« I often hear that I am a good story teller. We tend to think that every good story must have a hero and a villain. Normally the villains, as characters are much more interesting than the hero. Time is a merciless villain and it is the villain in the stories of my space-time characters. The fabric of space-time is a fairly new idea, about 100 years old. If science still does not have a firm grasp of it, what better way does the common man have to explore it than through art?

For over 20 years, I have been dealing with these photographs that I took, mostly in down town São Paulo, for an exhibition at the time, called “Faces of São Paulo”. The subjects of the photographs were people who had been excluded from our society and were dumped in the non-place. For all of these years, I have been showing these photographs and telling these peoples’ stories trapping them in space-time making them immortal, eternal. These same photographs were the inspiration for all of the artwork show in this exhibition.

In many ways, somehow, someway, they borrow from me and I borrow from them. I come to a point were I can’t differentiate wether I am them, if they are me, If they ever existed or if they were all a figment of my imagination. I see my beard getting white, I see my hair falling, I see age hitting me like a cement truck, yet my space-time characters don’t change and nothing changes for them. They are trapped in a loop. Trapped in that space between two photograms in a reel of film. My characters are all trapped in this cycle. They are all holding hands, in a circle, ever moving. As I work with each of these characters I constantly live the dialectical relation of knowing that every time I attempt to break this cycle, I see myself closer and closer to them, until I am in the circle, with them, holding hands.

I become them and they become me. »

Tarek Mourad