(Her/His) stories of Palestine

Since a significant lot of the images, meanings and narratives we manufacture claim some lineage to one’s own biography, I imagined that ‘stories’ of Palestinians, inside and outside Palestine, dispersed within Palestine’s territory and all over the map of the world, would depict a more acute, poignant and significant picture of Palestine ‘now’, on the sixtieth year in the pursuit of justice, repatriation, self-determination and the return to a usurped homeland. In conceiving the exhibition, I consciously chose the purview of a storyteller, or more precisely of an ethnographer whose research is centered on the body of works and objects Palestinian artists chose never to part with in the span of their career. Thus the exhibition would showcase objects or works artists had held onto, deciding resolutely not to sell or give away, and agree to lend, for the length of the event. Moreover, the display would be accompanied by a narrative text written by the artists that accounts for the reason or provide the context for never parting with the object or art work.

This ethnographic approach, drawing from factuality, carries fecund potential to elucidate one of the most complex (her/his)stories of a people, violated, persecuted, occupied, expelled, to be told. The ethnographic and quasi-anthropological turn in contemporary art is neither alien nor new to the past half century of practice. The use of textual models that engage in decoding practice and discourse has acquired remarkable currency. In the context of Palestinian art, both national plight, stretching over six decades, and unambiguous political framing, have been the subject of encoding, decoding and recoding in almost all artistic practice. In the past decade or so, the drive for documentary (video and photography) has visibly congealed into a trend, subsumed in the political. This bent for the political has, admittedly, inspired critics to admonish its limiting and restrictive burdens, not least of which Hal Foster, who deemed the caveat in the shift from “medium-specific” to “discourse-specific” practice as “dangerously political” (emphasis my own).

These objects and/or works, that artists Never-Part with, occupy a physical space in the artists’ lives, intimate to their lived experience, accumulating over time the quintessence of their actuality, told through their narrative. Furthermore, these objects and/or works are repositories of narratives of history and paradigms for cultural mapping. Their documentary factuality, profoundly subjective, is not intended to stand in lieu of, deliver realistic accounts or eye-witness reports about the tragedy of the Palestinian people. To borrow from Nordstrom and Robben’s introduction to their Fieldwork under Fire, “victims can never convey their pain and suffering to us, other than through the distortion of word, image, and sound”.

My engagement with the project has not been immune from interrogating my own motivations. I wondered, for instance, how far removed the peculiar beckoning of Never-Part was from the art world’s tirelessly ravenous search for immaculate and unadulterated symbols. Might the endeavor not hinder the platonic relationship between objects and/or works and their creators? Possibly, but an alternative evaluation might also find a cathartic release instead of the hindrance, or a closure to a unique relationship and inimitable story. I am not sure I am able to draw any conclusion or extract a thread out of the fabric of that complex history of entangled destinies and accidents, even if I wanted to. What I am invested in, is the attempt to produce the impossible representation of past-lived experience. By virtue of their physical presence, these objects and/or works become, incomprehensibly and absurdly, part of the trauma and lived experience of Palestine’s tattered being, they convey what narrative is evidently incapable of doing alone. The concept/motivation for the exhibition also attempts to unwrap dialectically, objects, images, sounds and texts as they part-from the artists and become part-of the nation, the history, the diaspora, the experience, the ambition, the humiliation, the glory, the failures and the dreams of a people dispossessed.

Jack Persekian

Curator

Editor’s Note 

From its inception, Never-Part coupled the exhibition of object with text, in spite of the fact that such couplings are nowadays alternately regarded with suspicion, taxed with passeism or snubbed as didactic. In Never-Part, texts present narrative and objects represent narrative, transcribing lived experience to the scale of the individual and inscribing the profoundly subjective in the realm of art, with works or practice. Producing a catalogue was not a straightforward, pedestrian choice. On the one hand, documenting this unconventional exhibition –laden with a ‘once and never again’ tension– seemed obvious, because it would be its only perennial archival trace. On the other hand, designing a catalogue, which conventionally entails production of texts, risked in this case a superlative production of narrative, be it descriptive, analytic or critical.

Even though Never-Part is entirely embedded in the realm of contemporary artistic practice, the exhibition is nonetheless disengaged from the rules of the game. Not only are artists’ contributions de facto extracted from the discourse, visibility, reach and commerce of contemporary art, they moreover intimate to a subjectivity that artists have decidedly kept at bay from public exposure. Rather than fill gaps in whatever the exhibition delivers, or counter its momentum, we decided the catalogue ought to accompany it in tandem and record as close documentation as possible.

To underscore the historical, political and ‘ethnographic’ mapping intended by the curator, artists were invited to answer a set of five questions, inspired from his statement as well as from the overall lot of contributions. This set of questions, perfunctorily referred to as ‘interviews’, are actually closer in form to a survey, a standard tool in mappings. They focused on the theme of loss, central to the lived experience of being Palestinian, to the creative process, artistic practice and parting. In many respects, the questions attest to the limits of a formal surveying of the signifying power of loss, its creative charge and impart on subjectivity.

Only two artists turned down the invitation because each felt they had already expounded enough in their respective texts. At first hand, respondents’ answers provide interesting testimonials of the experience of loss, elucidating the boundaries of a straightforward discussion, of language that does not resort to allegory, metaphor, or symbol. On another register, they present interesting expressions of artists’ engagement with the contemporary world of exhibition and promotion as well as production of information and knowledge on art.

Much as curator Jack Persekian was transparent and self-critical about the complexity of his own motivations and approach in conceiving Never-Part, so was I daunted by the challenge of imagining a catalogue that would be up to par with the boldness of the exhibition, its implications on the historiography of Palestine, its catastrophe and contemporary art. In their bewildering diversity, artists’ contributions to the exhibition bring back to the fore an essential attribute of Palestinian art that the self-congratulating international art market and fantasia of international biennials seems to systematically undervalue or elude, namely the uncanny ability to ceaselessly innovate and imagine ways of representing their being in the world as Palestinians, in a Palestine sovereign, self-determined and inscribed in a cogent historical continuum.

Rasha Salti

Editor