Stateless Nation: An Exhibition on the Frontiers of Citizenship by Sandi Hilal and Alessandro Petti at The BZU Ethnographic and Art Museum

The Exhibition Stateless Nation at Birzeit University marked the pre-inaugural opening ofThe University's Ethnographic and Art Museum. Prior to this opening the exhibition by Sandi Hilal and Alessandro Petti had toured in Europe having first been exhibited at the prestigious 2003 Venice Biennale.

The exhibition articulates the multiplicity and diversity of Palestinian identity. Palestinians are commonly thought of as a homogenous group in terms of stereotypes of the masked terrorist or helpless refugees images which have remained associated with Palestinians during the last several decades. The installations and video works do much to challenge these pre-conceived ideas. In the Room of Dreams Palestinians from all walks of life describe their aspirations. In their differences one finds common threads, most significant of which is the desire for a degree of normality, of not having to continually encounter the political meaning of one's identity. The politics of identity the absence of a nation are clearly crystalised in the monumental Passports. In these “passports” people of the same nation carry different citizenships, giving them varied rights to movement. In the legal documents which they carry, these people are part of other countries but the reality for Palestinians is that they experience themselves as the 'other' in many locations. The silent images shown side by side in On the Border, juxtapose satellite images of the territories, topographical maps and statistics, with photographs of borders and check points and testimonies of the experiences of different generations of Palestinians. In so doing the implications and outcome of political decisions and the discourse of the map are unraveled. In this piece one sees the transformation of “place” as it is dealt with as 'space' inhabited by another to be conquered and divided. At the same time one reads the very personal relationships to places, in the form of memories and anecdotes of different Palestinians.

Finally the sheer practicality, and the reality of having to move from one place to another, in a terrain brimming with a surreal amount of checkpoints and the apartheid wall, is documented in the video work Road Map. Encountering the various facets of the exhibition one leaves the exhibition with a wealth of information about the personal experiences of statelessness Palestinians and the reality of the physical terrain of a nation under occupation.