Educator Briefing – Justine Youssef: Somewhat Eternal

Educators will join ACE’s Artistic Director Danni Zuvela for an insider's look at Justine Youssef: Somewhat Eternal.

This tour is a great opportunity to learn about the opportunities ACE provides to students, educators and early-career artists.
Enjoy a drink on ACE, receive a free art publication bundle, catch up with friends—and even meet someone new! Professional learning certificates provided on.

Educator Briefing – Justine Youssef: Somewhat Eternal
Thursday 29 August 2024
4pm–6pm
RSVP essential

About Justine Youssef: Somewhat Eternal

Justine Youssef’s Somewhat Eternal is a multi-sensory installation, encompassing video, textiles, text, scent. Justine Youssef’s auto-ethnographic films and installations explore the impacts of displacement and prompt us to consider our complicity in creating it. Relationships to land and the endurance of rituals and beliefs are key ideas for the Darug/Sydney-based artist.

Somewhat Eternal is a multi-sensory installation, encompassing video, textiles, text, scent. The central work—a three-channel video shot in Lebanon—shows the artist’s aunt performing R’sasa, or molybdomancy, a traditional alchemic practice of clearing the evil eye. For generations, the artist’s family have used their knowledge of the local mountains and ecology to survive famine and military occupation and to heal everyday ailments and misfortunes.

From 1982 to 2000, parts of Lebanon were under Israeli occupation, and the lead used in R’sasa is often extracted from bullets still found in the region. Through this material connection, Youssef asks us to consider colonisation as a curse that inhabits and influences social and cultural life.

Throughout the installation, embroidered textiles are scented with plant hydrosols—aromatic waters produced by steam distillation of plants—using a process the artist inherited matrilineally. Here, Youssef has substituted commonly used plants with blessed milk thistle, burnet rose, damask rose, and Lebanese cedar, chosen for their complex relationships to land subjugation, occupation, and renewal.

Somewhat Eternal expands from familial narratives to consider broader social and political currents, revealing the connections between human displacement and ecology. Within these acts of ritual and preservation, now fragmented and altered across geographies, lies a belief in the alternatives they offer us.

Curated by Stella Rosa McDonald, Tulleah Pearce and Patrice Sharkey.

Feature Image: Justine Youssef, Somewhat Eternal (2023), three channel video (still), 11 minutes. Courtesy the artist.