Dima Srouji

Dima Srouji

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Three Promises 2023

Yousef Srouji’s childhood in Palestine wasn’t something that he and his parents spoke of as a family, so when he found a box of his mother’s home videos from the early 2000s, an especially perilous and tumultuous period in the West Bank, the tapes became a means for remembering and comprehending a painful past. The stories she captured illuminate the nature of life in a war zone, and familial bonds that cannot be broken. – Bedatri Choudhury (DocNYC)
Dima Srouji

Dima Srouji

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Sebastia 2020

Sebastia, a small archaeological town, sits on top of a hill Northwest of Nablus, Palestine surrounded by Shavei Shomron, an illegal Israeli settlement and confiscated agricultural fields of olive groves and apricot trees. This ancient site was excavated multiple times over the last century by colonial archaeologists funded by Zionist individuals and institutions. The first excavation of 1908 led by Harvard University took advantage of Sebastia locals including women, men, and children as cheap labor digging their own land for the sake of biblical archaeology. Each excavation extracted soil and artifacts from the ground, taking what they considered valuable to their home institutions and leaving pottery shards and rubble on the surface. Today, what’s left of the archaeological monuments is contested by the nearby settlement as well as the Israeli military. The Roman Forum is a battlefield, but the locals are incredibly resilient.
Dima Srouji

Dima Srouji

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She Still Wears Kohl and Smells Like Roses 2023

But She Still Wears Kohl and Smells like Roses retells the story of a collection of glass vessels from the V&A collection that were excavated in Palestine and Syria. The replicas were produced in Palestine with local artisans, the Twam family, and an anonymous family that works in the black market to make and sell forgeries. The original vessels in the glass gallery are replaced with tomb cards that narrate the violence of exhuming bodies to retrieve the "grave goods" and illustrate the power of the female body in the history of archaeology. The installation was accompanied by an experimental film that stitches personal histories with the history of glass.