Displacement
The exhibition Displacement is focused on two Palestinian artists, Raeda Saadeh and Larissa Sansour, whose work inevitably relates to the social and political context from which it springs. Years of strained relations between Israel and Palestine which came to a critical point in 2002 with the erection of the defence wall separating Israel from the West Bank, has recently become one of the main crisis areas in the world and has taken the lives of mainly innocent Palestinian civilians. The wall was, and still remains a border: road blocks and checkpoints impede free movement, a curfew is imposed, fewer work permits are issued and consequently there is a steady elimination of Palestinians from Israeli society. The concept of security based on a fear of anti-Semitism, Islam, terrorism, extermination, etc. has become the basic guideline of Israeli politics and society, resulting in a radical militarisation of their society, which is now hostile to Palestinians.
A life under constant occupation has a huge impact on the work of
both artists who - each in their own way – examine and reflect on the
complex conditions they are confronted with in their everyday public and
private lives.
Their work also addresses issues around the
preservation of their own political subjectivity and individual forms of
resistance, revolt and reaction to the all-encompassing colonisation of
both the body and space, and which also affects the value systems which
are dictated by a radically militarised and patriarchal society.
Saadeh
and Sansour reflect the political through the perspective of a woman;
they are both the main protagonists of their works. Their principal
means of expression are video, photography and installation, though
Saadeh is no stranger to performance whilst Sansour also realises her
projects through printed media (books) and on the internet.
They
set their bodies in real urban and natural or imaginative and
constructed landscapes, positioned in different (but accurately
selected) topographic and temporal contexts. They are often engaged in
tasks traditionally ascribed to women and in a poetic, absurd or
humorous way critically comment on the stereotyped role of a woman in
the Middle East as well as the political reality of permanent occupation
and the search for a place under the sun.
A common
characteristic shared by both artists is the exploration of politically
engaged topics and the use of the female body as a tool to explore
identity, gender and space, as well as the relationship between
space/environment and the subject.
In the video performance
Vacuum, Saadeh performs the absurd “Sisyphus task” – she is vacuuming
the desert between Jericho and the Dead Sea, the Palestinian territory
where the only inhabitants left are rocks and sand. This act not only
casts a critical view on gender roles but also becomes a strong and
direct symbol of the inability and absurdity of the political conditions
in her country. Similar topics are intertwined in the photo series
Concrete Walls. Saadeh is confronted with the evident symbol of
separation; the eight-metre high, barbed wire topped barrier stretching
over 700 kilometres. In the first photograph, she is a strong woman
pulling the wall with a thick rope. “She moves the walls” and has a
smile on her face, whilst in the second image she embodies a vulnerable
angel trapped on the wrong side. When looking at Saadeh’s photographs
one cannot ignore the feeling of contradiction created by the tension
between the character and the background (landscape). Her characters do
not quite fit the harsh reality of the scenes.
Her photo series
True Tales Fairy Tales (Cinderella, Rapunzel, Penelope, Mona Lisa) has
the same effect. Evidently artificial placement of the fairy tale
characters among the ruins or deserted streets of Jaffa during the
night-time curfew can be read through a perspective of contradictions
and frustrations of the artist’s everyday life which is full of
contrasts, in particular when you are a Palestinian woman with an
Israeli passport living in Jerusalem in the occupied area. By drawing
attention to the artifice of the image, she is more concerned with
highlighting disjuncture, discord and displacement and structures her
images accordingly.
Whereas Saadeh takes characters from fairy
tales, legends and the portraits of Great Masters, in short the heritage
of the past, and places them in a contemporary Palestinian reality,
Larissa Sansour’s films are rooted in the future. To her, the only
possible solution to the Palestinian-Israeli conflict is the genre of
science fiction and fiction. That is, it lies beyond the reality. In the
film with a meaningful title A Space Exodus, she adapts a section of
2001: A Space Odyssey, Stanley Kubrick’s masterpiece; she is the main
protagonist, a woman, a Palestinian, planting the Palestinian flag on
the Moon. With bitter humour, Sansour criticizes the long unsolved issue
of the Palestinian state. In her next short film entitled Nation
Estate, she goes a step further. She stays faithful to the sci-fi genre
as the only “space” that allows her to explore potential solution to the
problem of how to join all Palestinians together in a single space. In
the film she returns from her space journey to Earth and houses the
entire Palestinian population in a colossal skyscraper in which each
city has its own floor. A vertical solution seems perfect because it
takes up the least physical space and simultaneously simulates living
the high life. The story follows the female lead, played by Sansour
herself, in a futuristic folkloric suit returning home from a trip
abroad and making her way through the lobby of this monstrous building –
sponsored and sanctioned by the international community. Having passed
the security checkpoints, she takes the elevator to the Bethlehem floor
where she lives. Neither directly horrific nor demonizing of the Israeli
occupation it critiques, the work boasts a humour that has the
potential to open up different ‘readings’ into the ongoing
Israeli–Palestinian conflict. Sansour’s controversial project was
nominated for the 2011 Lacoste-sponsored Elysée Prize by Switzerland’s
Musée de l’Elysée, although the nomination was later retracted since
Lacoste did not want to be associated with the work’s political
overtones. (Mara Vujić)
Larissa Sansour (Palestine/UK)
Nation Estate Film, 2012 / 9'
A Space Exodus Film, 2009 / 5’ 24’’
Raeda Saadeh (Palestine)
Vacuum (2007), video installation
Cinderella (2010), photography
Organisation: City of Women; In collaboration with: Škuc Gallery.
Free entrance.
