My condition as a Palestinian artist in the diaspora, dispossessed of the right of return, is both individual and collective. Unique and ubiquitous. On the ground in the occupied territories, life is characterized by a deep fear of ethnic cleansing and a pervasive stagnancy; in the diaspora there is a desperation for belonging and a hunger to have a functional, lived experience on the land of Palestine, among Palestinians. For the latter, much if not all our experiences of Palestine are digitally mediated – online, we seethe with rage as we witness the violence of Zionism, we weep at the footage of land we cannot experience with all of our senses. In May 2021, the electronic intifada sparked by the Sheikh Jarrah demonstrations against illegal Israeli incursions on private Palestinian homes put my life in a standstill. I spent days in my bed watching the events unfold. The same thing happened in 2022 when the legendary journalist Shireen Abu Akleh was murdered in cold blood by an Israeli soldier. A sense of solidarity has emerged – not just amongst Palestinians who shared, resposted, and commented, but in an ever widening circle of digital citizens who were seeing the injustice anew. However, with this digital mobilization comes an ever-growing frustration with the inability to change things IRL (in real life). Through this exhibition, I hope to better understand the inheritance of Nakba trauma, as well as the role of witnessing, when it comes to being a Palestinian in diaspora who experiences the world through many layers of digital mediation and alienation.
All-Day Olive Pits
83 sculptures, 1 x 0.5 cm
Bronze
family meal, falafel, hummus, foul, double dipping, traces, breadcrumbs, breaking bread, work breakfast, communal, community, cooties, black olives, green olives, stuffed olives, marinated olives, spicy olives, grilled olives, olive oil, food fixes everything.
I would say that the thesis of this exhibition is the work All-Day Olive Pits. Although I grew up with Palestinian olives served at every meal, I only understood what a true staple they are when I visited Palestine and took part in mealtimes at the A.M. Qattan Foundation and Inash Al-Usra. Communal breakfasts would fuel the entire team for the whole day, with everyone dipping their bread in the same plate; this felt like a bonding ‘trust fall’ activity in the midst of the pandemic. Once the meal was finished, left behind were mounds and mounds of olive pits, both collective and personal. Contributing to these mounds is the closest I have felt to an active sense of being Palestinian amongst Palestinians. I decided to give this experience the literal and figurative weight it holds in my life by casting olive pits in bronze. On the whole, the work resonates with a feeling that Sandi Hilal describes, “Even if I go to a place for three days, I can still contribute to the public sphere of the place. I can still be a subject and a host; I can still belong.”
Embroidery
deconstructed heritage, reconstructed meanings, escape plans, cosmic encounters, the four elements, the bride’s comb, mothers-in-law, platonic unsolids
Although I work in many mediums, embroidery is my most constant form of artistic expression. My embroidery work is mostly done in cross-stitch, which is a Palestinian tradition that I am committed to conserving from a craft perspective and further developing from a conceptual one, as I contemporize the motifs and focus on balancing positive and negative space in the compositions. The maps in my thesis act both as containers and as speculative escape plans. On the whole, embroidery connects me to Palestine ancestrally given that I grew up watching my grandmother cross-stitch, as well as archivally, since there is endless knowledge to glean about the history of the craft.
Embroidery 1 | Sacred Compound
40 x 40 cm
Cotton thread on aida cloth
This embroidery was free-form and entirely improvised. It began by imagining the first structured forms that would have appeared from the Big Bang. It became a dreamscape full of archways and staircases that evolved into an artistic interpretation of an aerial view of Al Haram Al Sharif and Al Aqsa Mosque in Jerusalem. Finally, the work became a composition of the five elements of air, fire, wind, water and space.
Embroidery 2 | Letter to Salwa
40 x 40 cm
Cotton thread on aida cloth
In “Letter to Salwa,” which I created for my future mother-in-law, I integrate a wide range of wedding and fertility symbolism such as the bridal comb and the pomegranate. The two birds facing each other reference a story I learned regarding how illiterate women would “write” home to their mothers via embroidery. If the birds are facing one another then it would signal to the bride’s mother that she is getting along with her mother-in-law. If they are facing away from another, then it means that the bride’s relationship with her husband’s mother is rife with struggle. I am struck by the way in which embroidery functions as a missive of Palestinian social relations, both within Palestine itself and in the diaspora. As a form of pictorial writing, it is an early form of “identity art”, whereby women communicated a highly detailed set of information about their village, religion, marital status, and social standing.
Embroidery 3 | How, Though?
40 x 40 cm
Cotton thread on aida cloth
Taken from a line in a poem I wrote as part of a previous artwork titled Practicing Dying, the Arabic text translates to “how can we blossom while Palestine wilts?” There is an all-encompassing sense of survivor’s guilt that comes with being a Palestinian in diaspora. In his book I Saw Ramallah, Mourid Barghouti touches upon this. He writes,
“How did I sing for my homeland when I did not know it? Should I be praised or blamed for my songs? Did I lie a little? A lot? Did I lie to myself? To others? What love is it that does not know the beloved?…But what remains to the exile except this kind of absentee love?”
When looking at the phenomena of survivor’s guilt from a wider lens, Paul Connerton in his theory volume, The Spirit of Mourning, postulates that testimony functions as a form of survival, and looks closely at the work of Elie Wiesel and Primo Levi, placing them in a wider discourse about historical loss. He writes,
“The survivor’s sentiment of indebtedness means that, however much they may feel the tug of a voice within them telling them to stop mourning the past, they find themselves visited by an even more compelling sense of obligation to serve as the emissary of the dead…For Wiesel, not to transmit the history of their disappearance would be to betray the dead. For Levi, not to transmit the history of his annihilating experience would be the ultimate annihilation.”
In their essay Moore and Qabaha write that, “The close fit that has obtained between trauma studies and recuperated Holocaust histories, and the use of trauma discourse to sediment Israeli self- definition, have deferred acknowledgement of Palestinian trauma as a political and ethical imperative,” and so we see it is ironically Jewish writers commemorating the Holocaust that we learn the most from when understanding the Nakba and ongoing ethnic cleansing of Palestinians. This work gestures towards the kind of activism I would hope to do in the UAE and abroad if I weren’t so afraid of the repercussions. How, Though? is both a swan song and rallying cry, holding a mirror to attendees of the exhibit and all Palestinians in diaspora with its haunting, unanswerable questions.
Embroidery 4 | Almost Solid
40 x 40 cm
Cotton yarn on aida cloth
Both this embroidery and Hills of Ramallah I consider to be tests — hence the use of a larger Aida canvas which is easier to embroider on. In this case, I wanted to push cross-stitch further by overlaying diagonal, horizontal, vertical stitches. Conceptually, I wanted to work with the Platonic solid as a form of study, as one does when they are learning to draw. Given that much of I Would Treat Lightly has to do with childlike impulses, Almost Solid is a continuation of that thread. As a child, I would doodle cubes in the margins of all my school notebooks, and in this work I am imagining having attended a Palestinian school where embroidery would have been part of the curriculum.
Embroidery 5 | Hills of Ramallah
25 x 20 cm
Cotton yarn on aida cloth
As I prepared to build Uneven Staircase, I wanted to gain intimate knowledge of the form. The steep hills I went up and down by foot and by car all summer were symbolized throughout in I Would Tread Lightly by staircases; I began by doing my version of a quick sketch, which in this case was a cross-stitch embroidery on a large-weave aida cloth.
Embroidery 6 | I Would Tread Lightly
40 x 40 cm
Cotton thread on linen
This embroidery is a diagram of the exhibition I Would Tread Lightly. When asked what medium I work in, more and more the truest answer feels like “negative space.” I think most about the space surrounding my works, i.e. the flow of footsteps around objects, the movement of eyeballs from one word to the next. I think the most work happens in the in-between — in the pauses between thoughts, in the blank space between artworks. Hence, I wanted to embroider the container of the space i.e. the exhibition walls to form intimacy and understanding. Technically, it was an extremely difficult work as I attempted to achieve uniform lines in linen, treating as one would a structured Aida cloth. I also used thinner thread than is traditionally used for Palestinian cross-stitch, as I was trying to achieve the gossamer materiality of an architectural blueprint. The grid was so small that there was only room for half a cross-stitch per square.
Writing as Sculpture, Sculpture as Video aka Fugitive Information
Fugitive Information I
Stoneware
32 x 38 cm
Fugitive Information II
Acrylic
30 x 42 cm
Fugitive Information III
15 minutes
Color | Sound
Crutch
Porcelain and clear epoxy resin
7 x 14 cm
Traveling to Palestine is colored by intense anxiety — depending on your interrogator, you are questioned for hours and often rejected at the border. Because I was worried about carrying a notebook that would be found and deemed grounds for rejection, I decided to start a fresh notebook once I had safely arrived, and to censor my writing in case the notebook would be found on my way out of Palestine. The paranoia around being surveilled seeped into my dreams and subconscious, and extends to living in the UAE.
I made an impression of the aforementioned fresh notebook and of myself writing in it; I was interested in making bodily impressions in clay as a parallel to the impressions that were made upon my body and mind by visiting Palestine and walking around Ramallah and Jerusalem. I chose the form of a clay tablet as a reference to ancient forms of communication in Mesopotamia — private messages were covered with an additional layer of clay, which is resonant with the veil I intended to throw upon my own writing. The clay tablet broke thanks to an unwieldy table and a chaotic studio visit; I thought this was appropriate given how much anxiety had been absorbed by the notebook. In Fugitive Information III I made a video of myself burying the tablet by the Abrahamic Family House, which also feels appropriate given the crimes that the UAE is helping to sweep under the rug as it builds such monuments
Finally, I decided to remake the clay tablet with a more robust type of clay (stoneware) and to sculpt it so that it mimics both rolling hills and a fluttering page. In Fugitive Information I, as I write about the hills into the notebook being pressed into clay, my hand leaves impressions of its movements and hence (re)creates the hills. In this work, my body sculpts a landscape — this is the initial attempt to encapsulate the feeling of walking in the hills surrounding Ramallah, Palestine for the first time, and developing a familiarization with what would have been “my” land in a visceral, experienced way. In its counterpart work, the acrylic pages of Fugitive Information II are unbound and transparent, pointing to how fleeting the source memory is. Once the memory is made, it recedes into the horizon of the mind. By using digital fabrication techniques such as vector drawing and laser cutting to print the hills of Ramallah, we lose the details of the ancient olive groves and are left with an anonymous hillscape, pointing to the land grabbing impulse that such holy land seems to incite. Working more deeply with redaction and self-censorship, I turned to the writing series Palestine Striations.
Redacted Writing or A Subject in the War Machine
Even before I arrived in Palestine for the first time ever, to do an artist residency at the A.M. Qattan Foundation, I was seized by anxiety, paranoia and nightmares. I had been warned that I could be rejected at the border for simply saying that I was a Palestinian artist and that I was interested in preserving embroidery. The organizing entity warned that saying I had an official invite would actually hurt my chances of entering. So, in my anxiety-induced nightmares about Israeli security, I would have to go back “home” with my tail between my legs …to Kuwait? To Abu Dhabi? To backpack in Europe forever?
I understood that to enter I had to uphold the lie that Israelis tell themselves about Palestine —that they have conquered it completely i.e. that it no longer exists or that it never existed in the first place. To do this, I also had to lie to myself. I focused on several things before arriving in Israel for the first time. First, I deleted all traces of BDS activity and even identification as a Palestinian from my digital presence. Second, I deleted all emails and messages that stated I would be going to Palestine for an art residency. Third, I deleted the numbers of everyone I knew in Palestine, and wrote the number of the woman organizing my residency backwards on the back of a museum postcard hidden in my luggage in case I had to reach her. Fourth, I made a fake tourist itinerary on Google maps and titled it “Israel.” Finally, thanks to my own “archive fever,” I took screenshots of everything I deleted and hid them in a password-encrypted digital vault. The key to my entry, I told myself, was to convince myself of the lie. I would repeat to myself, “they are entitled to my country. This is their land.”
I decided to read Deleuze’s theories on Palestine to see if I could understand the psychology behind my own will to disappear so that I could reappear in Palestine, finally. The term “terra nullius” came to my attention, “[which] is linked specifically to the problem of the disappearance of the other, interpreted here as the continuing social production of collective displacement-and replacement within a particular form of settler-colonialism – Zionism.” I found that to enter Zionist logic I had to adopt their attitude to my own self, I essentially had to other myself so that I could displace Liane the Palestinian artist, great-granddaughter of Nakba martyrs, and replace her with Liane the beguiling Jewish-adjacent tourist. I had to practice the ultimate tool of Zionist survival i.e. mental self deception, which according to Jon Elster as paraphrased by Marcelo Svirsky,
“lead[s] to a collective belief involving the obliteration of objects that are unpleasant and incongruent with the way the Zionist project is discursively implemented. According to Elster, self-deception involves a dual commitment to incompatible or contradictory beliefs: the one that one holds, and that which one believes is grounded in evidence (Elster 1983: 149–50). Elster deconstructs the operation of self-deception through ‘a four-step process: (1) arriving at the well-grounded belief; (2) deciding that it is unpalatable; (3) suppressing it and only then; (4) adhering to another and more tolerable belief’.”
Through the Deleuzian lens, I also learned the term memoricide, which is “a displacement or disturbance in the process of recollection occurring at the last movement or aspect of the actualisation of the past in the present.” I understood that I had to momentarily scrub my own memory too of its links to Palestine, or at least be able to conceal all evidence of my Palestinian-ness. I wore a blue-and-white bandana and left my locks hanging long and visible. I wore a top in a deep-V to display my decollete in an unislamic fashion, topped by a blue crystal necklace very much like one could see on an Israeli tourist in Goa or Costa Rica. I practiced my lines, my coquettish glances. It felt like a work by Andrea Fraser.
Once I had scrubbed myself clean of myself, I entered Palestine; the territory was a terra nullius for me too, as I had expunged myself with the Zionist tools of self-deception. I deleted the fake agenda I had created for border patrol, canceled hotel bookings at Israeli hotels. As I entered and began to remember who I was once more, the poignancy was almost too much to bear. I began to film myself during my first breakfast in Palestine. Then I filmed my first bus ride, my first shower, and so on. This became a series of almost fifty timelapse videos which I used as a reference when writing Palestine Striations. I use the word “Striations” in the sense of Deleuze and Guattari, wherein borders, lines, divisions, categorical and binary thinking all aggregate to make up the war machine, which creates striated space – the way in which Palestine has been carved up to be part of an apartheid state is the pinnacle of striation, as is the limitation on movement for its citizens.
My angst about having grown up in the lands of others was psychologically transferred into the relief to finally be on land and amongst people that felt like my own — the mundane videos I made of myself doing quotidian things was an affirmation of this. Finally, I gave myself the “permission to narrate”, for my life up until then had felt like they had been conducted in vitro, all leading up to these series of affirming moments. The resulting works in Palestine Striations are redacted statements and observations from my Palestine notebooks and videos; they are scanned and printed on vellum as an invisible gesture towards the screenshots I took and kept in a vault before going to Palestine; the use of vellum as opposed to solid, opaque paper is a nod to the show title, I Would Tread Lightly, where self-preservation and self-expression are in a precarious balance. I try to mark the ways in which my movement as a nomadic artist (again, in the D - G sense) is disrupted by Palestinian, Israeli, and worldwide state apparatuses. The work is made with my non-dominant writing hand for multiple reasons — first, it reflects the sense of childlike discovery and learning. Second, it follows the vein of the Surrealists who did the same in order to unlock the right brain and the subconscious mind; the more I wrote with my left hand the more I unlocked sublimated impressions of my time in Palestine. Finally, by reducing the legibility of the writing, I added a layer of mediation and further protected myself from audience members looking cursorily.
Serial Sculptures
Given the UN General Assembly recognition of Palestine as a sovereign nation, it is against international law for Palestinians to be held in prison by their occupiers. All 4700 Palestinians currently held in occupier prisons are held based on their protest of the Israeli occupation, making them political prisoners. Making my work is a prayer. Whilst the effort of making serial sculptures is often mundane and feels endless, the goal is endurance and empathy with the solitude and isolation that Palestinian political prisoners feel, although in my case the condition is voluntary whilst it is absolutely and violently imposed on the prisoners.
Viktor Frankl, in his book Man’s Search for Meaning, wrote about those living in concentration camps,
“Former prisoners, when writing or relating their experiences, agree that the most depressing influence of all was that a prisoner could not know how long his term of imprisonment would be. He had been given no date for his release. (In our camp it was pointless even to talk about it.) Actually a prison term was not only uncertain but unlimited. A well-known research psychologist has pointed out that life in a concentration camp could be called a ‘provisional existence.’ We can add to this by defining it as a ‘provisional existence of unknown limit.’ …The Latin word finis has two meanings: the end or the finish, and a goal to reach. A man who could not see the end of his ‘provisional existence’ was not able to aim at an ultimate goal in life. He ceased living for the future, in contrast to a man in normal life. Therefore the whole structure of his inner life changed; signs of decay set in which we know from other areas of life.”
Given this comparable existential state that results from having no sense of a future life, we find that Palestinians living under administrative detention are in a similarly hopeless position. They are held without charge or trial — neither they nor their lawyers know what crime they have even committed in the first place. Their files are deemed secret and go to military court, where military judges often give arbitrary sentences without even looking at the prisoner’s file which is not even in Arabic or English. Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch have issued multiple statements on the illegality of such courts, which try citizens in military courts and keep legal files from Palestinian lawyers.
Helplessness that continuously compounds and is colored with frustration and sadness is part and parcel of the Palestinian experience. In addition to hunger strikes, political prisoners often revolt or even find means of escape. At the time of this writing, incredible activists such as Khader Adnan and Walid Daqqah (the latter has been held in occupier prisons for 37 years and managed to have a child by smuggling his sperm out of prison) are both on hunger strike and are in critical condition. As I edit this essay today, May 1 2023, Khader Adnan, husband and father of nine, has died in Israeli custody. Whilst I made the following works about Palestinian political prisoners I learned about many nuances related to the Zionist prison system and its illegal practices thanks to Milena Ansari, International Advocacy Officer at Addameer Prisoner Support and Human Rights Association.
Womb Amulets
29 sculptures, 9 x 9 cm
Stoneware, paper, and handbound thread dyed with iron oxide.
I have made 29 stitched clay amulets for each of the Palestinian women imprisoned in illegal occupier prisons as of January 2023. The amulets are made from pink stoneware and are abstracted wombs. Carved on the insides of the wombs are a series of letters and numbers; they have been inserted with pieces of paper, to mimic ancient spell-binding rituals for protection from Palestine and surrounding regions. Each amulet contains one of the names of the prisoners, who I aim to pray for and protect by not publicly exhibiting their names. I tried many different stitches and threads including embroidery thread, yarn, and bookbinding thread, before settling on binding these works with iron-oxide dyed and hand-knotted thread. In the end, I chose to create something that looked like it was of the flesh, perhaps like intestines.
Palestinian women held in occupier prisons are likely to be subjected to gender-based violence and threats of sexual molestation. They are robbed of basic rights and privacies such as the right to change their menstrual pads or privacy from male prison guards. This means that political prisoners who wear hijab must keep them on at all times of day and often develop alopecia and skin conditions as a result. Although female political prisoners are less often subjected to positional torture as male prisoners are, pregnant political prisoners are cuffed to hospital beds by their hands and feet while giving birth. Newborns stay in prison for 2 years with their mother and stand count when prisoners are rounded up and counted. Many of the children born in occupier prisons develop trauma from male voices. This is a prime example of “the exposure of Palestinians to chronic trauma; that is, trauma that repeatedly occurs," as stated by Lindsey Moore and Ahmed Qabaha.
Adding complexity to the situation of female political prisoners is their return to Palestinian society after their release, whereby the shame associated with their imprisonment is much higher than it is for their male counterparts. I threaded some of these amulets together as I considered the sisterhood that results from gender-based oppression. The threads are knotted together by a knot that is used for friendship bracelets (forward-backward hitch knot) and are made of muslin, which is a fabric used for making patterns when cutting out the pieces of a sewn garment. The fabric is dyed with iron oxide, which is a pigment extracted from red earth and symbolizes safety; it is a form of protection from the sun’s radiation, as it was the first known sunblock to be used by humans.
Unchilding
43 sculptures, 8 x 3 cm.
Glass marbles suspended in epoxy resin
Forty-three resin building blocks hold marbles for the Palestinian childhoods frozen in motion. As of May 2023, 170 children between the ages of 14 and 17 are held in prison, in an egregious breach of human rights and international law worldwide. The occupiers of Palestine are the only country in the world to hold children in prison. This is a full, illegal breach of the UN’s Convention on the Rights of the Child. Children, mostly boys, are arrested by their country’s occupiers in order to be deterred from activism and to stunt future generations of resistance and development. Zionist military courts try children as young as 12, and keep them in arbitrary detention until they are of legal age to be imprisoned, as was the case with Ahmed Manasra. Boys become men in prison, and Palestinian society lives with a series of amputated limbs. Children are also placed under house arrest by the Zionist forces, parents become stand-in prison guards and the family home becomes a prison cell. In this work, the children are suspended marbles and the resin building blocks are pawns in a wider political game.
The block with a sole marble is made in tribute to Ahmed Manasra, who has been in solitary confinement since November 2021, when he was 19. The United Nations General Assembly Standard Minimum Rules for the Treatment of Prisoners were revised in 2015 to extend restrictions on solitary confinement exceeding 15 days. Ahmed has been alone in a jail cell for X days and has developed schizophrenia as a result of this and compounded traumas inflicted by Zionist settlers and armed forces.
Tribute to the 12 Withheld Bodies of Palestinian Political Prisoners Who Died of Medical Neglect: Anis Doula, Aziz Owaisat, Faris Baroud, Nassar Taqatqa, Bassam Al-Sayeh, Sa’adi Al-Gharabli, Kamal Abu Wa’ar, Sami Al-Amour, Daoud Mohammad Al-Zubeidi, Mohammad Ghawadra, Nasser Abu Hamid and Khader Adnan.
15.24 x 15.24 x 5.08 cm.
Epoxy resin and porcelain clay.
“For Palestinian, there is no freedom, even in death,”says Milena Ansari, international advocacy officer at Addameer. The bodies of political prisoners are not released to their families as a form of collective punishment. They are buried in numbered graveyards, which are inaccessible to Palestinians. Parents lose sons without washing their bodies, as is part of the Islamic tradition. Spouses and children never get the closure of sprinkling earth and water on the bodies of their loved ones or reading the Quran at their funerals.
In the case of medical neglect, it appears that the corpses of political prisoners are not even buried — they are held indefinitely in refrigerators — the ultimate indignity. In this work, I aim to bring to light this injustice by combining two materials — one organic and the other synthetic — to give the sense of bodies in suspension at the threshold of life and death. I took impressions of crevasses and folds of my body with porcelain clay, then fired and glazed them with resin before suspending them in translucent resin blocks. The work was tedious, as I aimed to get pure white blocks without resin, and had to wait days between each centimeter of each resin pour. The patience this demanded felt congruent with the subject matter.
Painting
I Spun Around
Acrylic on canvas
360 x 180 cm
Waterfall
Acrylic on canvas
270 x 180 cm
Whilst meditating and praying on the condition of Palestinian political prisoners, I wanted to transmit my solidarity with them. They, like Palestinians in the diaspora, have been robbed of their connection to the land. The essence of this work is simplicity and pure observational delight. I made it as a response to the unique shades of the sunsets in Palestine…the vividness of the oranges…the copper and gold rays highlighting the wildflowers inspired a simultaneous sense of awe and comfort which I wanted to celebrate with an action painting, made by spinning in circles and spilling paint from a vessel I sculpted. It also relates to writing about the experience of the Palestinian landscape that is included in Palestine Striations.
Anti-Archive
These videos are anti-archival, meaning they are not meant to document anything, time, or place. They indicate moments of disassociation, which feels like a glitch in the human experience, or a rift in the space-time continuum.
1948
8 seconds
Color | Sound
A surreal moment on a bus: the time is 19:48, the year of the Nakba. I imagine I am time traveling back to that year. What if when I got off the bus Palestine was still free?
Glitch I
11 seconds
Color | Sound
Girls in Ramallah have a spontaneous lunch at a friend’s house mid-day before a night out. They chop and sauté vegetables from one of their family’s farms. I am invited to tag along, we walk a long way I am not familiar with. The home borders a refugee camp, it is an intimate space and I am an outside observer. An old bone is picked. Someone’s phone acts up every time it is connected to a charger. Dysfunction abounds, and it feels familiar, almost like home.
Glitch II
8 seconds
Color | Sound
A light needs replacing in a Ramallah apartment. It syncs with the music playing in an apartment.
Heaviness
Uneven Staircase
Wood
2.8 x 1 meters
Weight 1
Lead curtain weights dyed with iron oxide.
5 KGs.
Weight 2 Brick.
6 KGs.
Weight 3
Even brick.
1 KG.
Body Sculptures
5 minutes 58 seconds
Color | Sound
As previously mentioned, I decided to build an uneven staircase to simulate the steep hills surrounding Ramallah (page 8). This is inspired by the phenomenon of my body being sculpted by its movement up and down the hills (in fact, a group of men slowed down in their car one night while I was lugging groceries back up to the A.M. Qattan Foundation, and catcalled in Arabic, “like rocks,” presumably in relation to my backside). I made a series of videos related to going up and down the hills of Ramallah with bags and books, and included one in my thesis show, entitled Body Sculptures. In this video, I carry weights in both my arms and on my head as well, mimicking the ancestral feeling of deja vu — I had done this before, on this land — in the past I had walked home with jugs of water perched on my head and baskets of herbs in my arms. To add a performance art element I walked both forward and backward, the athleticism of which forced me to stop and rest; I would also stop and rest when I was walking with my groceries in Ramallah this past summer. I chose to make a green screen set because I wanted to highlight the inaccessibility of Palestine — I can edit it into the footage digitally, but I cannot travel there easily given that security flags repeated visits by Arabs, nor can I return indefinitely. Essentially, with a green screen behind me I am everywhere and nowhere.
Weights I, II, and III do not merely mimic the weights of my belongings this summer. They are inspired by a heaviness I felt on my chest one night after digitally witnessing a Palestinian mother grieve her martyred teenage son. The weight woke me up in the middle of my sleep and felt absolutely real, as though it was slowly taking the air out of my lungs. I found an outdoor pavement brick a few weeks later while I was conducting an outdoor art experiment that was uncannily closer to the weight and size of the object I had discerned in the middle of the night. I incorporated it and other found weights into Body Sculptures, and shot yet another video where I explain the symbolism of the weights. You can watch this video here:
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1hneh_qV0GNoEhglDCmgjIJJ7XHQDlQLk/view?usp=drivesdk
In terms of future work, what if I engaged with Israeli memoricide in a satirical manner? What would this entail? Perhaps I could forge documents that my family in Ramleh, Jerusalem, Haifa and Gaza all signed over land, property and in fact their entire culture (including our craft and family recipes) over to Israel. What about looking at cannabinoids i.e. the transmitters responsible for the “neurochemical function of forgetting”? In what ways can I close my eyes as a Palestinian to bring attention to how David Ben Gurion closed his eyes when passing Palestinian villages? Diana Taylor, writes in her book Performance,
“Dangerous seeing, seeing that which was not meant to be seen, puts people at risk in a society that polices the look. The mutuality and reciprocity of the look, which allows people to connect with others, gives way to unauthorized seeing. Functioning within the surveilling gaze, people dare not be caught seeing. Better to cultivate a careful blindness. Performance can stage percepticide, the triumph of the atrocity that impels us to close our eyes. The spectacles of violence leave us speechless and blinded. We have to deny what we see, and in shutting our eyes, we become complicit in the violence that surrounds us. Like Oedipus, we cannot look at the world we have created.”
These ideas inspired me to address the blindness that develops with compassion fatigue, i.e. the exhaustion that ensues after feeling too much and too often for others. I believe that one of the only ways to give dignity and compassion to those who are suffering is to at least witness their hardship, to feel it as deeply as possible through the mediation of screens.
In addition to NYUAD, this work was supported by the A.M. Qattan Foundation. The input of Bahaa Jobaa, the incredible Palestine textile and culture archivist/curator was invaluable, as was that of Tania Nasser and the team at Inash Al-Usra. The courage and diligence of the Addameer association for prisoner support and human rights will continue to motivate my work. The cause is lucky to have you.
Thank you to my professors:
First and foremost, Tarek Al-Ghoussein for being the beacon that brought me to this moment and being my forever inspiration. To my advisor Jill Magi, my art trip shaman Terri Geis, my Palestine parents Tina Sherwell and Jawad Al-Melehi.
Thank you to those who helped me make the work:
Shaikha Almazrou, Joanna Settle, Dustin Foster, Nelson Reyes, Anna Kurkova, Deepak Unnikrishnan, Jonny Farrow, Laura Schneider, Sandra Peters, Katia Arfara, Dale Hudson, Judi Olsen, Jonathan Bonner, Talha Muneer, Terry
May.
…for your time, wisdom, and encouragement.
I had an incredible amount of input from studio visitors:
Christiana di Marchi, Reem Fadda, Dima Srouji, Murtaza Vali, Joanna Settle, Archana Hande, Surabhi Sharma, Toral Gajarawala, Aaron Sherwell, Manthia Diawara, Marsha Ginsburg, Wendy Bednarz, Suhaila Takesh, Faustin Linyekula, Lawrence Abu Hamdan, Nada Reza, Laila Soliman, Nora Razian, Nadine Khalil, Isaac Sullivan,Jolaine Frizzell, Daniel Otero Torres, Ala Younis, Munira Al Sayegh, Daniel Rey, Dania Al Tamimi, Mays Albaik, Michael Ang, and Mariett Westermann.
My support system in the UAE, Kuwait, Romania, Ramallah, and the US:
Samir Al-Stouhi, Yousef Al Ghusain, Dana Al-Ghusain, Nadia Shaat, Maria Nadolu, Yasmine Al Qaddoumi, Fadi Quran, Mirna Bamieh, Garrett, Michael Baers, Maya Al-Stouhi, Sheriban Diab, Dalal Al Tawheed, Fadah Al Omar, Haya Alissa, Grainne Hebeler, Ghazi Mulaifi, Charmaine Mulaifi, Tamara Qabazard, Mariam Al-Shatti, Catherine Raffoul, Maha Al Sartawi, Rana Sadik, Adele Cipste, Nadine Khalil, Vivi Zhu, Majd Alloush,
…your support has been incredibly invaluable and at the core of my sanity.
In loving memory of :
Salima Dawood, Nazira Shukri, Abdulkarim Shaath, and Noureddin Al Ghusain, who connected me to Palestine before I was even born.
Dalal Almohanna, for whom I still spin ecstatically.
Tarek Al-Ghoussein, who paved my way.