For a solo show at Afterhours Projects, Toronto, ON, Canada.
Afterhours Projects presents: Sarah Zar
NOMADS ON THE SHORE
October 31-November 10, 2013
An affinity for the times between actions, the moments before and after irreversible change… these fragments of illusory stillness, just before everything shatters into action… this affinity is the ghost of inherited memory.
I revel in the aloofness of my perch, the idea that dangers may be coming into existence nearby, like stars popping into the night sky, but for now, I am APART: outside of the days when the absence of choice might descend.
I am staring out a window, just before dawn, in the room of strange house. From here, it is hard to tell if it is day or night. I am between places… passing through. And that is when the feeling rises like fog: this is Familiar. The recognition of patterns is triggered, and I start processing lateral connections at lightning speed. The window and I are still. I am so deeply identifying with being between worlds that in this moment, I feel inexplicably at home. I remember the mood of escape, conveyed to me by my ancestors. Long after they stopped moving, this is a trait that kept traveling.
When I step up to these windows, I feel the shape of the patterns drawing close, sense the webs of events as they are woven before me. The family tree in my veins pulses, sprouting images like leaves. The roots feed from something out of my body, out of my time, something one part trauma, two parts strength. These things that are in us all have a way of creeping out of us, whenever we stop and listen for them.
After generations of movement, the tremble of wagon wheels and half remembered transient moments courses through the blood of survivors’ children, dreaming itself forward. We are all the children of survivors. The pulses of forgotten histories appear in postcard-like moments, in a time they no longer fit. They pull at us, treading time, caught like fish on a hook at the end of a long line, originating on the other incomprehensible side of the surface of water… in a place where an ending seems like a barrier. We can’t see through it in any clear way, but we can sense the movement all the way along the line. When there is a pull, we feel it. We can feel it because we are the nomads on the shore.
