Representations of a Disappearing Landscape
The Palestinian Museum
April 2 – December 31, 2019
Curated by Dr. Tina Sherwell
Opening hours: Daily from 10:00 to 18:00,
except Friday (unless there’s an event).
The exhibition explores how representations of landscape evolved over time via a selection of iconic, rarely seen works, and special commissions by 36 artists from Palestine and its diaspora. The 87 works encompass painting, photography, installation, video and film, natural media, sculpture, and an intervention in the museum’s gardens. This is one of the largest group exhibitions ever held in Palestine, presenting a panoramic introduction to Palestinian visual arts from the modern to the contemporary.
Intimate Terrains explores the changing representation of landscape by Palestinian artists and our relationship to place and location through the themes of erasure, fragmentation, distance, and belonging, in a spectrum of artworks drawn from the 1930s to the present day.
Representations of landscape over the decades provide us with a prism onto the experience of loss and longing, as it has been a prominent subject matter for artists since its topography holds a central place in the identities of Palestinians.
Landscape is at once a site of projection and a layered terrain of remains, memories, and histories. How do artists negotiate and articulate collective and personal memory in relation to representations of landscape? What keeps us in a place? What are our ambivalences of why we remain attached to places? What are the limits of nostalgia? How do exile and different experiences of alienation shape views of the landscape? With our diminishing view and access to the landscape, ongoing violent confiscation and destruction of the land, segregation of communities and the fragmentation and isolation of terrains, how do our intimate relationships to places manifest around a disappearing landscape? What have been and what are our and dreams and visions of landscapes of the past and future?
The exit of the exhibition hall leads to the glass gallery, which is designed to complement the artistic propositions of this exhibition. The gallery displays leaflets and wall texts with a selection of poetry, prose, infographics, chronologies, etc. Arranged around the themes of loss, erasure, fragmentation, and resistance, these texts and figures map the political dispensation that structures the artworks exhibited in the museum’s main gallery.
Participating artists: Jumana Emil Abboud, Tarek Alghoussein, Jawad Almalhi, Basma Alsharif, Nabil Anani, Johnny Andonia, Rafat Asad, Asad Azzi, Samira Badran, Tayseer Barakat, Taysir Batniji, Rana Bishara, Benji Boyadgian, Hassan Daraghmeh, Aissa Deebi, Sophie Halaby, Samia Halaby, Rula Halawani, Hazem Harb, Tawfiq Jawharieh, Yazan Khalili, Manal Mahamid, Bashir Makhoul, Sliman Mansour, Jack Persekian, Khalil Rayan, Steve Sabella, Larissa Sansour, Walid Abu Shakra, Laila Shawa, Amer Shomali, Suha Shoman, Nida Sinnokrot, Nasser Soumi, Vera Tamari, Vladimir Tamari.
Photos by Hareth Yousef. ©The Palestinian Museum.
