A balance of personal and political in Palestinian artist Emily Jacir's exhibition
ONE of the pieces collected in the survey of Emily Jacir’s work opening at Imma this week, Embrace, is a low, circular platform made to look like an airport luggage carousel.
It turns fruitlessly, not a bag in sight. It’s a witty comment on waiting, and displacement, on the idea of never arriving. Jacir is from Bethlehem, so the leap from what might be a personal statement for another artist to an expression of the plight of her people is a very short one.
Indeed, in the artist’s own words, Embrace is “about the kind of waiting that happens in a temporary space, and what happens when that kind of waiting becomes permanent.” That, pretty neatly, is the dilemma of Palestinians.
But what gives real life to Jacir’s work is its range of reference: the shifting registers of personal and political are deeply intertwined. From work to work, they play off each other in interesting ways. Jacir spent her childhood in Saudi Arabia, and moved to Rome as a young teenager. She studied in the US and now teaches part of the year in Ramallah in the West Bank.
It’s a personal history that speaks strongly in her work, which looks at travel, time, displacement, colonialism, history, in particular silenced histories, and cultural exchange.
But the title of this survey alone warns against overly simplistic interpretations: Europa. It speaks to the long historical ties between Mediterranean Europe and the Middle East. Europa herself, in Greek mythology, was a Phoenician.
Today I am inspired by Emily Jacir:Where We Come From
— Ray of Sunshine (@Rayana_Speede) November 21, 2016
A photo series of acts carried out for Palestinians unable to visit their family&land. pic.twitter.com/A66nbvNaxN
Stazione is typical of Jacir’s playful seriousnessd — a witty project in which it was intended to add Arabic translations to the stops along Venice’s vaporetto water bus service at the Biennale in 2009. Tellingly, the project was banned — falling foul of a contemporary hysteria that conflates Arabic with Islamic extremism, with threatening outsiders rather than with neighbouring cultures who have been intertwined with the history of Europe for centuries.
“When that piece was abruptly cancelled last the last minute, I was really shocked,” Jacir says, “because that piece was for me about this beautiful moment in history, this shared heritage that could be celebrated by everybody. It was meant to be a celebration and completely secular. So, I was surprised they shut it down for this fear of the Arabic language.”
More broadly, says Jacir, as we sit in an exhibition room, the sounds of installation going on around us, with Europa, “the idea is to present the work I have done in Europe, because, I have felt that this aspect was overlooked in terms of curating and in terms of writing — my relationship to Europe, and particularly Italy. It kept getting sidelined by the work I do in Palestine or this activist period I had in New York. But there is this long history I have in Europe, and there are these subtleties and other ways of looking at the work that kept getting subsumed by this other discourse.
“It is a way for me to open up the dialogue about my work and also a way for people to see that it’s about many things and has many influences. No one talks about the impact of Italy on my work. Isn’t that weird? I’ve been living there on and off since I was 14. The first protests I went to in my life were in Italy. You can imagine some of the most formative experiences in my life happened to me there. not just politically, but aesthetically. “
The political and the aesthetic knit neatly in a new work, La mia Roma (omaggio ai sampietrini). It’s a sculptural tribute to the walks Jacir has taken through the streets of Rome since she was a teenager. Sampietrini are the stones that pave Rome’s roads and they form the basis of the work. They’ve also, over the years, like the cobbles of 1968 Paris, featured in popular protests in the city, emblems of class struggle.
Palestinian history, particularly suppressed stories that might be news even to Palestinians themselves, remains a central theme Jacir’s work. We are sitting in a room housing part of ex libris, a work made between 2010 and 2012 that commemorates the thousands of books taken from Palestinian homes, libraries, and institutions during the 1948 Arab-Israeli War. Six thousand of these books are kept and catalogued at the Jewish National Library in Jerusalem under the designation “AP” — Abandoned Property.
Some have made argued that “looted property” is more apt. Israel says it is merely preserving these artefacts, though that narrative has been challenged, including by Israeli academics, whose writing was how Jacir first came across the subject. In an example of Jacir’s wry sense of history, the work first featured at the dOCUMENTA festival in Kassel, Germany, a period during which Jacir read about the restitution of looted art and books after the Holocaust. “These books have not been restituted,” she says of the Palestinian books, “and I wanted to raise that spectre.”
Europa in its first iteration was at the Whitechapel Gallery in London last year, but there are several different elements this time including a new work called Notes for a Cannon.
“Showing in Ireland is very different and very personal and meaningful for me in ways that it would not be in other places,” Jacir says.“I wasn’t supposed to make a new work for this show, actually. It was supposed just to be a travelling show but I just couldn’t bear to show in Ireland and not have a new work, because of the history of this place. It has had such a profound impact on me for such a long period of time.”
The new work takes as its point of departure the clock tower that once stood at the Jaffa Gate in Jerusalem. It was destroyed by the British in 1922. The work references another clock tower — the still standing one at Imma, seen through a window from the exhibition.
“The first time I came to Imma was in March this year and when I came up here and saw what this place was, the history of this building, who was in this building, and [Kilmainham] gaol right down the road, the site became a sort of framework of the new work. I did research here in the archives, at the jail, and a lot of reading about the site. I was also very interested in the aspect of time-keeping, which is why I link it to the clock tower in Jerusalem […] It’s very much related to my interest in time, standardisation of time, time-keeping, duration and time in the sense of how it has to pass before certain trauma can be acknowledged or even spoken about.
“It’s so common for the generation that lives through a direct trauma not to speak about the things that happened and to hear a grandchild so, ‘Oh, my grandparents never spoke about that’.”
That idea of silence and trauma has been much talked about in Ireland during 2016, making Europa’s timing apt.
“I feel that many people going through this might feel a sense of familiarity with it,” Jacir says of the show. “There’s a shared heritage of Ireland and Palestine in terms of British colonial rule and the traces of that rule.”
