Altered i

Where do -I- exist? Is this question existential or political?

Sargon - 1996/2021

Shivers - 2018-2023

NOT LAILA - 2019

AGE: 60

Pronouns: she/her

BIRTH: X

(Projects)

(IDs)

AGE: 42

Pronouns: She/Her

BIRTH: Lattakia, Syria

AGE: X

Pronouns: IT

BIRTH: Instagram Filter, Lockdown 2020

AGE: 25

Pronouns: He/Him

BIRTH: ID card

AGE: 25

Pronouns: She/Her

BIRTH: Arnhem, Netherlands

AGE: 16

Pronouns: They/Them

BIRTH: Bathroom

Asmahan

Goredealer alien baby - 2020

Ra'sh - رعش

Sarjon@mail.com +31618332088 IG@_sarjon_

BIMBO ZYGOTE - 2022

the BimboZygotes are an army
of genetically modified sex workers
many of all ages live under different names and pronouns

Khanees al 3issam
خَنيس العِصام

Amanda pleezko Harder - 2023

The Blue Anger is a video reading of the last chapter of the book by Mustafa Khalifah 'The Shell', visually and sonically capturing the chapter’s emotional weight in relation to freedom. The Shell is a diary novel of the Syrian political prisoner of (the author) who was an atheist mistaken for a radical Islamist and was locked up for 13 years without trial in one of the most notorious prisons in the Middle East, Tadmour, Syria. With this video reading i attempt finding visual and sonic ways to experience the last chapter of the book wherein Moustafa Khalifa illustrates the void of nothingness he felt experiencing freedom outside the Tadmour prison after 13 years of unjust incarceration. Aligning with the type of powerless anger and nothingness i felt reading this diary book as a Syrian teenager at age 16 as the revolution broke out with war that followed, imagining what national identity meant under dictatorship for us. This is the type of anger that is blue, it doesn’t explode out with red clouds, it sinks in instead, spreading horizontally into a rooted void, it is the type of anger that isn’t allowed to take space so it transforms within into glitches, pixels and blurry visions. It’s the type of anger that transpires in an unjust manner when beings are forced to erase themselves into nothingness in order to survive.

My name is Sarjon, Sargon, Shivers, ra3sh, goredealer baby, Asmahan, khanees al 3issam, Amanda plzko harder and NOT Laila. I am all the names debating the reasons, the ways, and the risks of my body existing as a consequence. I build a practice where i am close to them, monitoring their character growth, making them props and voices to speak, I call them the altered {I}’s. My altered eyes are the lenses through which I see myself from the already existing narrations of the world. My maleness narrated by the patriarchy, my Arabness narrated by 911, my gender nonconformity narrated by the binary signs in public restrooms, my femininity narrated by a camp drag queen with a mustache I call daddy, and my immigration journey narrated by a powerful dictator. This practice stems out of the urgency in questioning political identity and how they form under different political systems by creating an excessive amount of identities and characters, i nurse an artistic reaction to the need of understanding what made me. A lot of what I consider agency is just a consequence in a bigger political construction, as an artist i’m drawn to simulating worlds in order to understand how politics work and what identities form as consequences in it, by presenting this consequence to the audience, they are confronted with their own role, they trace back their own identity and agency to it and question with me, How did we get here?