I began investigating my family’s history in the early 1990’s, in an effort to confront the "Other" within me. Through my photo-based work, I explore notions of territory, memory, and home. I collect the voices buried deep within my diasporic self, and I confront the resulting amalgam of my identity. Through an intergenerational, transnational and transcultural lens, I craft a language that expresses a shared humanity, while erasing the borders that maintain our "Otherness."

My work is an embodied response to the ripple effect of violence in the world, through four generations of my now plural, diasporic family. Faced with the outbreak of war, persecution, and/or religious intolerance, my family members either were caught (and murdered), hid from danger, and/or fled their countries of origin. Daughter of a Palestinian/Salvadoran Christian and a Polish/French Jew, and now living in the United States, I rescue the otherwise silent voices of my family and I try to understand the emotional repercussions of events that I myself did not live but unquestionably carry within. The unspoken lessons of surviving the Holocaust as well as the loss of a homeland in Palestine echoed on the walls of my house as I grew up in tension-filled El Salvador.

With Santos y sombras/Saints and Shadows, I trace my family’s various exiles and diasporas. The Palestinian desert and Eastern European ash sift, shift and blend in the volcanic sands of El Salvador, to form the texture of the path on which I define and express my experience.

Muriel Hasbun is a 2006-08 Fulbright Scholar and Associate Professor and Coordinator of Fine Art Photography at the Corcoran College of Art Design in Washington, DC. She is the recipient of numerous distinctions and awards, including a Maryland State Arts Council Individual Artist Award in Media (2008) and the Corcoran’s Outstanding Creative Research Faculty Award (2007). Hasbun’s photo-based work has been exhibited at the American University Museum (2008), NYU’s Hemispheric Institute’s “Encuentro” at the Centro Cultural Recoleta in Buenos Aires (2007); the Museum of Photographic Arts in San Diego (2007); Houston’s FotoFest (2006), the Corcoran Gallery of Art (2004); the 50th Venice Biennale (2003); the Centro de la Imagen in Mexico City (1999); and at the 29ème Rencontres Internationales de la Photographie d’Arles (1998). Her photographs are in numerous private and public collections, including the Art Museum of the Americas, Lehigh University, the Smithsonian American Art Museum and the Bibliothèque Nationale de France. http://www.murielhasbun.com