The Jerusalem Show VIII: Before and After Origins

Location: Jerusalem

Venues: Entrance to the Old City via New Gate, Jerusalem

Old Commercial Press & Shop #35, New Gate Road

Gallery Anadiel, Yerevan Restaurant & Knight’s Palace Hotel, Freres Road

Al Ma’mal Foundation, 8 Al Jawalida Street

Dates/Times: Open Monday - Saturday, from 14:00–21:00

Organizers: Al-Ma'mal Foundation for Contemporary Art

Click on the names below to visit each artist's section

Curatorial Statement by Vivian Ziheri

Artist Projects:

BEFORE: Benji Boyadgian, Megan Cope, Alice Creischer, Yazan Khalili, Jumana Manna, Tom Nicholson, Ryan Presley, Wael Tarabieh. And with contributions from the Canaan Amulets Collection, in collaboration with the Birzeit University Museum, as well contributions from the Collection of George al-Ama.

AFTER: Richard Bell, DAAR (Decolonizing Architecture Art Residency), Aiman Halabi, Saba Innab, Yasser Khangar, Randa Maddah, Muhammad Mughrabi, Christian Nyampeta, Rachel O'Reilly with PA/LA/CE Architects (Valle Medina and Benjamin Reynolds) and Rodrigo Hernandez, Shada Safadi, Wendelien van Oldenborgh, and Sawangwongse Yawnghwe.

Performances and Lectures: Sinethemba Twalo, Donna Kukama, George Mahashe, Dineo Seshee Bopape

Artist Biographies

Curator Biography

Curatorial Statement

Vivian Ziheri

For its 8th edition, the Jerusalem Show explores the theme of Return from the Jerusalem perspective with the two-part exhibition Before and After Origins. While the forced Palestinian exile of 1948 may be considered the origin of Return, the category of 'origins' is itself questioned throughout the show, contouring the relations of modernity, colonization, property and territorial belonging.

Works from over thirty artists and cultural heritage collections are presented across five venues in the New Gate neighborhood of Jerusalem's old city. The exhibition 'Before' at Al Ma'mal Foundation considers the power of narratives of origin, while the dispersed venues of 'After' stake a refusal of separation. Together these two parts offer a prism through which to reflect upon the ongoing project of the Return and its deep significance to the global condition.

 BEFORE

Al-Ma'mal Foundation

8-Al Jawalida St

Benji Boyadgian, Megan Cope, Alice Creischer, Yazan Khalili, Jumana Manna, Tom Nicholson, Ryan Presley, Wael Tarabieh. And with contributions from the Canaan Amulets Collection, in collaboration with the Birzeit University Museum, as well contributions from the Collection of George al-Ama.

The question of beginnings haunts any given time. Why are things as they are? How did this all come to be? Sets of stories may offer an explanation by telling of historical or mythic events that set the terms of a current order. In certain contexts, a narrative of origins may act not just as a guide, but as a tool to lay claim to the past and by which to rule over the future. Such is often the case in the 'settler colony'; the particular form of colonization in which the colonizer, as a settler, comes to stay.

In the new land the settling colonizer faces a dilemma. How to explain their presence in this faraway place? How does that there become this here? How do foods, clothing, architecture and agriculture that don't suit the environment become tethered to the new land? And how, above all else, to reconcile with the extraordinary violence that was required to seize the land and make of it a new home?

In the settler colony, the inevitably singular narrative of origin thereby becomes a crucial subject of study. Within its lines, the myriad lineaments that tether colonial dispossession may be found at their root. Here one may also encounter numerous other narratives that have been displaced or actively repressed. And one may study how they not only contest each other but converge, weaving across shared events and terrain.  

At Al-Ma'mal Foundation the exhibition Before examines this question of origins, starting with two significant bodies of Palestinian cultural heritage that are themselves unable to return. One is a sixth century mosaic, removed from the Naqab desert after WWI and permanently cemented into the Australian War Memorial, here reconsidered in the work of artist Tom Nicholson. The other is the extensive amulets collection of physician, ethnographer and renowned late-Ottoman Jerusalemite Tawfiq Canaan. Today in the care of the Birzeit University Museum (north of Ramallah), the collection cannot travel to Jerusalem but is instead present through the assembled writings of Canaan, which encompass scholarly texts as well as political pamphlets during the turmoil of the Mandate era.

A number of works point to the intertextuality of origins narratives and to the interwoven histories that underpin them. For example, six linocut prints by Wael Tarabieh tell the epic of Gilgamesh, an ancient Sumerian poem that finds its traces within many of the holy books of Christianity, Judaism and Islam. The hero figure of Gilgamesh, king of Uruk, is considered by some as an archetype that influenced the legend of the Palestinian Roman soldier from Lydda, known to Islam as Al Khadir and to Christianity as St George.

A curated survey of Bethlehem mother of pearl engraving from the collection of George al-Ama sheds light upon the impact of economic and political forces upon iconic imagery. Through examples referencing styles from the seventeenth to the twentieth century, the image forms shift with their commercial circulation and as the industry itself produced a Palestinian merchant diaspora as far afield as Latin America and the Philippines.  

Overall the exhibition takes the form of an upper layer that explores the aesthetics of the archeological 'dig', and a lower layer that plumbs an oceanic and perhaps subconscious dimension. Throughout both, the archaic emerges not as a figure of permanence but rather as a fragmentary entity. Its moment is as much in the daily pulse of social worlds as it is in the mythic act, in the slaying of a dragon for example. The show is thus one that links the weights and measures of narrative with real-world social economies that may themselves be sustained or extinguished through myths of existence. 

At base, in order to imagine or to move practically towards less destructive arrangements of human existence, the mythic, the archaic, and the foundational narrative must be the subject of a sensitive and dedicated effort of attention. It is this project that the audience is invited to join in viewing the exhibition Before of The Jerusalem Show VIII: Before and After Origins at Al-Ma'mal Foundation.

 Christian Nyampeta

The Hereafter, 2016

Single channel video, carved stones, fabric prints

A commission of Al-Ma'mal Foundation, produced with the support of the Mondriaan Fund.

The Hereafter is a new film and a system of signage produced for Jerusalem Show VIII. It is based upon the 1992 film Guelwaar by Ousmane Sembene in which a man is buried in the wrong grave. As a sequel, The Hearafter commences when its protagonist arrives at the wrong heaven, and must find how to get by in this unforeseen circumstance. The work spans both exhibitions Before and After in its charming and yet wholly sincere conjuring of the beyond.

Tom Nicholson

Comparative monument (Shellal). 2014–2016

Glass tesserae mosaics, wooden boxes, dimensions variable, and two-channel video: left channel: 5'58", right channel 14'23"

Mosaics created with the Mosaic Centre, Jericho, with mosaicists Rafat al-Khatib and Renan Barham, and project management with Osama Hamdan and Iyad Jammed. Artist assistant on mosaic cartoons: Jamie O'Connell. Video camera: Issa Freij, Christian Capurro, Tom Nicholson. Video editing: with Alex Archer. Additional Translation: Rasha Tayeh.

Courtesy of the artist and Milani Gallery.  

In 1917 a group of Australian (ANZAC) soldiers took control of an Ottoman hill-top position near Gaza, at Shallalah, or Shellal. They discovered a sixth century mosaic, known as the Shellal Mosaic which was slowly uncovered, documented, excavated, and then crated and transported to Australia, where it was eventually built into the Australian War Memorial.

Nicholson's work Comparative monument (Shellal) imagines the repatriation of the Shellal Mosaic, considering the parallel histories of dispossession that may be traced in the marking and unmarking of Palestinian and Australian lands. The project imagines the Shellal Mosaic created with tiles from another art deco mosaic in the War Memorial. Nicholson introduces a new colour system to the animals of the original mosaic, suggesting a transformation or a new set of forms yet to emerge. 

A two-channel video further elaborates the braided horizons of sovereignty that the mosaic traces, including fragments from conversations with the Bedouin Palestinian elder and activist Nuri al-Okbi. The video components also meditate upon the Shellal Mosaic's original site as the only place from which Bir Sab'a and Gaza City can be viewed with the naked eye, at the very limits of visibility.

Jerusalem School Painter, Unknown

Icon of St George, est. late 1800 

Egg tempera, on wood.

Courtesy of Collection George al-Ama.

The Melkite, or Arab icon emerged as a distinct regional variant of Byzantine art and was practiced by the Jerusalem School in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The example in this exhibition portrays many noted characteristics, following the Aleppo school, such as the almond-shaped eyes and rounded features of St George that are said to resemble the Arab folk hero in the popular miniatures of the period.

Ryan Presley

Crown Land (to the ends of the earth), 2016

Synthetic polymer paint and gold leaf on hoop pine panel, 53 x 43cm

Courtesy of the artist.

Aboriginal artist Ryan Presley re-imagines the icon of St George as an allegory of the Northern Territory 'Intervention'– or the new regime of discipline over Aboriginal lives inaugurated in 2007. The icon depicts a young Aboriginal woman caught in a canyon between the towers of mining and banking corporations on one side, and the military-industrial presence of US garrisons in north Australia on the other. It is an image that speaks at once of a powerful defiance, and at the same time to the failure of existing tropes of political 'good' in the face of renewed waves of dispossession

Wael Tarabieh

Epic of Gillgamesh, 1996

1. The Taming of Enkidu by Shamhat

2. Gilgamesh and Enkidu Meet in Battle

3. Gilgamesh and Enkidu Slay Humbaba

4. Gilgamesh and Enkidu Slay the Bull of Heaven

5. The Death of Enkidu 6. Utnapishtim and the Morality of Gilgamesh

Coloured linocut print on paper

Wael Tarabieh is an artist from Majdal Shams in the Occupied Golan. He trained as a print-maker in St Petersburg and is considered by many a father to the current dynamic generation of artists in Majdal Shams. The series of prints depicts scenes from the Epic of Gilgamesh, which Tarabieh says he was drawn to due to its intertextuality with many other major mythic and religious texts. For example, the demi-god and historic Sumerian king Gilgamesh is considered to have influenced the hero formation of St George. 

Megan Cope

RE FORMATION 1, 2016

Cast Concrete Oysters and locally-sourced clay dirt

Commissioned by Frontier Imaginaries, with the support of Arts Queensland.

Megan Cope's RE FORMATION 1 (2016) stands as a material expression of her long-abiding cartographies of aboriginal inhabitation of Australia, and South East Queensland in particular. The work presents middens-indigenous land-marks of accumulated shell and bone fragments made of oyster shells in cast-concrete. They point to the destruction of middens to produce lime for early brick-and-mortar settlement. Here in Jerusalem, the original local black-sand of the middens has been substituted for local red-clay earth as a substitution that aims towards a renewed and as yet unknown, reconstruction. 

Various Bethlehem engraved mother of pearl artifacts, (Eighteenth to twentieth century)

Collection George al-Ama.

The mother of pearl industry in Bethelhem demonstrates the intimate connection of social, economic and political factors in the production of iconic images. The examples in this selection, curated by al-Ama includes reference to the seventeenth century style of Christian Holy site miniatures, and shows the dramatic impact of the arrival of pinctada maxima shells from the Pacific and Australia on eighteenth and nineteenth-centuries' production. A recent example shows the near extinguishment of the craft under pressure of tariffs and economic barriers. 

Benji Boyadigan

The Puppeteer, 2016

Multimedia installation.

The Roundabout, 2016

Video, duration: infinite

Stalemate, 2016

Oil on canvas

The Puppeteer is an allegory on duration, a play between the moment and expanded time. It's a reflection on the repetition, projection and permutation of patterns. The installation juxtaposes two optical pieces at two ends of a space: The Roundabout and Stalemate. The frequencies of The Pupeteer reference those used in contemporary psychotherapies in the treatment of stress and mental tension. Together, the works of Boyadigan unsettle the monolithic or traumatic historic event and question its grasp on future times.

Alice Creischer

To Camille B., 2016

Singe-channel video, costume, A3 brochure and collage installation

A Frontier Imaginaries commission, courtesy of Alice Creischer and KOW Berlin.

In the shadow of the 2015 Euro crisis and the economic repression of Greece in particular, German artist Alice Creisher produced a video and visual essay that considers the evaporating horizons of left-wing political aspiration. The work is inspired by an engraved shell that was produced by one of approximately 4,000 Communards who were deported to New Caledonia, following the 1871 Paris Commune. The perpetual mimed execution of Creischer's own children, cast as communards and chained in long rows zeros, forms a humble yet sobering portrait of Europe's lost escape route from its own imperial-capitalist destiny.

 AFTER

Old Commercial Press

Richard Bell, DAAR (Decolonizing Architecture Art Residency), Aiman Halabi, Saba Innab, Yasser Khangar, Randa Maddah, Muhammad Mughrabi, Christian Nyampeta, Rachel O'Reilly with PA/LA/CE Architects (Valle Medina and Benjamin Reynolds) and Rodrigo Hernandez, Shada Safadi, Wendelien van Oldenborgh, and Sawangwongse Yawnghwe. 

Shop #35

Bisan Abu Eisheh, Jawad Al Malhi, Gordon Hookey, Tshibumba Kanda Matulu,

Gallery Anadiel

Karrabing Film Collective, Elizabeth A. Povinelli, Sawangwongse Yawnghwe. 

NGO-NOTHING GETS ORGANISED

Between Movement and Intertia

Dineo Seshee Bopape                      Gallery Anadiel (night time projection)

Donna Kukama                                 Old Commercial Press (performance)

George Mahashe                              Knight's Palace (courtyard)

Sinethemba Twalo                           Radio Broadcast (opening week & online)

If art can have one humble role amid the very grave conditions of politics at present, perhaps it is to make connections; strange, charismatic, even oblique connections. Where the map of political struggle appears evermore as an archipelago, perhaps it is an art of connections that can act to loosen and unravel an order of things that seeks to govern through a logic of 'security' given as division, confinement, isolation, and a growing industry of border technologies.

The dispersed exhibitions of After– one half of Jerusalem Show VIII Before and After Origins– argue that this art of connections is a deepest need of the our time. Indeed, the Palestinian experience since 1948 makes this known above all else. As political economist Raja Khalidi argues in his contribution to the Symphony of Liberalisms within the show, the chief device of colonial dispossession since 1948 has been the partition of Palestinian people into five or more populations with diverging experiences and increasing estrangement.

Today these groups include West Bankers, residents of the Gaza Strip, Palestinians in1948 and 1967 occupied territories or so-called 'Arab Israelis', as well as the merchant or refugee disapora. This condition of separation acts cruelly against efforts of Palestinian recovery and self-governance. Perversely, if perhaps not shockingly, we might acknowledge that if the much vaunted Oslo Accords achieved any one thing it was the entrenchment of these divisions and even their proliferation through bureaucratic subcategories.

The exhibition 'After' hence stakes a claim for the refusal of separation, and a deeply held demand for ongoing connection; to families, to lands, to ways of life, and to priorities other than those that fuel ongoing colonialisms. In this work it reaches out also to a global scope of practice. In part this is informed in connection to the project Frontier Imaginaries which examines what it calls 'settler regionalism'; a non-geographic region of settler states such as Australia, Israel, New Zealand, Canada and South Africa that are alike in their structure and connected at the government level, but whose locaized social projects are separated by vast distance. One of the efforts of the project is to activate the inherent mobility and the resources of contemporary art in order to stage connections between these dispersed but deeply relevant struggles.

As an exhibition across a cluster of sites, After starts out on the roof-top of Al-Ma'mal with Richard Bell's artists' rendition of the Aboriginal Tent Embassy. The Tent Embassy as it's known, was established in 1972 opposite parliament house in Canberra and remains active to this day as a country-wide network upholding the Aboriginal sovereignty movement. In Palestinian Jerusalem it signals a possible alterntive to a global system organized not by states, but by social movements.

The Tent Embassy also marks a signaling from the 1970s to the present day. A number of works in the exhibition consider the marked transition from the 1970s to now, by asking the difficult question of what constitutes a political act amid profound shifts in the categories of property, civil society and indeed the neoliberalisation of the global system itself.

Palestinian artist, rapper and film-maker Muhammad Mughrabi for example, looks to the late writings of poet Mahmoud Darwish for a detour back to the 1970s goal of nationhood. In a not dissimilar vein, Dutch artist Wendelien van Oldenborgh stages a filmic dialogue between the 1970s squatters movement of Afro-Caribbean diaspora communities in Amsterdam and current social groups in the city including anti-racist student organizations and asylum seekers, whose claims have been denied.

Each of the works presented in After represents a response to the topic of Return, with the vast majority of works in the show either newly commissioned or re-imagined for this purpose. Again echoing the Tent Embassy, these works delve into the deep significance of the concept of Return from numerous perspectives including Palestinian Jordanian, the Shu'fat Refugee camp, Palestinian Jerusalem, and by extension to Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal Australia, Burma and the Congolese points of view.  

The exhibition also includes a group of artists from the dynamic community of Majdal Shams in the Occupied Golan. Although deeply attached to the project of Return, these artists are not part of the Palestinian national project per se. For these artists, efforts to oppose occupation are complicated by the condition of the Syrian conflict where reunification and Syrian nationalism are no longer mobilizing claims.

A further contribution to the show is made by Johannesburg group NGO – NOTHING GETS ORGANIZED, under the title Between Movement and Intertia. This curated series of works intervene throughout the show as live actions, radio broadcasts and as a shift of perspective in the guise of a camera obscura. The selection reflects from the perspective of the South African post-apartheid condition and is a musing on the aesthetics of discontinuity. It revels in uncertainty as a form of thinking that venerates the interlude.

In viewing the exhibition After, vistors are invited to encounter histories and references that may be unfamiliar and that may at first appear unrelated. Visitors are encouraged to consider Return not only as a concrete political claim but also as a form, and from there, to imagine further to what is indeed concrete and deeply valuable in the relation of 'same but different'.

Al-Ma'mal Foundation

Richard Bell

Embassy, 2013-2016

Scout tent with video; synthetic polymer paint on board,

Courtesy of the artist and Milani Gallery, Brisbane.

Richard Bell is a renowned artist, activist and provocateur. Bell's Embassy is a restaging of Australia's longest standing protest action, the Aboriginal Tent Embassy which has stood opposite Parlaiment House in Canberra from 1972 to the present day. Since 2013, Bell's Embassy has hosted gatherings of talks, poetry and screenings on the topic of Aboriginal sovereignty in cities including Moscow, Jakarta, and Arnhem. For Jerusalem Show VIII, the iconic signage of the Tent Embassy has been translated into Arabic in a gesture of solidarity.

Muhammad Mughrabi

The Birth of a Nation, 2016

Performance

Commissioned by Al-Ma'mal Foundation.

Muhammad Mughrabi is an artist, rapper and filmmaker whose work increasingly uses the tool of provocation to speak from the viewpoint of a young Palestinian Jerusalemite. The Birth of a Nation is a two-part performance that addresses the project of Return with the challenging question of sacrifice and sin. Having grown up in the Shu'fat Camp as a second-generation refugee, Mughrabi questions the status quo of the 'Palestinian Refugee' as a symbol of the Palestinian national project.  

 Old Commercial Press

Yasser Khanger

Cloud Cuts, 2016

Poem

Acrylic on wall

Courtesy of the poet.

Yasser Khanger is a poet and Assyriologist from Majdal Shams. Khanger's contribution to the Jerusalem Show-the poem Cloud Cuts-is a love dedication to a flawed and earthly world. In Khanger's own words, it is about the wish not to be separated from reality. A book of Khanger's poetry in translation to English will be launched as an event and project of Jerusalem Show VIII. It will feature upon its cover an artwork by Khanger's partner, the artist Randa Maddah.

[English Translation]

It's not a homeland the earth if you are not involved in its clay

It's just your broken time in waiting.

One moment that takes place from the last knife cut until the night be broken,

the way that doesn't bite your leg is not your way.

Its sidewalk is enough just to write:

'I will not walk here again

you haven't been a lover o my friend

if you didn't think the cloud cuts in your heart are kisses'.

 DAAR  (Decolonizing Architecture Art Residency)

Participation: An Architect's Notebook, 2016

Part of the ongoing project School in Exile

Courtesy of the artists, produced with the support of the Rosa Luxemborg Stiftung.

The 'School in Exile' is part of the ongoing pedagogical and architectural interventions of Hilal and Petti in Palestinian refugee camps. The work stands as a set of furniture designed for the library in the Girls School in Shu'fat refugee camp along with a fiction book telling the story of the school itself designed by Sandi Hilal, Alessandro Petti, Livia Minoja for the UNRWA Infrastructure and Camp Improvement Program. The Jerusalem Show VIII presents the book Participation: An Architect's Notebook which is written towards a middle school reader and tells the story of the discussions surrounding the school design.

Randa Maddah

A Hair Tie, 2016

Bronze, upon wood base: 30 x 13 x 18cm

Courtesy of the artist and Gallery One, Ramallah.

Randa Maddah's small bronze sculpture A Hair Tie is part of a new body of work that meditates upon the ruptures of human life, and in part upon the Syrian conflict unfolds across a fenceline from the village of Majdal Shams. Of this work Maddah writes: 'On a parallel plane, all of this takes place. The earth is split open and the sky is indifferent, with so many stories in between them. My story is the passing of the memory over a dreadful heritage not perceived yet by the oblivion.'

The title of the work, A Hair Tie, is taken from a poem by her partner Yasser Khangar.

Sawangwongse Yawnghwe

2nd of March 1962, Rangoon, Burma, 2016

Acrylic on canvas.

A commission of Al Ma'mal and Frontier Imaginaries produced with the support of the Canada Council for the Arts.

2nd of March 1962, Rangoon, Burma is the title of a new large-scale painting produced in response to the theme of Return. It depicts the artist's family home on the night that his uncle was assassinated by the Burmese army. The composition of the soldiers refers to the painting of Manet's The Execution of Emperor Maxemilian (1867-68), itself an echo of Goya's The Third of May 1808  (1814). After this night Yawnghwe's father, mother, grandfather and grandmother became guerilla fighters for their people, the Shan ethnic minority. As such while the painting responds to Return, it in fact depicts a kind of beginning.

Shada Safadi

Keep breathing, 2015

Fabric print,    105 x 180cm

Courtesy of the artist.

Shada Safadi is an artist from Majdal Shams in the occupied Golan. Her series Promises reflects upon the struggles of those who have passed, and the demands that they make on the living. In this new edition of the work, Safadi has reflected in particular upon the ruins of a village nearby to Majdal Shams, destroyed in 1967, which is also the site of a water spring.

Wendelien van Oldenborgh

Squat-anti-Squat, 2016

Video, Lenticular photographs

A commission of Al-Ma'mal Foundation,and Frontier Imaginaries. Produced with the support of the Mondriaan Fund.

Squat-Anti-Squat is a new video-work that focuses on methods for change in the 1970s and now, starting from an impressive squatting action in Amsterdam by Surinamese immigrants in 1974 and considering current possibilities for resistance, as notions of property and (il)legality have changed considerably. The film will be presented with artist and poet Quinsy Gario in a special event. Two lenticular-prints- or double-focused images-present scenes from the film that stage conversations between social movements of the 1970s and the present-day.

Rachel O'Reilly with PA/LA/CE Architects (Valle Medina and Benjamin Reynolds) and Rodrigo Hernandez. Translated by Walid Houri.

The Gas Imaginary, 2014, from project The Gas Imaginary, 2011-ongoing, featuring: 1. Paternity Moderne, 2. Romantic Modelology, 3. Virtuosity of the Unconvention, 4. Horizontal Rev, 5. Citizenship Topsoil, 6. Enterprise Bargainment, 7. Flow Stoppage #Actual, 8. Flow Stoppage #Virtual, 9. New Pater Media Theory.

Gladstone Post-pastoral. 2016, from project The Gas Imaginary, 2011-ongiong, featuring: 1. Promethian Realism, 2. Torrens Title, Redacted, 3. Desktop Correctives, 4. Mystical Engineering, 5. Island Law Energies, 6. Unsettlement of Boom, 7. Othodox Value Theory (Limited Edition), 8. Postcontractual Surrealism, 9. Practice Conditions of Non-aligned Maritimes.

Limited edition series of risograph prints on paper, ink, pencil, 27.9 x 31.5cm

Courtesy of the artist.

Artist, critic and poet, Rachel O'Reilly presents two series of drawings that diagram the neo-colonial nature of the unconventional gas (fracking) industry in Australia. O'Reilly studies the romance of investment images and increasingly minimal environmental policies that enable corporate governments to install extraction wells as first a speculative idea, and then a destructive reality. The drawings are annotated with poetic text fragments that dissect histories and desires hidden by industry language.

Aiman Halabi

Untitled, 2016

Materials

Courtesy of the artist and Majaz Gallery.

Aiman Halabi is an artist from Majdal Shams in the occupied Golan. Halabi has for many years focused upon a series of abstract portraits of imagined figures. Initially these portraits were of Druze religious men. Since 2013 and the Syrian civil war the faces have lost their identifiable features, and yet have become all the more sharp in invoking specific presences through their forms.

Christian Nyampeta

The Hereafter, 2016

Single channel video, carved stones, fabric prints

A commission of Al Ma'mal Foundation, produced with the support of the Mondriaan Fund.

The Hereafter is a new film and a system of signage produced for Jerusalem Show VIII. It is based upon the 1992 film Guelwaar by Ousmane Sembene in which a man is buried in the wrong grave. As a sequel, the Hearafter commences when its protagonist arrives at the wrong heaven, and must find how to get by in this unforeseen circumstance. The work spans both exhibitions 'Before' and 'After' in its charming and yet wholly sincere conjuring of the Beyond.

Saba Innab

How to build without a Land, 2011 ongoing

Text, installed in acrylic

The ongoing project How to build without a land considers the relationship of construction and land to time; to a temporariness that gradually transforms-or deforms-into durability. Referencing the Palestinian refuge and exile in particular, but also human alienation in general, the work recognizes the impossibility of construction without land as self-evident. However, imagining such a possibility may be an essential prerequisite to effecting long-due change in architecture and politics.  The work explores variable notions of 'building', whether by the physical construction of an object, or by building with 'language' thorough different elements.

The text here is an etymological deconstruction of the word 'dwell' in Arabic. The root of the word has two meanings; one is to 'remain or stay in peace', the other is 'being still'. This linguistic complexity reveals an impossibility of dwelling, and hints at the fact that we can only dwell at the end of things or when we die.

كيفنبنيبدونأرض 2011 - لغايةالآن

هذا المشروع المستمر ينظر في علاقة البناء والأرض بالزمن، وكيف يتحوّل - أويشوّه - المؤقت إلى دائم.

بالرجوع إلى اللجوء والتهجير الفلسطيني خصوصاً، والتغريب الإنساني عموماً، يعترف العمل باستحالة البناء بدون أرض كأمر بديهي، مع ذلك، قد يكون تصوَر مثل هذا الاحتمال شرطاً أساسياً لإحداث تغييرات ضروريَة في مجال العمارة والسياسة.

يكتشف المشروع المعاني المختلفة للبناء، سواء من خلال البناء الفعلي لشيء ما، أو من خلال البناء باللغة  من خلال عناصر مختلفة.

هذا النص هو عبارة عن تفكيك اشتقاقي لكلمة سكن،

 Shop #35

Jawad Al Malhi

House No. 197 series,2010 ongoing

lightboxes, 30 x 10cm

The Painter  2010

single channel video 3 mins loop (digital frame)

Basketball  2010

single channel video 3 mins loop (digital frame)

Barbecue 2010 

single channel video 3 mins loop (digital frame)

info about the work please find attached

Palestinian artist Jawad Al Malhi contributes a series of light-boxes depicting the teeming movement and stillness of the Shu'fat Refugee Camp, east of Jerusalem, where he grew up and has worked on and off throughout his career. Al Malhi says: 'In this body of work, ongoing since 2007, I document the seasons, nights and days; the transformations of the landscape prompted by the necessity to accommodate a growing Palestinian refugee population. Photographed from the nearby Israeli settlement, the panoramic images reveal how the built environment has become a testimony of dislocation.'

Gordon Hookey

Detail from the unfinished mural Victory, Solidarity, Peace and Freedom, 2016

Oil on canvas, 300 x 200 cm

A commission of Al-Ma'mal and Frontier Imaginaries, produced with the support of the Australia Council for the Arts.

Gordon Hookey is a Waanyi Aboriginal artist from Australia. His work in oil on canvas paints at the intersection of cultural references, often producing rebellious images that parody public politics and the hypocrisies of colonialism.

At present Hookey is undertaking a large scale project titled, MURRILAND!. The project is unfolding across a series of 10m-long canvasses that tell the story of the Australian state of Queensland from a blakfella, or Aboriginal perspective. The work is inspired by the 102 paintings of Tshibumba Kanda Matulu's History of Zaire (1974-75).

For the Jerusalem Show VIII Hookey has spent time in the Shu'fat Refugee Camp, where an 11m long mural was planned to take place. Unfortunately this has not been possible, but Hookey nonetheless paints one scene from the mural Victory, Solidarity, Peace and Freedom in which the Palestinian football team kick an extraordinary and game-winning goal.

Tshibumba Kanda Matulu

History of Zaire, 1974-75

102 35mm slides

Courtesy of Johannes Fabian, and the Nationaal Museum van Wereldkulturen, Netherlands.

Tshibumba Kanda Matulu was one of a number of 'genre painters' in the 1970s, in the Katanga region of the Congo, who painted generic images onto flour-sacks and sold them by the side of the road. In 1974 Tshibumba convinced anthropologist Johannes Fabian to support him to paint the history of the region in 100 paintings starting from the ancestral couple, as well as the arrival of Arab slave-traders to the area, Belgian colonization, and the anti-colonial struggles of Zaire.

Bisan Abu Eisheh

Radio Be'er Sheva, (2014) 2016

Sound installation.

Courtesy of the artist.

Radio Be'er Sheva is based upon interviews with three men who served sentences in Israeli prison on account of their political activities. All three had the role of listening, summarizing and distributing news gathered from smuggled radios. Initially the work existed as a video and sculpture. For Jerusalem Show VIII Eisheh has re-imagined the piece as a sound environment that considers also the broader condition of confinement produced by the occupation.

Gallery Anadiel

Sawangwongse Yawnghwe

She was taken from their family, 2016

Rohingya Internally Displaced People Camp, 2016

Two Months at Sea, 2016

Sexual Violence not Reported due to Fear, 2012-2016

Land of darkness, 2016

Shelling and Shooting, 2016

Extrajudicial Killing of Civilians by Burma Army Troops, 2016

All acrylic on cotton

A commission of Al-Ma'mal Foundation and Frontier Imaginaries, produced with the support of the Canada Council.

For Jerusalem Show VIII Yawnghwe has produced a series of seven loose canvas paintings in the style of posters. Each one attempts to communicate a crucial piece of information on the ongoing strife in Burma that has followed the end of the British Occupation in 1948. The information is taken from the report Trained to Torture, Systematic War Crimes by the Burma Army in Ta'ang Areas of Northern Shan State (March 2011 - March 2016), compiled by the Ta'ang Women's Organization.

Karrabing

Wutharr, Saltwater Dreams, 2016

Video

Courtesy of the artists.

In the Emiyengal language 'Karrabing' means 'tide out'. It refers to a time of coming together. The Karrabing Film Collective was established in 2007 in response to the Northern Territory 'Intervention' when 600 Australian Defence Force troops took control of remove Aboriginal communities, marking the end of the 1970s Land Rights era 

Wutharr, Saltwater Dreams is their latest film, which explores the legal notion of the 'sacred site'. Four Karrabing members have sought passports to travel with the work to Jerusalem. The exceptional bureaucratic and pragmatic hurdles this entails are considered a part of the art and analytics produced by the project. 

Elizabeth A. Povinelli

Symphony of Liberalisms, 2011-ongoing

Wallpaper; Palestine chorus consultation Raja Khalidi; Graphic design by Razan Manayer

Courtesy of Elizabeth A. Povinelli.

The Symphony of Liberalisms annotates social, economic and political events in the form of a musical score. On the upper lines, or 'staff', events that have been felt across the work are noted from the 1950s to present. On the lower staff events that express the same transformations in power in Australia are noted down. For Jerusalem Show VIII political economist Raja Khalidi has contributed a new staff of the Palestinian events that sing the local version of this tune.

NGO - NOTHING GETS ORGANIZED

NGO-NOTHING GETS ORGANISED is an artists' space in Johannesburg (South Africa) that have contribute a selection of work for Jerusalem Show VIII titled An Intimation of Discontinuity. NGO writes:

'An Intimation of Discontinuity' is a musing on aesthetics of discontinuity. It is a reflection on objects in peril, objects assailed and subjugated by the ubiquity of an obdurate ontological inconsistency. NGO-NOTHING GETS ORGANISED is interested in how these objects invert these pernicious and ostensible misapprehensions, performing and iterating their discontinuities. Notwithstanding, in a desire to discontinue that which immures or restrains, NGO-NOTHING GETS ORGANISED does not allude to or affirm a new hope. We attempt to reflect on discontinuity as an action or proposal that might be analogous to thinking and reacting whilst falling in the rabbit hole-a moment where one dwells and revels in uncertainty-a form of thinking that venerates the interlude

Lectures and Performances

Yerevan Restaurant

Sinethemba Twalo

Between Movement and Intertia

Lecture performance, live and radio broadcasts

For An Intimation of Discontinuity NGO-founder Sinethemba Twalo will produce a series of one-hour radio broadcasts that have been developed in dialogue with Bisan Abu Eishe's Radio Be'er Sheva, and that will later appear online at Twalo's soundcloud page.

Old Commercial Press

Donna Kukama

Chapter X: A mouthful of Hot Air (When we re-blackened our faces and turned), 2016

Performance

Chapter X: A mouthful of Hot Air (When we re-blackened our faces and turned) is the sixth in a series of performances that comprise an extensive process in the creation of a book. It does not take on the form of the book-object that we are familiar with. Rather, it 'happens', morphing between performance, drawing, sculpture, and oral history. Refusing containment, the Chapter produced for the Jerusalem Show VIII Before and After Origins considers the potential for historical texts to also exist as speech bubbles carrying messages that are either invisible or do not exist.

Knights Palace Courtyard

George Mahashe

Camera Obscura #4 A Refusal to Allow Mediation, 2016

Light, translucent fabric/paper

For An Intimation of Discontinuity Mahashe has developed a camera obscura, or a shadow-device that can represent images of the outside. The work is inspired by the 8^th century Persian scholar Ibn al-Haytham who developed one of the first camera obscura devices for the purpose of looking at the stars.

Gallery Anadiel (evenings only)

Dineo Seshee Bopape

Is I Am Sky, 2016

Video 17:48, Projection, Colour and Sound

For An Intimation of Discontinuity NGO-founder Dineo Sheshe Bopape contributes the video Is I Am Sky The video experiments with visual effects to sense the space between her 'self' and all the surrounds us.

Programme

Thursday, 6 October

19:30-22:30 // Jerusalem

Exhibition Opening: The Jerusalem Show VIII: 'Before and After Origins'

19:30 - Opening: Al Ma'mal Foundation
20:00 - Musical Performance: by Muhammad Mughrabi, Al Ma'mal Rooftop

20:30 - Performance by Donna Kukama, Old Commercial Press
21:00 - D J Session by Sinethemba Twalo, Yerevan Restaurant

Friday, 14 October

14:00-15:00 // Jerusalem //  Film Screening: Squat-Anti-Squat, by Wendelien van Oldenborgh Venue: African Community Society

Artists' Biographies

Bisan Abu Eisheh (b. 1985) studied for his BA at the International Academy of Art Palestine, and received his MA in Fine Art from Central Saint Martins, University of the Arts, London, in 2014. He has taken part in several art events including the Bitter Rose project, Glasgow international, Glasgow, UK (2016), and Friday Late Night at the V&A Museum, London, UK (2014). He also programmed Hospitalfield's Summer School Fieldworks 2016, in Arbroath, Scotland under the title Not Every Tent is The Same. He currently lives between Glasgow and Jerusalem.

Jawad Al Malhi lives and works in occupied East Jerusalem in Shu'fat refugee camp. He received his MA in Fine Art from Winchester School of Art in the UK. His work over the years has focused on exploring communities, and their relationship to their environments and their everyday practices of life through painting, video, installation, sculpture and photography.

Richard Bell is an Australian artist and political activist. He is one of the founding members of Brisbane-based Aboriginal art collective proppaNOW. His works, that include painting, installation, performance and video, have been exhibited widely throughout Australia and internationally.

Dineo Seshee Bopape is a South African multimedia artist, born in Polokwane. She uses experimental video montages, sculptural installations, paintings and found objects to address problems with representation and storytelling. She lives and works in Johannesburg.

Benji Boyadgian (b. 1983, Jerusalem) studied architecture at ENSAPLV School of Architecture in Paris, specializing in urban sociology in post-conflict areas. Boyadgian works on research-based projects that explore themes revolving around heritage, territory, architecture and landscape. He uses painting and drawing as the main tools in his practice while also incorporating other mediums. He lives and works in Jerusalem.

Megan Cope is a multidisciplinary artist working with video, painting and site-specific installations. A Quandamooka woman from North Stradbroke Island, Queensland, Australia, her work explores the intricate relationship between environment, geography and identity to probe myths and methodologies around colonization.

Alice Creischer is one of the key figures of German political art movements in the 1990s. Her recent joint project with Andreas Siekmann, In the Stomach of the Predators (2014), explores today's predatory capitalism. Creischer lives and works in Berlin.

Decolonizing Architecture Art Residency (DAAR): Co-directed by Alessandro Petti & Sandi Hilal, DAAR is a combination of an architectural studio and a residency programme, and aims to use spatial practice as a form of political intervention. DAAR's programme has brought together architects, artists, activists, urbanists, filmmakers and curators to work collectively on the subjects of politics and architecture. It was established with the aim of engaging with a complex set of architectural problems centred on one of the most difficult dilemmas of political practice: how to act both propositionally and critically in an environment in which the political forcefields are so dramatically skewed.

Aiman Halabi is an artist from Majdal Shams in the occupied Golan Heights. He is an active member of a number of artistic associations and founded Majaz Art Gallery in Majdal Shams. He has participated in several international exhibitions including the Journalistic Photography Exhibition in Amsterdam.

Rodrigo Hernandez is an artist born in Mexico City and presently living in Karlsruhe, Germany.

Saba Innab (b.1980)is a Palestinian architect, urban researcher, and artist practicing out of Amman and Beirut. Her work on the reconstruction of the Nahr el-Bared Palestinian refugee camp has influenced her constant rethinking of architecture, and her concern with dwelling-in-temporariness. 'Through painting, mapping, sculpture and design, I try to explore the suspended states between temporariness and permanence and the variable notions of dwelling, building and language in architecture.'

Yazan Khalili lives and works in and out of Palestine. He is an architect, visual artist, and a cultural activist. Khalili has woven together parallel stories over the years, forming both questions and paradoxes concerning scenery and the act of gazing, all of which are refracted through the prism of intimate politics and alienating poetics.

Yasser Khangar is a Syrian poet.

Donna Kukama is an artist whose work navigates the spaces of performance, video, text and sound installations as laboratories for creative research in order to fictionalize reality. Kukama and lives and works in Johannesburg.

Amr Maddah (b. Majdal Shams) plays the saxophone. He specializes in more than one type of music, including jazz and blues. Currently he is completing his music studies at the Music Academy in Jerusalem.

George Mahashe was born in Bolobedu at Ga-kgapane in South Africa. His photography works with culture or cultural constructs, and people in relation to their place in time. He has exhibited in a variety of group and solo exhibitions locally and internationally.

Jumana Manna is an artist living in Berlin and Jerusalem. Her films and sculptures explore how power is articulated through relationships, often focusing on the body and materiality in relation to narratives of nationalism and histories of place.

Muhammad Mughrabi, from Shoufat Refugee Camp in Palestine's occupied capital Jerusalem, launched his hip-hop band G-Town in 2002 (G from Ghetto), which also includes Fadi Ammous.

Christian Nyampeta is a Rwandan-Dutch artist. His practice focuses on the idea of 'how to live together'. He builds habitable structures, which encourage audiences to dwell within a space of art. He lives and works in London.

Tom Nicholson works with archival material and the visual languages of politics. Nicholson engages aspects of Australia's colonial histories and realities through combinations of drawings, monumental forms, and printed material, often linking these to the realities of other places and struggles. He lives in Melbourne, Australia.

Nothing Gets Organized (NGO) exists as a forlorn and contemplative_____, a ____ and _____ twirl in a moment of bewilderment. The platform is interested in un/conventional processes of self-organising, those that do not imply structure, tangibility, context or form. The founding members are Dineo Seshee Bopape, Gabi Ngcobo and Sinethemba Twalo.

Rachel O'Reilly is a poet and artist, independent researcher and theory advisor at the Dutch Art Institute. She developed The Gas Imaginary in residence at the Jan van Eyck Academie. Curatorial collaborations include The Leisure Class GoMA, Contour 8 (public programs), and the online platform of Cosmopolis, Centre Pompidou 2017.

Wendelien van Oldenborgh is an artist based in Rotterdam, whose practice explores social relations through an investigation of gesture in the public sphere. She often uses the format of a public film shoot, collaborating with participants in different scenarios, to co-produce a script and orientate the work towards its final outcome, which can be film, or other forms of projection. Solo presentations include: Lina Bo Bardi: The Didactic Room, Van Abbemusem, Eindhoven (2010); and group exhibitions and biennials include the 54th Venice Biennial: Illumination (2011). She recently has published a project book Well Respected Man or a Book of Echoes in collaboration with Binna Choi, as the first edition of the Electric Palm Tree textbook series.

Ryan Presley currently lives and works in Brisbane, Australia. His art practice is a reflection of his locale which he audits and critiques to mount a larger enquiry that interrogates the articulations of power. He recently completed a Ph.D at the Queensland College of Art.

Shada Safadi is a visual artist born in Majdal Shams in the occupied Golan Heights. Safadi won the 3rd prize in the A.M. Qattan Foundation's Young Artist of the Year Award for her series of paintings, In the Presence of the Crow in 2008. She is a founder member of Fateh Al Mudarris Center of Arts and Culture.

Wael Tarabieh (b. 1968, Majdal Shams) graduated from The Repin Academy of Fine Arts, St. Petersburg, Russia in 1996. From 1996–2012 he was a teacher of plastic arts and is manager of the Fateh Al Mudarris Center of Arts and Culture in Majdal Shams in the occupied Golan Heights.

Sawangwongse Yawnghwe (b. 1971, Shan State / Canada) is an artist based between Berlin, Amsterdam, and Chiang Mai. He was born in an SSA jungle camp in Burma’s Shan State. His family fled to Thailand in 1972 and escaped to Canada in 1985. After studying at the Emily Carr University of Art and Design at Concordia University, he moved to Tuscany in 1990. Yawnghwe co-founded the Museum of Modern Art Panzano in 2007. Yawngwhe’s work was featured in Exit (Fondazione Sandretto de Rebaudengo, Turin, 2002) and Teatro Della Memoria, a collateral event of the 53rd Venice Biennale (2009). In 2016 Yawnghwe participated in Kamarado/SMBA/Clark House Initiative (2015), Dak'Art (2016), and will be part of the Frontier Imaginaries in The Jerusalem Show 2016 and Festivals Steirischer Herbst 2016.

Curator Biography

Vivian Ziherl is a critic and curator from Brisbane, living and working in Amsterdam. In 2015 she established the art and research project Frontier Imaginaries. Through exhibitions, conferences and publishing it seeks to work trans-locally in order to map the ongoing significance of the frontier formation in the global era.