Alexandra Handal
 From the Bed & Breakfast Notebooks

Single channel video, 13:46 min, 2008

 

Anna Boggon
As the Crow Flies
Digital print on archival paper, 2009

 

 

Buthayna Ali
No Comment!
Mixed media installation, 2009

 

 Alexandra Handal
 From the Bed & Breakfast Notebooks

In West Jerusalem, some expropriated Palestinian homes that

Are now occupied by Israeli Jews have been converted into bed and breakfasts, promising tourists ‘an authentic experience of Jerusalem’.

It is in one of those accommodations in West Musrara that I spent

 thirteen nights in August 2007. I wanted to capture the feeling of

 the place as I experienced it. The result is an account where

 numerous stories unfold through layers of sound, image and text, uncovering – like a crime scene investigation – the remnants of a

 denied past against an oppressive present.

 

No Parking Without Permission

Photographs, 2008 - present

 

Although walking through a city would almost anywhere in the

 world be seen as a mundane activity, for a Palestinian drifting in

West Jerusalem it is politicised and loaded with emotional

 ramifications. Through numerous walks, I explored these areas of

the city by looking through all sorts of barriers, fences, gates and

 bushes in an attempt to remove the distance and be/come closer to the spaces that Palestinians were torn apart from in 1948. These drifts culminated into a series of photos, each image a visual testimony of my yearning.

 


 

Anna Boggon
As the Crow Flies

As the Crow Flies’ is a printed map of the UK. It appears initially as a regular map including county boundaries. However a line spans the distance of London to the Highlands of Scotland, a staggering 709km, equivalent in length to the Israeli Separation Wall, printed to scale. The map is an effort to translate something incomprehensible into another language, be it a journey from childhood to adulthood or a six hour drive. Whichever way, it appears as a scar on the landscape and a hindrance of absurd proportion.

 

The Israeli Separation Wall Route measurements are taken from the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (July 2009)
Too Many Steps in the Wrong Direction
Video – stop frame animation, 04:00 min, 2009

 

A pair of shoes walks step by step through the streets of Jerusalem. Snap shots are pieced together to create two types of movement, that of the shoes devoid of body and that of the transient passersby who appear and disappear. It refers to being lost and out of place. The street level photographs of the shoes offer a way to document life in an unsuspecting way.


Buthayna Ali
No Comment! 

Religions grow us on
Love, forgiveness, honesty... respect ourselves and the other
We repel
And we become under their Shadows Deaf, dumb, blind...then wars
We build dreams on our wreckage souls
Perhaps one day they come true