" I had wanted to tell a story, almost a biography. [...]

Postcards are what people send when they visit a place. I think that all immigrants feel that sense of transience. Sometimes people don't accept the idea of being here permanently; they deny it. Their denial is a form of hope, the hope of having the choice to return. "

Rawi Hage was born in 1964 in Beirut to a family that, in 1978, would go into temporary exile in Cyprus in order to escape the civil war. At the age of 18, he again left Lebanon, this time for New York City, where he lived for nine years. Towards the end of his stay in the United States, he began studying photography at the New York Institute of Photography. In 1991, he immigrated to Montreal, where he earned an Arts Diploma from Dawson College, then a Bachelor's degree in visual arts from Concordia University.

It was during this time that one of his professors, Raymonde April, brought him to see photography as a medium that can become very aggressive, very unjust . . . at the documentary level, because it can be easily manipulated by the media. Hage opposes that pernicious effect on the medium by incorporating his photos-which deal mainly with immigration, war and racism-into fictional contexts where many voices summon each other. Somewhat like a Vermeer who has metamorphosed, through his art, the images of a camera obscura, he transforms his photographs so as to make them unsuited to hurried consumption or sensationalist use.

In his work Care of Raymonde, for example, not only does Rawi Hage transform his photos into postcards that he mails to April, but he also uses them as the basis for an imaginary narrative with exile as its theme: The images on some of the postcards reflect memories of past existence, while the written texts express the living present or a longed-for past. In this way, he creates an ambiguous realm, an undefined space between the fictitious and the real, a paradox, a mirror of a persona caught between two existences, or at least between two places, two cultures.

Rawi Hage has participated in solo and collective exhibitions in Canada, Lebanon, France and Colombia. The Canadian Museum of Civilization and the Musée de la civilisation de Québec have acquired some of his works.