposition of text and image.

"Created, directed, and edited by two of the most talented independent Latino filmmakers in Canada, Juana's Grammar is an ambitious exploration of diasporic identity that literally puts the body of a new generation of transfrontera women in this country on the cross-cultural epistemological battlefront. Structurally complex, technically daring, and with a wide emotional range, Awad and Lozano's striking experimental short draws freely upon a variety of global art traditions: from Chico Buarque's Brazilian compositions to Frida Kahlo's sketches to Heiner Müller's "Hamletmachine", without losing sight of their immediate social, political and cultural contexts." - Elena Feder

Projecting the real on the imaginary. This single channel video installation explores notions of perception and reflection when juxtaposing the self and its empty image. A rhythmic mixture between stop-motion and cubism.

"In Deep Skin" is an experimental music video, which travels through narrative and non-narrative scenarios while presenting a lesbian encounter. Rhythmic editing, and musical and visual complexity bring the viewer/listener on a voyage from ice storms to deserted beaches to the lonely body.

A rendition of the Spanish popular saying “drowning in a glass of water”, which translates: to be overwhelmed by events that appear to be much larger than what they are in reality.

"I interview my great-uncle Jose Elias Awad about his Berlin years (late 50's to late 60's), when he was finishing his doctorate in Economics at the Humboldt University in East Berlin. General Secretary of the Colombian Communist Party at the time, Jose Elias married Esther Bloss and on the day of their wedding in the Sudeten he left to help build the Berlin Wall. He told off Che for not having read Marx, hung out with Tamara Bunke and advised against the rise up in arms of the newly founded guerrilla group ELN (National Liberation Army) in Colombia. In 1968 he returned to Colombia after being expelled from the Party, and grew apart from his children, because of geographical distance and political ideology." - Juana Awad