Between Presence and Trace
DALIA JACOBS
My practice begins in the body and moves outward, like a ripple. I seek not to capture time, but to disturb it. I don’t believe in fixed narratives or linear memory. I believe in fragments, in traces, in images that feel like they’re still arriving.
My work demands intimacy. The mediums I use slow me down, teaching me to listen, to wait, and to grow close enough to the subject to become affected.
I desire the unpredictability of analog, for it is closer to the honesty of living. My intention with digital is to extend. The digital is not a replacement for the real, but it holds conversation with it.
I work in the space of migrating images, reassembling stories and breathing archives. My work is lives between the visible and the subtle, the implied; between longing and resistance.
My photography is stilled in the margins. Tunis’ streets, the chaos of exile, the stillness of olive trees or the weightlessness of water—these are not simply backdrops. They are collaborators.
Performance is an essential part of my practice. It is never rehearsed. On the contrary, it is improvised and instinctive. Often in response to a feeling I cannot name, a fear I need to face, or an emotion I must move through. It’s not about spectacle. It’s about honesty. In performance, my body becomes the first site of knowing, of remembering, of refusing. The line between ritual and action, between private gesture and public offering, is blurred.
Visually, I trust myself in a way that still surprises me. I often see things before they exist. I am drawn to the poetic. My visual language is intuitive, layered, sometimes surreal, and always rooted in the emotional.
I am interested in how light reveals and conceals, how gesture speaks without words, how composition can carry both clarity and ambiguity. I make images the way one writes a letter, tenderly, carefully, sometimes without knowing the address.
I seek to witness. I seek to both hold and leave space. My work is a gesture of love—a way of asking questions when language no longer reaches.
Copy Edited by Leena Aboutaleb