Traces, Roy Dib

In Athar, Roy Dib presents a series of works reflecting his experiences of recent political events. Approaching these events from a side-step, Dib offers a unique perspective on them. His work transforms the extreme violence and its complex representation into elements of his daily life during wartime. Sexuality and the experience of sound are central themes in this exploration.

This is not the first time Dib engages with themes of sexuality, boundaries, and limits in his work. These elements serve as pathways to construct a narrative of the present moment in its complexity. In this series, sexuality and the power dynamics it performs offer an entry point to explore the relationship between the body and the city in a violent context. Traces (or Athar) is a set of 20 photographs following a sexual encounter, showing only the location and objects left behind—traces of desire, practice, and vulnerability in a broader context.

The second response involves the phenomenological experience and sound traces of violence. In Jidar, Dib presents a series of shots from opposite angles, forming a diptych that reflects the concept of the “sound barrier” (jidar el sawt)—its redundancy and tension. Positioned between these two spaces, Dib portrays his own position within the dramatic tension of uncertainty and waiting. At the heart of the exhibition, a cube-shaped space with noise-canceling headphones invites visitors to a moment of silence away from the war’s noise, accompanied by three shields designed to protect the city and ward off evil.

Dib’s work addresses questions about how to narrate violence, catastrophic times, and the solitude of the body, offering a poetic approach to traces and the narrative structures they create.

Nayla Tamraz