Housni Alkhateeb Shehada (PhD Tel Aviv University 2006) is head of the Department of Visual Art at the Levinsky College of Education (Tel Aviv) and senior lecturer at the Bezalel Academy of Art (Jerusalem). His academic activities concern classical Arabic and modern literature, Islamic history, and history of art, particularly Islamic art and contemporary Palestinian art. His publications include a book on veterinary medicine in medieval Islam (Brill, Leiden 2013), several articles on the medical treatment of animals in that sphere, studies and catalogues of contemporary Palestinian art, as well as two books of poetry. He has also curated exhibitions of Palestinian artists and edited a special issue of The Van Leer Platform: An Electronic Magazine on Palestinian-Israeli Relations in Israel, Volume 6 (2016), dedicated to Palestinian art.
Housni Shehada
A Call to Preserve Memory Through a Future Gaze
How is Palestine represented in contemporary art, and how do Palestinian artists deal with the notions of memory and the past? Larissa Sansour raises in her work many questions concerning ideas of sanctity, homeland, and memory, in a manner that helps turning them into an illusion. In an analytical review and an in-depth critical gaze, scholar Housni Alkhateeb Shehada presents a broad picture of the place, the dialogue, the memory, and the conflict the figures are experiencing in the work recently presented by Sansour, in the Danish Pavilion, at the 58th Venice Biennale.