Publications
Qalandiya International 2016
RE/viewing Jerusalem #2 – REturn: Jerusalem
RE/viewing Jerusalem #2 – REturn
Location: Jerusalem
Organizers: Al Hoash – Palestinian Art Court
Venue: Al Hoash - Palestinian Art Court, 7 Zahra Street, Zaytouna building
Dates of tours: 6, 16, 22, 29 October & 5 November, 2016
Curators: Alia Rayyan
Artists: Click on the names below to visit each artist's section
Majd Amouri, Ahmad Nabil, Decolonizing Architecture Art Residency (Sandi Hilal & Alessandro Petti) (DAAR), Rabab Ghazoul, Eleanor Davies, Soren Lind, Larissa Sansour, Malene Nors Tardrup & Ea Orum Manal Ghaneim, Samer Rashed, Aleen Masoud, Ussama Allati, Mohammad Karazon, Amer Madah, and Jesper Aabille.
Click on the links below to visit each section
Curatorial Statement by Alia Rayyan
Alia Rayyan
RE/viewing Jerusalem is the culmination of several attempts to re-discover our city, increase the visibility of Palestinian life in Jerusalem and define new forms of social art engagement in the public space. Three different elements support and interact with each other; these can be experienced in October with the opening of RE/viewing Jerusalem edition #2 – Return. This year's edition involvesalternative tours, urban interventions and the second round of our successful art walk through the Al Zahra neighborhood and the Old City. RE/viewing Jerusalem will be part of the Qalandiya International Biennale 2016.
In August and September, we initiated the Alternative Tour project, shedding light on stories recounted by people living in Al Zahra Street, Salah Eddin Street and Bab Al Zahra. Instead of simply presenting touristic attractions like historic or religious sites, we collect real life stories, impressions and memories, enabling local and international visitors to experience how Palestinians live in Jerusalem and what their stories and memories are. In this project, students are supported to share their daily routines, experiences of place, and relationships with the city with visitors.
Urban Intervention is a program that tries to formulate new interactions with forgotten semi-public spaces to create new possibilities for Palestinian public space in Jerusalem. These new spaces are independent of the Jerusalem Municipality's plans and infrastructure. Instead, we work with community members, artists and urban gardeners to investigate how we can activate and transform semi-public spaces. One crucial need in Jerusalem is for green areas that are open to the Palestinian public. Urban community gardens are fulfilling this need; in the meantime they provide an opportunity to reactivate community engagement with the city, to regain ownership of place, and to make visible our existence in Jerusalem.
In mid-September, Palestinian and international artists will come together for the Art Walk in Jerusalem, to work with youth groups and community centers, bringing their artistic expertise towards the idea of activating public space. For three weeks of residency in Jerusalem, artists from Copenhagen, Wales, London, Bethlehem and Jerusalem will jointly create six "art stations" along with a walk which starts from Al Hoash and continues to Burj al-Laqlaq in the Old City. The artists' creative ideas will be expressed through these urban interventions, and the Alternative Tours will provide a venue for the participating students to tell their stories. Together these will provide allow visitors and residents alike to re-view the city from a different angle, to discover unexpected niches of Palestinian life and to return to the City.
On the 6th of October, these alternative interventions will be available to the public in the tour of RE/viewing Jerusalem, #2, RE/turn. The starting point is Al Hoash at 4 pm. The tour will last for 2 hours and will lead you through the streets of East Jerusalem towards the Old City.
Decolonizing Architecture Art Residency (Sandi Hilal & Alessandro Petti) (DAAR)
School in Exile
The 'school in exile' is part of the ongoing pedagogical and architectural interventions of Hilal and Petti in Palestinian refugee camps (www.campusincamps.ps). The work stands as a set of furniture designed for the library in the Girls School in Shufat 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.
Here, There and Jerusalem
I am a Welsh artist who has spent three weeks here with Al-Hoash gallery, responding to East Jerusalem. Walking around places, meeting people and soaking up the atmospheres, I am enchanted and incredulous. This is an amazing place and a complicated situation that is impossible to know in such a short visit.
Passing time and making things with people feels like the best way to understand more so I joined up with Helen who lives nearby, skilfully tending her beautiful garden. We wanted to revive areas of Karm Al-Khalili's dormant grass by daily watering one word in Arabic script.
When the park was suddenly closed, we reinvented the idea, looking for a way to access or create another place. So we have built a miniature park on this street, improvising space for people to be together.
Playing, telling stories, sharing food, resting in the shade, smelling the flowers, creating memories and imagining possibilities; doing things with each other in shared places is how we exist culturally and socially. So let's spend time here as we would in any other public garden.
Can something grow in this spot?
Tell me about what you would create on a tiny piece of the world, for a day.
Here is this place, today.
Here will be different tomorrow, just like it was another place yesterday.
When there is no stable ground to walk on, do we wobble and fall or do we dance?
Archaeology in Absentia
Archaeology in Absentia is a sculptural installation based on an ongoing entombment performance taking place during Qalandiya International. 15 deposits of hand-painted porcelain plates with folkloric patterns will be buried across Palestine/Israel - in collaboration with local art institutions. Once a batch of porcelain leaves the exhibition space, it will be replaced by a photo documenting its burial.
Carrying the iconic keffiyeh pattern, the porcelain plates are deposited for future archaeologists to excavate. Once unearthed, they will interfere with current versions of history and in effect cause a historical intervention.
Longitude and latitude of each deposit will eventually be engraved on a steel disc inserted into a 20cm bronze munition replica modelled on a Cold War Russian nuclear bomb. With the porcelain itself absent from the sculptural installation, the bomb shells represent the archaeological artefacts in absentia.
With the bronze bombs referencing the famous Fabergé eggs, the installation lends a familiar, yet destructive shape to the idea of instrumentalised archaeology as a new form of warfare - while discretely alluding to the notion of contemporary political artworks as suspended between the reality they are influenced by and their own status as luxury commodities.
Archaeology in Absentia is part of Sansour's ongoing project exploring the archaeological warfare taking place in Israel/Palestine. In the absence of a real peace process, archaeology has long since become a method for settling land disputes, and the discipline has long since lost its innocence as a sub-branch of historical studies.
At its core, Archaeology in Absentia takes on the role of myth/fiction on fact/documentary and investigates the possibilities of rewriting and influencing history.
The Frying Log
The Frying Log is a performative sculpture. It consists of a carved branch holding a frying pan, and a piece of firewood heating up the pan when ignited. It can be a challenge to find the appropriate logs for the sculpture. Here in Jerusalem we had the luck that one of al Hoash' supporters cut down a tree a couple of years ago. It is now completely dry and perfectly suited to be used as firewood. When we started to cut the wood into smaller pieces we found an ant colony inside. Fortunately, they were only living in some part of the trunk, so without disturbing their home, we could gather enough pieces for the project.
Jesper Aabille is a cross-disciplinary artist based in Denmark.
Usama Allati is a guitarist, and began to play at the age of ten, when she enrolled at the National Conservatory of Music in Bethlehem. She is a Marcel Khalifa Guitar Contest winner. Currently, she teaches music at the Bethlehem Academy of Music (BAM) and Dar Al-Kalima University College. Her musical experience extends on both the local and international level.
Majd Ammouri (b. Jerusalem, 1990) is an installation artist. Always interested in making art, she graduated from Bezalel Academy with a BA in fine arts in 2014. She now works as an art instructor in schools and art galleries. Majd lives and works in Jerusalem.
Eleanor Davies is an artist and producer. She invites people to engage differently with their surroundings, creating gentle and surprising provocations that allow a shift in position. She has played violin to gorillas, set up cages and landscaped school playgrounds. She has got people out walking, writing books and making speeches, and has worked with excluded kids, the elderly, teenage parents, the council, schools and the police.
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.
Manal Ghaneim is a Palestinian storyteller who has performed both in Palestine and abroad. Her performances use popular stories extracted from Palestinian and international heritage. She has trained children and young people in storytelling and drama, and has produced storytelling performances and theatrical sketches with them. She has participated in Palestinian national and cultural events, and in festivals in Algeria, Jerusalem, Morocco and Jordan. She recently founded a storytelling group of young people with the Bisan organization in Ramallah.
Rabab Ghazoul is a visual artist who uses video, site, language, the performative and the conversational to create installations, events and encounters-whether a march, a choir, a gathering or a walk-in the public realm. Artworks often draw on existing 'texts' to reveal the nuance of private affiliation; our negotiation of the political.
Mohammad Karazon is a drummer who was born in Ramallah into a family of musicians. He began his musical studies at the Al-Kamandjati Center in Ramallah and went on to study at the Angers and Toulouse institutes in France where he specialized in classical and jazz drumming. After returning to Palestine in 2014, he has taught in various musical centers, such as Al-Kamandjati, the Yamaha Music School and the Edward Said Conservatory, and organized music and drumming workshops for children across the West Bank and in France. He has played with groups, orchestras, choirs and singers in Palestine and abroad.
Soren Lind is a Danish author. He writes children's books and literary fiction. With a background in philosophy, Lind wrote books on mind, language and understanding before turning to fiction. He has pusblished a novel and two collections of short stories as well as four children's books. In addition to his literary production, Lind is also a visual artist and writes short film scripts. Lind lives and works in London.
Amer Maddah is an artist.
Aleen Masoud was born in Bethlehem, Palestine, and is a business graduate from Bethlehem University. She started playing the violin at the Edward Said National Conservatory at the age of ten and began singing four years ago. Aleen works as a violin teacher at Sounds of Palestine, teaching refugee children, and helping build hope and a better future for young Palestinian musicians.
Ahmad Nabil 'Fiction has been my passion since I was little; I grew up as a visual artist, especially in the fields of creating fantasy and fiction in painting, performing and writing. I usually work with children and young people in widening their imagination and artistic skills, passing on to them the tools they need to become pilots at what they love to do.'
Malene Nors Tardrup studied at the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts, Glasgow School of Art, and the University of New Mexico. Interested in why, where and how as humans we navigate and manifest ourselves, as an artist, theorist and facilitator, her work focuses on issues of cultural identity, cultural history and historiography. Her work is based on the photographic medium but often uses different media and methods. Lives and works in Copenhagen.
Samer Rashed chose to study the viola not only because of its unique sound, but also because it was among the more uncommon instruments to study in Palestine. He graduated from the National Conservatory of Music in Jerusalem in 2012, and also studied in Turkey with Nedim Nalbantoglu, a specialist in gypsy, Turkish and jazz music. Samer has participated in concerts and festivals in Sweden, Greece, Bahrain, Finland, Belgium, Serbia, Lebanon, Spain, Norway, Jordan, Syria, Kuwait and the UAE.
Larissa Sansour (b. East Jerusalem, 1973) studied fine arts in London, New York and Copenhagen. Utilising photography, installation and sculpture, her work is immersed in the current political dialogue. Central to it is the tug and pull between fiction and reality. Her films and installations have been widely shown, in recent solo exhibitions in the UK, Copenhagen, Finland, Sweden, Dubai, Madrid and Istanbul, and in the Istanbul, Busan and Liverpool biennales. She currently lives and works in London.
Alia Rayyan has an MA degree in international politics, with a focus on the Middle East, sociology and history of art, from the University of Hamburg and the School of Oriental and African Studies at the University of London. Since 2001 she has interwoven politics and art as a creative producer, filmmaker, project manager, journalist and writer in Berlin, Beirut, Dubai, Amman and Ramallah. Moving in 2007 to Palestine brought her focus to the language of image and identity, and she worked for different international organizations in Ramallah and Amman as a consultant and culture manager. Since September 2013, she has been Director of the Al Hoash Gallery in Jerusalem.