Stories from my Grandmother’s House
Video and sound, 6 min 40 s; virtual reality experience, 25 min, 2025
Stories from my Grandmother’s House is a virtual reality (VR) project that tells the story of the artist’s Palestinian-Armenian family across several centuries. The journey begins in a room in her grandmother’s house in Haifa, Palestine, in the 1930s, and time travels through different eras: from a shipwreck off the coast of Akka in the 1700s to the streets of Palestine.
The project combines archival research with contemporary explorations of Haifa to explore how present realities and personal connections to Haifa have been shaped by the social and political period of British Mandate Palestine. Utilizing VR as a means of travel, the installation circumvents time, place and contemporary borders to allow viewers to access places that might be otherwise restricted and to experience Palestine as it would have been during Maroun Tomb’s lifetime and through Kelleyan’s family history.
The project explores whether VR can give us spatial memories, valuing alternative systems of knowledge such as sensory perception and oral histories. Stories From My Grandmother’s House intends to create a space where one can obtain knowledge through feeling and to carry heritage forward as living memory into the future.
Mado Kelleyan is an artist and experience designer specializing in how technology can be used to augment imagination. Her work uses immersive technologies to create portals into stories that are not so often told, engaging audiences through rich, multi-sensory experiences that foster connection, interaction and discovery.
Kelleyan holds an MA from the Royal College of Art, UK. Her work has been featured in Esquire Middle East, Stir World, and The Dezeen Awards. She has exhibited in London at the Festival of Architecture, Breeze Film Festival, Design Festival, and Al Ma’mal Foundation for Contemporary Art in Jerusalem.