ID92559661

The exhibition contemplates Palestinian identity during the second Intifada which broke out in the year 2000 through the documentation of the lives of Palestinian labourers who work in Israel without permits. These labourers risk their lives, going around military checkpoints, and staying away from their families and beloved ones in the West Bank for weeks and months.They live in warehouses or rented apartments under extremely harsh conditions. They are haunted by the feeling of being stalked and hunted down by Israeli authorities every minute of their lives whether they are at their houses or at their places of work in Israel.

This fear spills over to their families, through the bitter means of living that they provide them. The pictures are taken in black and white, with frames made of construction wood used by the labourers in their work. ID numbers in a serial order are ironed on the side of each frame . The exhibition travels with the workers between their houses in cities like Lod, Beer Sheva, and Jerusalem, and their houses at Aroub camp, Yatta, Hebron, Bethlehem, and Ramallah in the West Bank.

This link between the labourer and his family aims to bring to light the fact that the issue here is not simply an individual case, which implies the suffering of a small portion of the Palestinian people.But rather it is situation that affects all the Palestinian people. The family is the extension of the individual, and the family is the nucleus and the core of all the people.

The exhibition presents the crisis of legitimacy suffered by the Palestinian people in their struggle with the other-the Israeli. It implicates who can be present in which part of Palestine, when and within which definition. Israel has worked methodically on dismembering the Palestinian people through the issuance of several types of Identity cards with different colours: Orange for residents of Territories occupied in 1967, blue with conditional residency for residents of Jerusalem occupied in 1967, and blue Identity cards with Israeli nationality for Palestinians who live within the green line since 1948. Israel humiliates Palestinian of 1967 OccupiedTerritories through the policy of permits.

The artist himself was arrested under harsh condition in the year 2004 when he was caught in Jerusalem without a permit. This experience made him even more insistent on realizing his project to express the crisis of legitimacy that he as an individual and his people suffer from. The artist chose to use his ID number as a title for his exhibition to express his fusion with his own people.