Joyce Joumaa
Untitled, 2025
4K Digital Video, Color, Single-Take
8min 2sec.
Wschód Warsaw

Black Box operates conceptually as an independent platform dedicated to the medium of video art and sound, archival and contemporary, emphasising its ongoing relevance to a wider spectrum of cultural initiatives undertaken by Wschód. It was initially born out of the idea of an experiment; our New York outpost – a somewhat peculiar space previously run as a tailor shop – was to shelter boundary-crossing initiatives and to define itself through those exact artistic interventions. Housing a discreet, hidden cinema at the lower ground floor of the gallery space offered practical tools for developing a more complex and resonant image of the world.

Now, a highly curated program of Black Box Warsaw will commence with Joyce Joumaa’s most recent video work Untitled (2025). The 8-minute, single take video playing on a loop, depicting a hand operating an analog calculator, encapsulates crucial aspects of the social and political concerns the artist has been preoccupied with throughout her practice. The seemingly endless math calculation appears as a mirror to the current obsession with devaluation, the countless recalculations required to navigate the magnitude of the economic crisis.

Joyce Joumaa is a video artist and writer based between Beirut and Montreal, whose work engages with histories shaped by conflict and crisis, often rooted in her native Lebanon or in diasporic experiences. Joumaa’s works have been previously shown at the 60th Venice Biennale (2024) the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, FOFA Gallery and Stuart Hall Gallery. In 2023, she was a finalist for the 2023 Prix Pierre Ayot and the recipient of the 2022 Bourse Plein-Sud. Her 16mm film To Remain in the no Longer (2023) has been screened at MUDAC (Lausanne, Switzerland), The 35th edition of Ljubljana Biennale of Graphic Arts (Ljubljana, Slovenia), Open City Documentary Festival (London, UK), 18th Edition of Ecrans du Reel (Beirut, Lebanon) and was included in the 2nd Sharjah Architecture Triennale (Sharjah, United Arab Emirates).