GhaRaBa
Amber Eve Anderson
From a single three-letter Arabic root——gha, ra, ba——comes a list of more than 50 words and three times as many translations, including not only the Arabic word for Morocco (al-Maghreb), but also place of the setting sun, life away from home, and exile. Using Hans Wehr’s Dictionary of Modern Written Arabic, I compiled this list of words with screenshots from Google Image Searches for the same words in Arabic alongside their English equivalents.
Transliteration
An excerpt from Mahmoud Darwish’s poem about the death of Edward Said is the basis for this video. Originally written in Arabic, I first encountered the excerpt in English. I used the English translation and transliterated it back into the Arabic alphabet. The Arabic letters approximate the sounds of the English language as best as possible.
Seabed
30 Nights (in a Sea of Uncertainty)
Amber Eve Anderson is currently a Resident Artist at School 33 Art Center in Baltimore, MD and a regular contributor at BmoreArt. In 2016 she was a Baker Artist Award finalist and was awarded residencies at Wagon Station Encampment with Andrea Zittel in Joshua Tree, CA and the Kimmel Harding Nelson Center for the Arts in Nebraska City. Anderson's work has been exhibited throughout the United States, as well as in Canada, Finland, Morocco, and Peru. Her first self-published book, Free to a Good Home was purchased by the New York Public Library and is sold at Printed Matter, the world’s leading non-profit for artist books. Anderson is a 2016 graduate of the multidiscplinary Mount Royal School of Art MFA program at MICA and is the founder of Ctrl+P, a curatorial project for artist books and editions.