z

  

 

Hisham Bizri is a filmmaker and visual artist from Lebanon currently living in Boston. 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, shaped and continue to shape what he does in life and art. He has studied in the US with Raoul Ruiz and Miklos Jancso and lectured extensively in the US, Lebanon, Korea, and Japan. He created the first cinematic virtual reality installations for the CAVE (premiered at Ars Electronica and ISEA '98), 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), Rencontres Internationales Paris/Berlin, Institute du Monde Arabe (Paris), among others. He is currently a research fellow and artist-in-residence at the Center for Advanced Visual Studies at MIT. His work tries to make himself as a human being and artist. He hopes to expand the use of digital technology in the service of film and installation art, one that expands the language of art and hence human consciousness. In his work, audiences from various cultures have the opportunity to experience and question such urgent issues as exile, migration, and identity, within a novel aesthetics, one informed by James Joyce's "mythic method," in which the present spirals deep into history giving fresh meanings to contemporary life.