Justine Youssef
Somewhat Eternal

Curated by Stella Rosa McDonald, Tulleah Pearce, and Patrice Sharkey

'A curse can be understood as a decision.
To be hexed or receive the evil eye is to choose what another has desired for you.
To clear their desire and embody your own, melt lead from the bullet of an AK-47 and cast it in plant waters.'

Justine Youssef's auto-ethnographic films and installations explore the impacts of displacement and prompt us to consider our complicity in creating it. Relationships to land and the endurance of rituals and beliefs are key ideas for the Darug/Sydney-based artist.

Somewhat Eternal (2023) is a multi-sensory installation, encompassing video, textiles, text, scent. The central work—a three-channel video shot in Lebanon—shows the artist’s aunt performing R'sasa, or molybdomancy, a traditional alchemic practice of clearing the evil eye. For generations, the artist's family have used their knowledge of the local mountains and ecology to survive famine and military occupation and to heal everyday ailments and misfortunes. From 1982 to 2000, parts of Lebanon were under Israeli occupation, and the lead used in R'sasa is often extracted from bullets still found in the region. Through this material connection, Youssef asks us to consider colonisation as a curse that inhabits and influences social and cultural life.

Throughout the installation, embroidered textiles are scented with plant hydrosols—aromatic waters produced by steam distillation of plants—using a process the artist inherited matrilineally. Here, Youssef has substituted commonly used plants with blessed milk thistle, burnet rose, damask rose, and Lebanese cedar, chosen for their complex relationships to land subjugation, occupation, and renewal.

Somewhat Eternal expands from familial narratives to consider broader social and political currents, revealing the connections between human displacement and ecology. Within these acts of ritual and preservation, now fragmented and altered across geographies, lies a belief in the alternatives they offer us.

Justine Youssef
Somewhat Eternal, 2023
three-channel video, 12min 40sec; embroidered faux-mink blankets, burnet rose (Rosa spinosissima) hydrosol, damask rose (Rosa x damascena) hydrosol, lebanese cedar (Cedrus libani) hydrosol, blessed milk thistle (Silybum marianum) hydrosol, silver charms

Featuring Juliette Khoury, Julianna Beshara, and Micheline Beshara Second Camera David Le Borgne Editors Justine Youssef and Jeremy Elphick Colourist Jeremy Elphick Sound Mix Giuseppe Faraone Translation Celine Skaf Distillation Assistance Siham Chamoun and Leanna Youssef Embroidery Hasiba Siddiqui Textile Assistance Willow Darling