ART-PRESENTATION: Jerusalem Lives,Part I

Bob Gramsma, Facts on the ground, OI#17241, 2017, Concrete, steel reinforcement, soil, Photo by: Hamoudi Shehade. © The Palestinian Museum, The Palestinian Museum ArchiveOn Nakba Day (May 15th), Palestinians remember their exile from their ancestral homeland as well as their suffering in refugee camps and the subsequent occupation of the West Bank and Gaza. The Israeli strategy of expelling Palestinians from their land was a slow and deliberate process. According to Israeli historian Ilan Pappe, Zionist leaders and military commanders met regularly from March 1947 to March 1948, when they finalised plans to ethnically cleanse Palestine (Part II).

By Dimitris Lempesis
Photo: Palestinian Museum Archive

“JERUSALEM LIVES” is the title of a multi-faceted project and the inaugural exhibition of the Palestinian Museum. The exhibition is an attempt to study and examine the city of Jerusalem as a case study, a microcosm or condensed laboratory that metaphorically represents globalization and its failures, and to find answers that inspire us to struggle for a better future. Veering away from clichés, the exhibition exposes the neoliberal colonial and imperial challenges imposed by the Israeli occupation that Jerusalem and its Palestinian inhabitants are facing. Four chapters explore the concept, beginning with a central multidisciplinary exhibition that demonstrates the emanation, effects and limitations of globalization in the city of Jerusalem, through various audio-visual materials. Commissioned or refabricated, site-specific artworks form the second chapter is exhibited on the grounds and gardens of the Palestinian Museum. In the third chapter, the public programme will directly collaborate with civic and non-governmental organizations in the city, which have adopted a long-term working methodology of collective communal struggle. The JERUSALEM LIVES publication is the fourth and closing chapter that will focus on knowledge production as a frontier of resistance. Basel Abbas and Ruanne Abou-Rahme work together across a range of sound, image, text, installation and performance practices. Their practice probes a contemporary landscape marked by seemingly perpetual crisis and an endless “present”, one that is increasingly shaped by a politics of desire and disaster. They have been developing a body of work that questions this suspension of the present and searches for ways in which an altogether different imaginary can emerge. Rula Halawani was born, grew up and still lives in the Mount of Olives district in East Jerusalem. Growing up under occupation and working as a photographer in an intensely political environment, Halawani’s work demonstrates a strong relationship between art and politics. Rula Halawani shoots and produces images of the changes taking place daily on the Palestinian territory. She is the founder and director of the photography department of the Birzeit University. Emily Jacir employs conventional devices of Conceptualism and Performance art to call attention to the plight of the Palestinian people. In her research-based films, installations, performances, and photographs, Emily Jacir investigates issues around movement and migration. For her multipart work “Where We Come From” (2001-03), Jacir posed a question to Palestinians living in the occupied territories and abroad: “If I could do anything for you, anywhere in Palestine, what would it be?” In carrying out the resulting tasks and documenting her actions in a series of photographs, texts, and videos, she presents her viewers with a complex set of perspectives on the effects of the Israeli occupation on her life and community. Khalil Rabah is a Palestinian conceptual artist who works in a wide variety of media. His method can be seen as a form of artistic science that focuses on questioning history and memory, specifically in the context of his native Palestine. A pioneering conceptual artist, Mohammed Kazem uses overlooked remnants of the everyday to measure and navigate global transformations. Since 1990, Kazem has created visual representations of sounds by vigorously scratching and gouging paper with scissors. Born in Jerusalem, Vera Tamari is a visual artist, historian of Islamic art, art educator and curator. As an artist she specializes in ceramic sculpture and conceptual art. Several major themes remain consistent in Tamari’s work throughout her career. In “Going for a Ride” (2002), she took a collection of crushed cars and arranged them in a line on a stretch of asphalt that had been laid down on an abandoned football field, a deliberately absurd evocation of traffic made from a pileup of wreckage on a road leading nowhere. Participating artists: Ruanne Abou Rahme & Basel Abbas, Sultan F.N. Abdulaziz Al-Saud, Maria Thereza Alves, Simone Bitton, CAMP, Rain Wu & Eric Chen, Bob Gramsma, Rula Halawani, Khaled Hourani, Iman Issa, Ahed Izhiman, Athar Jaber, Emily Jacir, Khaled Jarrar, Mohammed Kazem, Yazan Khalili, Oscar Murillo, Khalil Rabah, Adrian Villar Rojas, Sudarshan Shetty, Nida Sinnokrot, Vera Tamari and  Inass Yassin. The Palestinian Museum is an independent institution dedicated to supporting an open and dynamic Palestinian culture nationally and internationally. The Museum presents and engages with new perspectives on Palestinian history, society and culture. It also offers spaces for creative ventures, educational programmes and innovative research.

Info: Curator: Reem Fadd, Assistant Curators: Fawz Kabra and Yara Abbas, The Palestinian Museum, Museum Street, (off Omar Ibn Al-Khattab Street), Birzeit, Palestine, Duration: 27/8-15/12/17, www.palmuseum.org

Ahed Izhiman , Courtesy Ahed Izhiman, The Palestinian Museum Archive
Ahed Izhiman , Courtesy Ahed Izhiman, The Palestinian Museum Archive

 

 

Ahed Izhiman , Courtesy Ahed Izhiman, The Palestinian Museum Archive
Ahed Izhiman , Courtesy Ahed Izhiman, The Palestinian Museum Archive

 

 

Ahed Izhiman , Courtesy Ahed Izhiman, The Palestinian Museum Archive
Ahed Izhiman , Courtesy Ahed Izhiman, The Palestinian Museum Archive

 

 

Ahed Izhiman , Courtesy Ahed Izhiman, The Palestinian Museum Archive
Ahed Izhiman , Courtesy Ahed Izhiman, The Palestinian Museum Archive

 

 

Yazan Khalili, Regarding Distance, The Landscape, 2010, Courtesy of the artist and LawrieShabibi gallery, The Palestinian Museum Archive
Yazan Khalili, Regarding Distance, The Landscape, 2010, Courtesy of the artist and LawrieShabibi gallery, The Palestinian Museum Archive

 

 

Yazan Khalili, The Bounty, 2014, Courtesy of the artist and LawrieShabibi gallery, The Palestinian Museum Archive
Yazan Khalili, The Bounty, 2014, Courtesy of the artist and LawrieShabibi gallery, The Palestinian Museum Archive

 

 

Iman Issa, Heritage Studies #5, 2015, Aluminum, vinyl text , Installation, The Palestinian Museum Archive
Iman Issa, Heritage Studies #5, 2015, Aluminum, vinyl text , Installation, The Palestinian Museum Archive

 

 

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