“The quintessential Palestinian experience... takes place at a border, an airport, a checkpoint...it is at these borders and barriers that the six million Palestinians are singled out for 'special treatment,' and are forcefully reminded of their identity,” writes historian Rashid Khalidi (1997: 1). This is perhaps most salient in the Occupied Palestinian Territories (oPt), where spatial mobility is governed by physical checkpoints staffed by armed soldiers, segregated roads and an insurmountable bureaucratic paper trail required for obtaining passes, visas, permits, and residencies from the occupying power. Hence, the 'barrier' frame is not only a major preoccupation but also a deeply embedded signifier of identity in people's psyches, bodies, and sense of collectivity. In the post-Oslo era, expressive culture - including music, theater, film, etc. - figures prominently in the construction of Palestinian collectivity through projects of resistance, nation-building, and international diplomacy. Such activities are sometimes framed colloquially as “cultural intifada.” This paper is based on ethnographic work conducted in Palestine/Israel in 2011-2012. My aim is to show how expressive culture is utilized to culturally reconstruct the making of place, and its associated epistemologies, under extreme conditions of confinement. The paper details a performance by the Youth Orchestra founded by the oPt-based Al-Kamandjâti music conservatory at Qalandiya checkpoint. Established by the Israeli security apparatus to control the movement of Palestinians between the West Bank and Jerusalem, Qalandiya is a daily passage point and a marker of fragmented lives for thousands of Palestinians. In this performance, the orchestra re-territorializes the checkpoint as a Palestinian space by confronting its disembodied surveillance technology with embodied, collective sonic power. Beyond confronting the brute hierarchies established by the occupation, the orchestra challenges the national, social, and moral orders that undergird its logic. This performance also participates in the buildup of cultural narratives about Palestine and Palestinians locally and globally.

In the wake of disenchantment resulting from the failed Oslo Peace Process and Second Intifada, a younger generation of Palestinian artists is shifting away from the visual references that dominated the work of older generations of Palestinian artists. These younger artists are demonstrating a disinterest in the symbolism of and references to the foundational moments in the history of the Palestinian Occupation. These moments, which had prevailed in the art of previous generations of Palestinian artists, centered around the events of 1948 and 1967: the Nakba and Declaration of the State of Israel, and the Six Day War and annexation of East Jerusalem, the West Bank, Gaza, and the Golan Heights. Instead, these artists are choosing to center their artistic practices around the daily realities of their lives under the Occupation. Rather than fixating on the past, they are concerned with the present and imagining unique futures of their own invention. These artists are disillusioned with the nostalgia of previous generations, and reflect this in their artistic production, which focuses rather on the daily injustices of the Occupation that they bear witness to and experience themselves. Additionally, I suggest that in their imaginings of the future, this generation of Palestinian artists is not concerned with a notion of going back to a previous conception of Palestine rooted in nostalgia, but are rather re-inventing a modern vision based on the realities of the past 60+ years. These artists are inventing and reinventing the symbolism and potential future imaginings of Palestine for their contemporary times. This paper will conduct a critical analysis of works by contemporary Palestinian artists living in Israel and Palestine in order to examine these new approaches by the youngest generation as compared with previous generations of Palestinian artists. MESA will be the first presentation of original field research, consisting of artist interviews, studio visits, and archival and library research, conducted from April-June 2015 in Israel and Palestine.

Larissa Sanour’s Nation Estate (2012) is a 9-minute short film that imagines a future Palestinian state constructed as a skyscraper. Rendered in a glossy, fluorescent palette of digitally generated imagery, the film follows Sansour as she returns from a trip abroad to the vertical nation of Palestine and roams its eerily underpopulated floors. Qalandia 2087 (2008), a piece in Wafa Hourani’s Future Cities series, also envisions a dystopian urban future for Palestinian statehood. This mixed media piece evokes an architectural model in both size and structure, comprising five scale models representing the future city of Qalandia. Named after the infamous checkpoint between Ramallah and Jerusalem, Qalandia’s segments are based on actual sites: the Qalandia refugee camp, the airport and the apartheid wall. Though both projects are rooted in a rich science-fictional vocabulary, Hourani and Sansour present opposite visions of a dystopian Palestine. Hourani’s is characterized by sprawling filth, a crumbling physical infrastructure and the dilapidated technology of a previous century (as is evidenced by the omnipresence of archaic television antennae). Sansour, on the other hand, gives us a Palestine that has been condensed and sterilized, its landscape controlled and contained by a single, surreal high-rise building. Furthermore, the approach of the viewer is radically different between each of these works: Sansour’s project offers the narrative absorption of film, inviting a participatory relationship to the work, whereas Hourani’s miniature models can be moved between and scrutinized, elevating the viewer to the omniscient role of an urban planner poring over a future city. In both of these projects, however, the physical space of Palestine is remapped according to a complex network of cultural signifiers and political imperatives, implicating the imaginary urban fabric as a site for the negotiation of Palestinian citizenship. This paper will consider these divergent models of space, approaching science fiction futurism as an emergent framework for critically interrogating the relationships between Palestinians, place, and the rhetoric of statehood.

This paper explores one of the most debated topics regarding the arts, the relationship between artistic production and understandings of what constitutes ‘the real.’ The question of what is deemed real has played a constitutive role in perceptions and practices in the ongoing struggle over Palestine, and as scholars have shown, facts do not in themselves serve as proof of reality. As a result, great attention has been given to discursive and imaged constructions of reality in Palestine, as well as to the renderings of a people and their historical genealogy as mere fabrication. While studies on Palestinian cultural production have focused on an art/politics relationship, particularly within the material terms or allegory of a Palestinian nation, the question of the real has not been substantially theorized. This paper focuses on the museum for two significant reasons: 1. The concept of the museum itself blurs the boundaries between art and politics, art object and socio-political reality; and 2. The role of museums in Palestine is historically connected to Palestinians’ desire for aesthetic and political self-representation. In particular, I investigate the Palestinian Museum, which is hoped to be a (if not the) leading cultural institution located in Palestine and which is promoted as the largest museum in the world devoted to Palestinians. Initially named The Palestinian Museum of Memory, it was conceived as a national museum that preserves and authenticates Palestine’s past. Its new configuration as a transnational museum that cultivates multi-vocal narratives of Palestine and the Palestinians constructs an alternative relationship to the real where narrative is privileged over fact and the constructedness of Palestine is assumed in place of an ontological understanding of the nation. The Museum, scheduled to open in 2016, is firmly embedded within a post-Oslo context where the land of Palestine and its people are continuously reconfigured and art and politics are shaped by future imaginaries of Palestinian reality. This research offers a contextualization of museums not as sites of contestation between two peoples/two narratives but rather an assemblage of multiple ideologies and material and structural processes that contribute to understandings of how the real is conceptualized. Based on ethnographic research on the Museum (interviews, site visits, collection of brochures, press releases, newsletters, media reports), I situate my analysis within recent scholarship on museums in the Arab world that address questions of truth and authenticity, representations of reality, and global spectatorship.