Hanna Hallaq

This graduation project documents my personal experience as a hotel employee, blurring the boundaries between work, life, and art. By shifting between different modes of image-making – some footage captured through surveillance cameras and some on a mobile phone – it constructs a visual narrative that explores the relationship between surveillance, identity, and personal expression within the everyday workplace.

At the center of the installation is a work of video and sound, presented on a four-channel split screen, displaying simultaneous surveillance camera footage of my movements throughout the hotel. Accompanying the video are 3D-printed models of hotel spaces (a guest room and an elevator), alongside digitally printed photographs taken both inside and outside the hotel.

Many people know the hotel as a place of vacation. For me, a hotel is a kind of home.

I have worked in a hotel since I was fourteen, as a housekeeper, a laundry manager, and, in recent years, a security guard. I know the building as I know myself: every door, every corridor, every corner.

In this project, my daily routines as a hotel security guard merge with my artistic actions. My workplace becomes a nocturnal playground, where ordinary tasks are transformed into acts of observation and creation.

I place my photographs and sculptures throughout the hotel, in the dining room, empty guest rooms, the elevator, and the corridors, and then photograph them. Through multiple perspectives, shifting between the hotel’s surveillance cameras, my mobile phone, and a GoPro camera I attached to myself, I simultaneously guard the hotel and become absorbed into it, as though it were an inner world that is at once real and imagined.

Special thanks to the Musrara School of Art and Society and to the entire faculty for their guidance, support, and encouragement.