Lina Issa is a Lebanese artist, writer, and co-curator of DOTE festival 2019 and of the project Second-hand Body specifically. She graduated from the Graphic Design program at the American University of Beirut (2002). ‘Issa left Lebanon for a postgraduate research fellowship in Fine Arts at the Jan Van Eyck Academy in Maastricht (2002-2005). After receiving her Masters in Visual Arts from the Piet Zwart Institute (2006), she has worked in a range of media with a focus on exploring tensions between the personal and the universal.
Her work revolves around themes of embodied memory, displacement and the performativity of (cultural) identity. In her debut Where we are not: ten days in the life of an other, which will be published at the beginning of 2020 by Van Oorschot, Issa explores those themes by sending someone in her place, a stand-in, to her home country Lebanon to visit people and places that constitute for her the idea of home. Revisiting her script and instruction notebook and narrations that she gave to her stand-in, combined with notes and responses of her stand-in, Lina moves across different temporalities, places, bodies, remembered and imagined stories through which a complex multi-layered cartography of embodied places and memories unfold and through which the question of what if you’d take place, can you feel what I feel? is being intimately explored.
