Engaging with the ideological work of archives, Rama’s practice insists on a structure for something indefinite, absurd and slippery, hoping to see the ways image, language, and memory systems resist closure.
Some of this unfolds in a long-term research project about her family's entanglement with the looting of Palestinian heritage and the transfer of archaeological objects from the West Bank into the collections of religious institutions and museums across the United States. This birthed several episodic moving image works, including I’ll Send You The Pictures (2024) and Material Witness (2025). Understanding the archival photograph as both document and process, these works attempt to encounter an image that does not reflect the past, but actively participates in its unfolding. They’re part of a larger imaginary architecture: a subaltern site where those who look can revise limits imposed by time, power, and authority.
In Common Desire (2020), another archive-oriented project, desire, war and image are entangled together in an anthology of video works appropriating digitized films to point to cultural transformations and revolutions that apexed during the Lebanese Civil War. The public domain image leans into entropy as it chooses, collapsing mythologies, and building new ones around the interpretive axes of a historical moment.
In Common Desire (2020), another archive-oriented project, desire, war and image are entangled together in an anthology of video works appropriating digitized films to point to cultural transformations and revolutions that apexed during the Lebanese Civil War. The public domain image leans into entropy as it chooses, collapsing mythologies, and building new ones around the interpretive axes of a historical moment.