Camille Zakharia - Anchored to Distant Shadows

Taymour Grahne Projects is pleased to present 'Anchored to Distant Shadows', an online solo show by Bahrain-based artist Camille Zakharia (b. 1962, Lebanon) launching on July 1, 2025. 

The photomontage pieces in 'Anchored to Distant Shadows' by Camille Zakharia emerge as both cartographies and personal records - fragmented landscapes stitched together from the textures of memory, longing, and migration. Zakharia develops a visual language that oscillates between the fantastical and the intentional, blending emotions with architectural precision across fifteen captivating pieces printed on exquisite Hahnemühle fine art paper. This virtual art showcase builds upon an investigation into themes of location and identity in the context of displacement. It presents his creations from the years 2024 to 2025. 

Camille Zakharia, a photographer, artist, and printmaker based in Bahrain, has consistently delved into the inner cartographies of displacement. His work is a deep engagement with uprooting and  reorientation - its geographies, its quiet tolls, and its uncanny familiarity. He approaches the migrant's perspective not as an outsider but as someone actively building a world from fragments, whether he is traversing conflict zones or following the ordered geometries of settled urban environments. For Zakharia, the migrant is not a passive bystander; he is a maker of meanings, a forger of connections between here and elsewhere. This sensibility permeates Anchored to Distant Shadows, where meticulous construction meets emotional resonance. His photomontages, slowly constructed with care and complexity, are not acts of rupture but of reassembly - ways of making visible the emotional architectures of life stretched across borders, languages, and time. 

Every composition in this series turns into a mnemonic device - an attempt to hold on to fleeting  impressions, partial recollections, and emotional states that elude verbal articulation. The works carry the patina of memory, and the weight of things imperfectly remembered. The exhibition's title captures this tension: a yearning for anchorage, for rootedness, tethered to what is ultimately  intangible. "Distant Shadows" may refer to former homes, imagined futures, lost cities, or emotional echoes - spectral presences that continue to exert gravitational pull. These works do not situate themselves in any singular place or moment. Instead, they occupy a suspended temporality in which ruins, scaffolding, prayer niches, construction zones, sea walls, and fences coexist in a speculative, uneasy harmony. 

A quiet rhythm runs throughout the series - a negotiation between drift and structure. In Compositions 1 and 4, for example, Zakharia presents imagined vistas composed of architectural fragments and archival cues gathered over time. These are not depictions of real places but rather visual essays that suggest a form of psychogeography - a term coined by the Situationist International to describe how a geographical location affects the emotions and behavior of individuals. Zakharia invokes this concept to chart an internal landscape shaped by memory and emotional history. The layering is precise but never clinical. The surfaces range from stark grayscale to subtle warmth, often marked by textures that suggest erosion, wear, or the passage of  time. Each piece reflects the dual nature of memory - resilient and fragile, persistent and fluid - continually reshaped through the act of recollection. 

Compositions 5 through 8, completed in 2024, expand Zakharia's investigation of liminality. Doorways, hallways, arches, and corridors - recurring motifs in his practice - become metaphors for transition and ambiguity. These architectural features signal passage, transformation, and the in betweenness of the home. Zakharia renders these spaces as existential: not just physical structures but states of being. Their restrained layering and careful orchestration raise quiet, searching questions: What remains when a place is left behind? What kinds of belonging persist when the familiar turns unfamiliar? When one returns to a site once known, what has changed - and what within us has shifted? 

Zakharia uses geometric balance, repetition, and compositional clarity. Compositions 11 and 12 have a horizontal scroll-like layout, inviting viewers to read them as stories to be followed rather than a mere collage of images. Their extended length mirrors the protracted time associated with the  experience of migration, as well as the slow unfolding of space and time during movement.  Through these works, Zakharia invites viewers to reflect on the construction of these images without offering a resolution. 

This body of work, while grounded in the artist's biography, speaks far beyond it. With increasing economic upheaval, environmental precarity, and forced migration, Zakharia's photomontages offer a quiet counterpoint to dominant narratives of displacement. They resist spectacle, catastrophe, and resolution. Instead, they linger in the subtle space of emotional continuity - insisting that what grounds us may not be fixed geography but the silent, enduring gravity of memory. These images  ask us to trace the architectures - emotional, psychic, ancestral - that we carry with us, even when the physical markers of place have been erased or abandoned. 

The series' visual style draws inspiration from a monochromatic color palette that evokes the aesthetic of ancient manuscripts and archival materials. Zakharia intentionally cultivates a way of seeing that allows every scene to unfold gradually. The subtle shift in light and shadow, along with soft outlines of forms and subtle lighting, creates an evolving visual experience. His use of Hahnemühle paper - renowned for its exceptional quality and rich surface - affirms his devotion to the printed image, not as mere reproduction but as a site of presence and contemplation. 

This online exhibition, presented by Taymour Grahne Projects, extends that reflection into the digital realm, where works assembled across time and distance find new audiences. The format, far from incidental, reflects the series' central concerns: fragmented narratives, dispersed geographies, and the possibility of coherence across space. 

Anchored to Distant Shadows provides a counterpoint in an era characterized by speed and urgency prompting cultural content. It demands an alternative temporality, one rooted in slowness, shaped by return, and sustained through acts of recomposition. In Zakharia's hands, creating images becomes a silent act of resistance, a testament to the cumulative power of attention to detail, layering, and care. He reminds us that meaning does not arrive all at once; it builds up gradually through making, memory, and the shadows we choose to hold on to.

- Text by Hiba Farhat