Palestinian Art Research Articles

The Seed Keepers

Seeds always presuppose cooperative arrangements of tending and care. Seeds are useful to think with because they connect the past, present, and future, carrying old biologies and inherited histories as well as genetic transformations and new possibilities. This essay traces a history of botanical classification in herbariums, photographs, and seed libraries in Palestine that stretches back to the nineteenth century. Through individuation and taxonomic ordering, colonial botanical archives isolated plants and people from history and vanished Palestinians from their land. The colonial archive's formal organization and orientation to preserving dead or disappearing objects also opens space to investigate the proliferation of archive-based artworks by contemporary Palestinian artists such as Larissa Sansour and Jumana Manna. Sansour and Manna's artworks demonstrate that the value of seeds lies in their cultivation, transformations, and local adaptations. The seed is an alternative archive that maintains the vitality of being in the world. The seed is well-suited to planting Palestinian futures that are living, growing, and changing.

Shifting perspectives: exploring the intersection of traditional and digital photography in contemporary artistic practices

The advent of digital photography has ushered in a dynamic era marked by evolving paradigms and practices in visual representation. This research delves into the profound interplay between traditional and digital photographic modalities, investigating their impact on contemporary art and society. Through an art-based research approach, this study examines an innovative artistic experiment conducted by Palestinian artist Ahmed Al-Saffarini. While Al-Saffarini's work serves as a starting point for philosophical reflection, it is the broader conceptual exploration of digital and traditional photography that forms the core of this research. By burying vintage photographic negatives underground for an extended period, Al-Saffarini sought to explore the transformative potential of integrating traditional and digital photography techniques. Drawing on a rich body of literature encompassing philosophical discourse, artistic practice, and technological advancements, this research elucidates key themes shaping the trajectory of photography in the digital age. Phenomenological perspectives illuminate the experiential dimensions of perception and consciousness inherent in the photographic medium, while scholarly debates on analogue versus digital photography underscore the epistemic complexities and artistic possibilities engendered by technological innovation. Furthermore, this study highlights photography's role as a conduit for memory, identity formation, and cultural expression in contemporary society. Through an analysis of Al-Saffarini's artistic experiment and its implications, this research contributes to a deeper understanding of photography's transformative potential and its evolving significance within the artistic landscape. Emphasising the importance of interdisciplinary collaboration and creative experimentation, this study advocates for the integration of art-based research methodologies in scholarly inquiry, thereby enriching our comprehension of photography's multifaceted nature and its enduring relevance in the digital era.

Mapping and countermapping dispossession in Palestine

AbstractIn their claim to distance from reality, maps seek power from representation. Maps are constituted by a particular set of practices that are enmeshed within wider social relations. Maps, then, are a powerful vantage point for understanding the geometries of power. Under settler colonialism, geography is constantly reshaped and reconfigured by expansionist and eliminatory logics. Such is the case in Palestine, where Israeli settler colonialism has fragmented the map of historic Palestine into messily separated archipelagos. As Palestinian geographies are constantly being reconfigured under Israeli settler colonialism, can maps catch up? How do we locate Palestine on the map? I take up these questions by focusing on the 1948 and 1967 Palestinian territories as two spatio‐temporally differentiated locations of settler colonial spatial reconfiguration. Using a counter‐map designed by Palestinian artist Haya Zaatry, I highlight the importance of counter‐mapping in bringing into sharp relief the conjunctural layering of dispossession in Palestine. If dominant colonial maps are about the neat packaging of lived realities into dominant spatio‐temporal demarcations, counter‐maps are about highlighting the ghostly stories and embodied spatial practices and processes of living within and beyond such demarcations.

“Politics in Matter”: Concrete Expressions in Contemporary Palestinian Art of Resistance

This article examines the utilization of concrete as a medium for artistic expression in the art produced by contemporary Palestinian artists residing in the State of Israel. The author proposes that when considered through Eyal Weizman’s lens of "politics in matter," concrete emerges in contemporary Palestinian art as a significant material intersecting with the broader political fabric, an artistic medium intricately linked to the ongoing struggle for Palestinian identity, nationalism, and human rights. Within the geopolitical context of Israel/Palestine, concrete thus gives rise to multifaceted associations of struggle, violence, defense, and fear. Contemporary Palestinian artists actively engage with concrete, repurposing it as a tool for artistic, civic, and political resistance. They challenge dominant narratives, contest prevailing historical accounts, and confront oppressive structures. Their works reimagine shared spaces, contest the erasure of Palestinian history, and amplify marginalized voices. Concrete becomes a material embodiment of the complexities experienced by Palestinian artists residing and working within the State of Israel, its finally symbolizing resistance and catalyzing the reimagining of alternative futures. This article provides a comprehensive analysis of how concrete is employed and represented within contemporary Palestinian artistic practices, shedding light on its role in shaping Palestinian experiences and contributing to a nuanced understanding of the Palestinian/Israeli context. By exploring the politics of concrete, the article enhances our understanding of its significance in contemporary Palestinian art and its place in the broader discourse of art history.

Morphing forms, undermining border regimes: in conversation with Khaled Jarrar

This short piece - written in exchange with Palestinian artist Khaled Jarrar - charts his work over the past decade as it deals with borders. In particular, it focuses on a set of linked projects in which the material from the Israeli 'Separation Wall' in the West Bank were transformed into art objects, which then served as the basis for purchasing agricultural land in Palestine. In a new phase for the project, the outputs harvested the land now morph again in order to infiltrate international boundaries under 'false pretences'. It is argued that Jarrar's work uses the specificities of the art market as well as material-bureaucratic conditions of national boundaries to draw attention to and undermine unjust borders.

Designed Geographies: Mona Hatoum

Known for her conceptual art, performances, and sculptures, Mona Hatoum is a Palestinian artist whose work since the 1980s has focused on the concept of homeland. Through metaphorical and tangible means, Hatoum explores identity, home, and homeland, touching on past, present, exile, and belonging. Through the prism of migration and aesthetics, Hatoum critically assesses and transforms the pain of physical and mental exile from multiple angles. Her works decode mental and physical migration, geography, identity, and the 'other' with a discerning eye. Exploring the meaning of settlement in the globalized era, Hatoum roots her search for the meaning of existence in her geographical origins. In her art, borders symbolize more than physical enclosures; they embody concepts of permission, annexation, prohibition, transit, and residence. Hatoum's concerns extend beyond personal struggles to broader societal and governmental issues. This article analyses Hatoum's cartographic works, such as "Present Tense", "Map" and "3D Cities", exploring their visual, contextual, metaphorical, and historical dimensions while examining the artist's experience of the challenges of migration.

Visual, Spatial and Temporal Aporias in the Post-Palestinian Films of Basma Alsharif

Abstract This article focuses on the films of diasporic Palestinian artist Basma Alsharif, analyzing the visual strategies she mobilizes to negotiate three aporias in Palestinian experience around visuality, space and mobility and temporality. Focusing on Ouroboros (2017) and Home Movies Gaza (2013), I explore the ethical ways she represents a situation of suspended violence without spectacularizing suffering or relying on overdetermined visual conventions. The films evoke both feelings of spatial constraint, and conversely, a diasporic expansiveness that characterizes a Palestinian structure of feeling. Finally, I look at Alsharif’s engagement with the concept of the eternal return, paying particular attention to the ways that it suggests a notion of time not predicated on the unitary, revolutionary (i.e., heteromasculine) subject and proposes a way forward not based on the exclusionary rhetoric of the nation-state. Throughout the article, I put her work in conversation with other female Palestinian filmmakers handling similar themes to identify emerging patterns in how Palestine is portrayed and conceived.

Rooting the Palestinian Shatat in Jordan: Art, Objects, and the Matter of Belonging

This article presents the concept of dispersed rooting in order to understand the significance of Palestinian visual and material productions in Jordan. The authors argue that the production of art and traditional clothing, as well as the consumption of souvenirs, constitutes rooting practices that connect exiled Palestinians to the broader Palestinian people and homeland within the shifting and negotiated limits of protracted displacement in Jordan. By considering the role of art and objects in the rooting of Palestinians, this article elucidates the importance of visual and material culture for the meaning of identity and belonging among a dispersed population of exiled Palestinian refugees. Specifically, it demonstrates how producing Palestinian art and tradition is deeply implicated in the reproduction of the Palestinian self and community. As the analysis indicates, Palestinians produce visual and material culture to root themselves in a world where Palestine persists, and where their belonging to it and its people remains inviolable.

Palestinian Artists and the Biennial, from “Baghdad 1974: A Summary of the First Arab Biennial of Fine Arts”

Abstract In 1974, Moroccan cultural journal Intégral published a special edition on the first Arab biennial of visual arts, which had just taken place in Baghdad. The two documents translated here come from this special edition, and both of them deal with the Palestinian presence at the landmark exhibition. Moroccan artist Mohamad Chebaa and Italian-Moroccan art historian Toni Maraini each consider Palestine an ideal arena for the development of decolonial “combat art,” but express disappointment with its pavilion's emphasis on folk idioms over images of armed struggle. The introduction to these documents situates them in relation to Moroccan and Palestinian discourses surrounding heritage and colonialism, arguing that the Palestinian context erodes the distinction between “folk” and “combat” art in ways foreign to the Casablanca-based intellectuals.

Introduction to “Revolutionary Painting and the Palestinian Revolution,” by Mohammed Chabâa, and “Palestinian Artists and the Biennial,” from Toni Maraini's “Baghdad 1974: A Summary of the First Arab Biennial of Fine Arts” (Both 1974)

Abstract In 1974, Moroccan cultural journal Intégral published a special edition on the first Arab biennial of visual arts, which had just taken place in Baghdad. The two documents translated here come from this special edition, and both of them deal with the Palestinian presence at the landmark exhibition. Moroccan artist Mohamad Chebaa and Italian-Moroccan art historian Toni Maraini each consider Palestine an ideal arena for the development of decolonial “combat art,” but express disappointment with its pavilion's emphasis on folk idioms over images of armed struggle. The introduction to these documents situates them in relation to Moroccan and Palestinian discourses surrounding heritage and colonialism, arguing that the Palestinian context erodes the distinction between “folk” and “combat” art in ways foreign to the Casablanca-based intellectuals.

To See in the Dark

Abstract Seeing with Palestine was a constitutive possibility in the anticolonial way of seeing from the moment of the Nakba, meaning “catastrophe,” the destruction of Palestinian society in 1948. This article traces this way of seeing in the genealogy of visual culture that emerged in Britain in dialogue with Black British cultural studies and art practice, based on the practices of Stuart Hall, George Lamming, John Berger, and Jean Mohr. It then discusses Palestinian artist Randa Maddah, whose work Berger described as “landswept.” The conclusion speculates on how to “see in the dark” via the Palestinian artists Basel Abbas and Ruanne Abou Rahme.

What Does Art History Have to Say About a Lebanese Sasquatch? The Body of Decolonial Struggle in Amanda Boulos's Art

Abstract This paper focuses on several works by the Palestinian-Canadian painter Amanda Boulos that communicate the shared desire of both Palestinians in the diaspora and Indigenous peoples of Canada to move beyond the normative identities of settler colonialism. Through co-ordinated social historical, formalist and iconographical readings of Boulos's work, I propose a shift in the discourse on global contemporary art, from postcolonial figures of the oriental, the subaltern and the hybrid to strategies of representation such as transformation, ambiguity and queering – a shift intended to foster alliances amongst members of BIPOC communities, against the divisive politics of settler colonialism in Palestine, Canada and elsewhere. To this end, the artworks are set in two interrelated contexts: one art historical and one more strictly political. Boulos's work is read in relation to that of contemporary artists dealing with postcolonial conflict zones, and Modern and contemporary Palestinian artists both in Palestine and its diaspora. Relevant political contexts for her work include Palestinian LGBTQ activism after the Second Intifada and the 2014 Israeli War on Gaza called Operation Protective Edge.

“From Palestine with Art”: Dreams of Sovereignty and Acts of Resistance at the 2022 Venice Biennale

For the 59th Venice Biennale, curator Nancy Nesvet and the Palestine Museum US in Woodbridge, Connecticut, organized the Collateral Event “From Palestine with Art” at the Palazzo Mora (European Cultural Center). “From Palestine with Art” presents the work of nineteen contemporary Palestinian artists who invite audiences to imagine a new landscape and way of life in a liberated Palestine. The exhibition interweaves moments of joy with themes of struggle, resistance, and injustice. The artists and curators turn away from gratuitous images of suffering and violence to embrace creative forms of fighting and solidarity where happiness and presence is a radical act of resistance. As Israel continues to occupy Palestinian land and execute unprovoked military actions against unarmed civilians, the exhibition shows that Palestinians are still here. Their presence, even if far from the Biennale’s main events, is a visual argument for liberation, while its physical distance is indicative of the ways that many aim to neglect the current situation.

“The Visual Poetry of the Work”

AbstractThis article addresses the work of the German-language philosopher and theorist Theodor W. Adorno and the Palestinian artist Mona Hatoum in order to ask after the form of the subject and the sense of life privileged in critique. I consider the form of the subject and the sense of the social presumed and generalized in Adorno in relation to his reading of Hegel and his discussion of race, anti-Blackness, anti-Semitism, and “the American landscape” in aphorisms twenty-eight and sixty-eight in Minima Moralia. Drawing on scholarship in Black and Indigenous studies, I argue that in Adorno a particular sense of the subject, with and against Adorno's language, is advanced: the subject of the law, right, property, and whiteness, what one might call the subject of settler life. I suggest that this is a sense of the subject that privileges its ethicality in relation to social violence and world, and I notice that this privilege is constitutive of what critique, for Adorno, is. I then turn to Hatoum and offer a reading of several of her works and installations alongside her discussion of her art in a series of interviews, where I focus on Light at the End (1989), Present Tense (1996), Hair Lines (1979), and Socle du Monde (1992–1993). I study Hatoum's work in order to understand the sense of the social it enlivens, and the sense of being and language it makes manifest, and I argue that, in Hatoum's work, art becomes critique, critique becomes a theorization of the social, and theorization becomes a temporal practice of sociality, an inessential, inidentical sharing in language and form. In Hatoum's art, a sociality of collective form displaces the critical terms of self-possession, self-orientation, and philosophical self-reflection, where property is unmoored as a logic of reading and life and a principle of form.

Not, not citizen: art and the making of fugitive sociality in the settler colony

ABSTRACT This paper takes up the entwinement of citizenship and the political in the writings of Engin Isin in the context of the Palestinians in Israel. It opens with an invitation to think with an artwork by the Palestinian artist Durar Bacri as a staging of fugitivity through a refusing of that which has been refused. Out of this I pose the question of whether such an act of refusal is political or not. I start by thinking with this artwork to unpack the settler colonial nature of Palestinian citizenship in Israel and how the figure at the centre of the painting is refusing the citizenship that is being refused him. From this I posit that not only is there a refusal of citizenship, but more there is an ‘end’ or limit to the political itself, and with it the political subject. I conclude with a discussion of a fugitive sociality and its implications for understanding the struggle of Palestinians in Israel.

The everyday art of resistance: Interpreting "resistancescapes" against urban violence in Palestine

In 2002, the Israeli military performed one of its most extensive operations on occupied Palestine. One outcome of this war was the enforcement of an Israeli Segregation Wall that severs the sensitive Palestinian urban fabric and secludes Palestinians in isolated enclaves. Consequentially, the eight-meter-high wall stands as a physical reminder of the spatial violence behind its existence, which targets the normality of Palestinian everyday life by restricting mobility and confirming invisibility. The imposed hegemonic wall became part of the public realm, converting the latter into a traumascape where memories of war are continuously emitted to the public. Since then, eager international and Palestinian artists have been utilizing the concrete panels as a medium for art expression. On the Segregation Wall, graffiti expresses the historic and ongoing struggle that embodies Palestinians' collective memory and national identity. Through graffiti, Palestinians find moments to grieve losses and cognitively imagine a liberated future for their cities. This paper offers an in-depth reflection on the Palestinian graffiti on the Segregation Wall. Through ethnographic research, the study explores the role of Palestinian graffiti in transforming the Israeli-imposed traumascape into what we term a resistancescape. By provoking urban dialogues around trauma sites, Palestinian graffiti offers an example of creative everyday resistance, empowering Palestinians to claim their right to the city. Challenging the oppressor's hegemony by spreading graffiti on the imposed Segregation Wall helps Palestinians negotiate everyday life, keep their Sumud, and demand spatial justice.

Defying Ornaments

The article will discuss works of art produced by Palestinian artists, in which the ornament functions as an intermediary for conveying signs, symbols, messages, and identities. In Muslim tradition, the ornament represented, and visually participated in, establishing the social order, and was also a signifier of a distinct theological, social, dogmatic, and gendered identity. The works at the heart of this article present the ornament as part of an aesthetic and ethical inquiry, a means of reenacting individual and collective history as well as preserving and deconstructing conventions, a method that is both poisonous and a remedy for social hierarchies, fixed identities, and oppressive power relations. I argue that the ornament represented in contemporary Palestinian artworks reflects a destructive or constructive urge, which Mark Wigley describes as an: “elaborate mechanism for concealing and preserving, if not constructing, identity.”

From Australia to Italy and Palestine

From Australia to Italy and Palestine

Introduction toVisual Arts ResearchSpecial Issue, Body Cam: The Visual Regimes of Policing

Introduction to<i>Visual Arts Research</i>Special Issue, Body Cam: The Visual Regimes of Policing

From Bethlehem to Basilicata: Framing Pasolini from Palestine

Sopralluoghi in Palestina (Location Hunting in Palestine) () documents Pasolini’s search for an archaic, biblical world within which to set Il Vangelo secondo Matteo (The Gospel According to St. Matthew) (). Pasolini’s search in Palestine/Israel was eventually abandoned, with The Gospel According to St. Matthew being filmed in and around Basilicata. Pasolini’s documentary has proven a fertile object with which Palestinian artists have conducted dialogues. Following Edward Said, this article reads the documentary ‘contrapuntally’ – as a text to be resituated and responded to – through two responses: Ayreen Anastas’s Pasolini Pa* Palestine () and Basma Alsharif’s Ouroboros (). Examining Alsharif’s engagement with Carlo Levi’s Cristo si è fermato a Eboli (Christ Stopped at Eboli) (1945), the article interrogates Pasolini’s and Levi’s Basilicata and Anastas’ and Alsharif’s responses from Palestine, arguing that the contrapuntal movement between these four works constitutes a ‘dialectical’ cinematic image of Palestine – between image and reality, the archaic and the contemporary.