Hisham Bizri
E-mail: hb@hishambizri.com |
Hisham Bizri is a filmmaker
and visual artist from Lebanon currently living in San Francisco,
U.S.A. He has been making films, videos and multi-media installations
that are meditations on his exilic experience as a Lebanese/Muslim
living in the West. The Lebanese Civil War, as well as the
Arab-Israeli conflicts (the Naqba, Naqsa, and the Intifadas), and
most recently the events in the Gulf War, have shaped and continue to
shape what he does in life and art. He has studied in the U.S. with
Raoul Ruiz and Miklós Jancsó and lectured extensively
in the U.S., Lebanon, France, Ireland, Korea, and Japan. He created
the first cinematic virtual reality installations for the CAVE
(premiered at Ars Electronica and ISEA '97), and directed a number of
narrative and experimental films and videos which have been shown
nationally and internationally, including the Museum of Modern Art
(New York), the Walker Art Center (Minneapolis), the Louvre Museum
(Paris), Biarritz Opera House (France), Institute du Monde Arabe
(Paris), among others. He was recently an artist-in-residence at the
Center for Advanced Visual Studies at MIT and currently heads the
time-based art program at the University of California, Davis.
Hisham is concerned with portraying himself as both an artist
and a human being through his work. He hopes to expand the use of
digital technology in the service of cinema and installation art, one
that depicts the world, rather than expresses some ideological,
semiotic, or linguistic sign. In other words, he hopes to bring
aesthetics back to cinema, so that cinema can be seen once more as a
window onto the world, and not as a mechanistic vehicle for ideology.
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