identity

The Body as an Unresolved History: On the Works of Artist Samah Shehadeh

With precise lines and minimalistic visual language, Samah Shehadeh presents the Palestinian female body as a charged space of memory, rupture, and contemplation. Drawing with charcoal, a black and raw material, embodies an artistic act that exists on the seamline between erasure and exposure. The body in her work is not a closed representation but a continuous movement, silent yet present, exposing questions that representation cannot resolve.

A Gazan Memory for Forgetting

For Mahmoud Darwish, while memory serves as a tool of resistance against the erasure of existence, it also represents another form of symbolic death for identity and history. This is because it enforces a kind of stagnation and immersion in old pain, trapping the individual in a cycle of grief and reflection on past losses. In his reading of "Memory for Forgetfulness," Ra'ad Abu Sa'ada questions, as a Gazan, the role of memory in the ongoing Palestinian struggle and in the collective Israeli identity, with a view toward the Holocaust, the besieged Beirut of 1982, and Gaza today.

Endeavors to Forget: Bedouin Resilience and Desert Sustainability Vs the Israeli State’s Contemporary Colonialist Sculpture

Large piles of rubble that remain after acts of destruction and forced displacement appear like temporary, monumental manifestations of “Contemporary Colonialist Sculpture.” They stand out in stark contrast to the lightweight and versatile construction used by the Bedouins, which it seeks to supplant, and as a tangible embodiment of the violent act of erasure and enclosure. The Common View collective learns from the Naqab/Negev Bedouins’ adaptability and resilience towards an alternative, equitable futures.

Palestinian Collective Memory: Present-Oriented and Forgotten

For Palestinians living in historic Palestine and for those referred to as "Palestinian refugees," the Nakba (Catastrophe) of 1948 never ended. This memory shapes Palestinian identity, but is it a lack of narrative that has existed for decades? Nour Saed analyzes factors inhibiting Palestinian society from investing in the arts while emphasizing the importance of storytelling and documenting a national experience versus forgetfulness.

A Tourist in Your Own Home: a Conversation with Shasha Dothan

The artist Shasha Dothan has recently curated a virtual show of works addressing the sense of alienation experienced by immigrants, of which she is one. Hagai Ulrich spoke with her about the show and her works, in which she rows a canoe across her living room, invites a male stripper to an apartment, and erects a tent-installation where she hosts works by immigrant women.

On the Corrupt in Art (a reading of Hannan Abu-Hussein's artworks)

The musician, artist, and poet Wisam Gibran suggests a socio-cultural reading of four works by the Palestinian artist Hannan Abu-Hussein's - Agina (Dough), Pouring the Oil, Bukjia (Bundle), In Between the Destruction of the Father - as representatives of inner worlds reflecting art's association with the cycle of life and death, movement and stillness, the sacred and the forbidden, the presence and the absence. 

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.

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