With the obsession of an archaeologist, Salah Saouli has over the past several years collected photographs, texts and other documents, to incorporate them into his multimedial objects and installations as fragmented material often at the brink of legibility. Printed and painted on flags or housed in shrine-like encasings, mounted on the wall, arranged in display cabinets or staged in spacious labyrinths, these remains, which have been recovered and reproduced complement one another across the individual works to comprise a visual depot which- complete with cracks and gaps, as well as thematic repetitions - is repeatedly excerpted and combined anew. Salah Saouli prefers to work with complex montages and multidimensional overlappings, with ways of focusing and renewed diffusion, to lend his material energetic form and associative significance without foregrounding its origin or historical places and times. In particular, it is the effects of war on people and cities that Salah Saouli has invoked as images of recollection, by using images of destroyed buildings or photos of missing persons.
The processing of this parallels and the memories of a nearly un- represent able, and incomprehensible past drive Salah Saouli to his artistic language.

By Stefan Rasche