A young architect asks an audience assembled in Jerusalem to learn about her country: “How can I be un-Palestinian in an international context?” Her question introduces us to the paradox at the core of my presentation. Palestinian art represents that which cannot be assumed to exist, anticipates it temporally, instantiates it spatially, and claims it affectively. Yet the architect reminds us that the people tasked with being Palestinian constantly rethink their relationship to the category, too. “Home,” thus, makes a strange word for Palestinian art. On the other hand, art makes an estranging home for Palestinians, whose ethno-nationalist self-term remains the art-world term for a person who categorically cannot appreciate art: Philistine. Perhaps the problem is neither that there is no home for Palestinians to inhabit nor such a dominant one from which they cannot escape. Perhaps these artists reveal rather the limits of art thinking, both academically and curatorially. The extreme case of Palestine’s non-place supports an interdisciplinary inquiry into the workings of imagination, materiality, and the affect of art. Drawing on fieldwork I have conducted intermittently between 1992-2018, I probe cases of art careers and artwork circulation (i.e. work of .Suleiman Mansour, Jawad Malhi, Mona Hatoum, Emily Jacir, Amer Shomali) by bringing both feminist theory and queer theory to bear on the topic. The former reveals discrimination against people by gender while the later reveals discrimination through gender. The one calls for equal access; the other for respite. Both matter. Similarly, Palestinians face discrimination for not having a proper home and want equal access to at-homeness, but they also call for rethinking home as a category entirely. What do we see when Palestinian artists are trying to create home? Is there a home for this in art history? As an anthropologist, I answer these questions by introducing audience-artwork interactions, thereby applying Palestinians’ special case to challenge standard art historical assumptions about where art lies.

Ma?m?d Darw?sh's poetry, particularly his depictions of olive trees, respond to and question Zionist dicourses on land and cultivation in several ways. Zionist discourses often depict the land that would become the State of Israel as empty and in need of cultivation, as exemplified by the well-known Zionist slogan “A land without people for a people without land.” This empty land was often depicted as occupied by pre-modern, perhaps even barbaric inhabitants who were reduced to a part of the landscape; consequently, this land was depicted as in need of newcomers who could cultivate the land using modern techniques. This depiction of empty, uncultivated land waiting to be populated can be linked to the ways in which Zionism (as Maryanne Rhett has noted) sought to produce a new Jewish identity free from the tropes of European anti-Semitism, which portrayed European Jewish men (who were often legally barred from land ownership) as unmasculine and unsuited for physical labor. Ma?m?d Darw?sh's poetry, particularly his depictions of olive trees, appears to respond to and to question this discourse primarily by depicting Palestinians and the olive trees they cultivate as kin. Darw?sh's land is not empty but has been occupied continuously by human beings and olive trees which have cared for one another for centuries. In poems which often blur the boundaries between human and tree, Darw?sh links the simultaneous uprooting of Palestinians and olive trees from their land and suggests that there is a relationship between the right of trees to grow unmolested and the rights of human beings to remain in their native land. The right of humans to remain, he suggests, are drawn from a reciprocal relationship in which human beings care for trees who care for them in return; human beings are depicted as having a familial, kinship relationship with olive trees and as drawing their own rights to remain upon their land from this relationship. Both Darwish’s poetry and Zionist discourse depict Palestinians as part of the landscape, but with very different effects; while Zionist depictions have the effect of erasing Palestinians, Darwish’s depictions assert that it is Palestinians’ very kinship relationship to the landscape, and their roles as caretakers of its trees, that best support their right to remain.

My paper analyzes the experimental moving image practice of contemporary Palestinian artist/filmmaker, Basma Alsharif, which examines the political as a site of investigation that does not resemble the more defined parameters of candid documentary reproductions. Employing a hyperreal aesthetic, Alsharif addresses considerations around homeland and occupied lands, and the undefinable spaces between the known and the unknowable. Her poetic works destabilize image, text, and sound, and offer an alternative to a social consciousness that cannot be penetrated because of its media-saturated realities. Arresting our attention by decolonizing the ethnographer’s gaze, Alsharif’s films move against representing Palestinian communities, but rather present portraits that challenge viewers to better understand a place continually embroiled with conflict and invent ways to exist there. The viewer is never certain what they are seeing and any comprehension of history is seen as pliable, and often imposed by Western representations of marginalized communities. Her works can’t be associated with a specific time and place; they engage with evasive spaces where stories can’t quite be grasped, where history is subjective, and any notion of the real is contested. Simultaneously, Alsharif is invested in the experience of reinterpreting traumatic events repeatedly to reveal things that can’t be communicated and to allow for new meanings to be created. Repetition is not used to bring the story forward, but rather it is employed because the story is too harrowing to be communicated otherwise. By considering how people and civilizations endure and how they are destroyed over time, the artist asks: what kinds of speculative imaginaries are possible even after a political or social destruction? My paper analyzes these issues through a visual studies lens, film theory, and through the writings of feminist, decolonial, and post-colonial scholars. It contemplates how the experimental documentary format grants Alsharif the ability to engage with people and speak with and through their struggles (Minh-ha). Additionally, it examines how artistic processes can represent the other (Tuck and Yang), and how language can fall short in its ability to communicate a contested event (Deleuze). Deleuze, Gilles. Difference and Repetition. Trans. Paul Patton, 1968. New York: Columbia University Press, 1994.   Minh-ha, Trinh T. “The Language of Nativism: Anthropology as a Scientific Conversation of Man with Man.” American Feminist Thought at Century’s End. Ed. Linda S. Kauffman. Cambridge: Blackwell, 1993. Tuck, Eve and Yang, K. Wayne. “Decolonization is not a Metaphor.” Decolonization: Indigeneity, Education, & Society. Vol. 1, No. 1, 2012, pp. 1-40.

In Rashid Masharawi’s film ‘Eid Milad Laila (Laila’s Birthday, 2008), the viewer accompanies Abu Laila, a judge-turned-cab driver, as he navigates his way around Ramallah, transporting passengers who run the gamut from ex-convicts to young lovers to the sick and underprivileged. On this particular day, he must conduct his daily visit to the Ministry of Justice to follow up on his work permit, transport passengers, and purchase a cake for his seven-year old daughter Laila—making sure that he is home by eight o’clock, in time for the festivities. In a similar manner, in Annemarie Jacir’s film Wajib (Duty, 2017), Abu Shadi must drive around the city of Nazareth with his expatriate son Shadi, hand-delivering wedding invitations for his daughter Amal’s wedding and meeting with Amal during her break so they can go dress shopping. Like Abu Laila, Abu Shadi and his son must navigate heavy traffic jams, decaying infrastructure, and disorderly conduct by other pedestrians and drivers—all the while dealing with their own personal drama. Their family drama revolves around Shadi’s refusal to succumb to his father’s desire that he abandon his current girlfriend, move back from Italy, and settle down in Nazareth—ideally after marrying a decent local woman. Engaging with critical film studies by scholars including Nadia Yaqub, Hamid Naficy, and Hamid Dabashi, as well as humor studies, I argue that Masharawi and Jacir employ the trope of the tragicomic ride as a means of juxtaposing familial and national drama and demonstrating the porous nature of the private and public spheres for Palestinians who must endure and circumvent Israel’s ongoing efforts at extinguishing their personal agency as well as their collective “dreams of a nation,” to use Dabashi’s term. The paper demonstrates that the urban road trip serves multiple purposes, including: revealing the absurd material and political conditions endured by Palestinians, as manifested on the street and in spaces likes homes, cafes, and car-repair garages; documenting the mundane and creative, planned and unplanned, acts of sumuud (steadfastness) in the face of national trauma and daily chaos; and demonstrating the intricacy and diversity of the socio-political landscape inhabited by Palestinians, including those who left, stayed behind, or returned to the homeland.