Oh, I do like to be beside the seaside! is deceptive in its focus on the banal.
Cutting to the quick of disturbing issues of nationalism and racism, the work presents us with a rendering of this quintessentially English ditty in Arabic, in the context of a seaside town on the South Coast.
The seaside, nostalgic site of summer holidays, ice-cream and Punch and Judy is also the coast, not the literal border of a nation but nevertheless that space wherein a nation's land ends and the exterior begins. This work inhabits both conceptions and simultaneously destablilises their underlying notions of tradition, ownership and interiority.
Exhibited during Pilot
Susan Diab is an artist working across and investigating a range of media and forms of practice.