Johanne Issa: Sweet Dust

Sweet Dust explores the intimate geography of memory and interiority. Fragmented perceptions, emotional residues and everyday traces are treated as the basic material of consciousness. Rather than representing reality, the works transform these fragments into a fluid psychological space in which memory, dream, loss and resilience coexist. At the heart of this process is the artist's gaze: not a passive act of looking, but a means of extracting, transforming and giving form to what ordinarily escapes representation. Contemporary art has long confronted a fundamental question: how can one give form to that which, by its very nature, eludes form? How can the trajectory of a thought, the retinal persistence of a memory or the evanescent texture of a dream be made visible? Through saturated fields of colour that reject illusionistic depth, the works create a psychological rather than a spatial depth. They become surfaces onto which mental images and emotions can be projected, materialising the space between what is seen and what remains latent, remembered or imagined, between the clarity of an emotion and the disappearance of the event that gave rise to it. At the same time, they ask what remains of our experiences when memory is reduced to fragile traces, somewhere between dust and electrical impulses, in a digital and posthuman era. The artwork thus becomes both a receptacle and a site of transformation, where the artist's gaze meets the viewer's own memories, allowing what has been lost, fragmented or forgotten to take on another form.