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Palestinian Posters: Revolutionary Remixes and Visual Rememberings
Abstract
In the late 1960s, Palestinian artists and activists began creating posters as a way of communicating with each other and commemorating their struggles. The early posters commemorated martyrs, marked the advent of political movements, advocated for political positions, and celebrated national moments and progressive causes. As the tradition developed, the Palestinian poster genre grew to include solidarity posters with others in struggle, posters by others in solidarity with Palestinians, advertisements for political and cultural events, and after 1994 posters promoting projects of the new Palestinian authority. The poster art tradition continues to this day, in paper, and more innovatively, in digital form. Palestinian posters now number in the thousands, held in collections all over the world, and are still being produced and pasted in the streets and tagged on Facebook pages throughout the West Bank, Gaza, Israel, the Palestinian diaspora, indeed globally. This research is built on an internet-based archive that contains nearly 4,000 Palestine posters and another 2,000 posters in the physical archive to which I have unique access. This paper will examine the development of a visual language that memorializes the events, symbols, and images of the nation, and how that visual language has been constructed over time through more than forty years of Palestinian posters. Land Day (30 March 1976) is commemorated in 93 posters, each memorializing the event in a palette of symbols that conjures up a uniquely Palestinian memory of that event. Via close study and chronological attentiveness, we can see how images come to have iconographic meaning and become “an object of memory.” In the case of Land Day, the predominant symbols are the kufiya, a tree, and some expression of grief over the land. In addition, poster artists also remix and reuse images, thus both complicating and enriching the symbolic palette. For example, the poster from Land Day 2010 uses an image of an elderly woman clinging to an uprooted olive tree, an image that has been used in five different posters published in the West Bank, Beirut, and Belgium, which first appeared as a photograph on a poster in 1990. The iconography that artists use is built on a vocabulary of symbolic events that connect to individual and collective memories of the past. Through these visual renderings and remixes, the posters create narrative nodes of Palestinian history that draw on communal memories and create shared spaces for recollection.
Discipline
Anthropology
Geographic Area
Palestine
Sub Area
Arab-Israeli Conflict