In a recent New York Times interview with the artist Emily Jacir about her installation “Material for a Film” (now on display at the Guggenheim), she was asked how she “distinguish[es] between her political activity and her art.” Jacir’s work draws on personal experience as a Palestinian living and working in the West Bank and the US, and addresses–either directly or obliquely–the themes of collective loss, political exile, and Israeli military occupation, eliciting criticism that it maligns Israel. The subsequent exchange is doubly revealing.  If there is something too easy, too glibly reflexive, in the interviewer’s assumption that the work of a Palestinian artist is primarily an extension of her politics, Jacir rather protests too much in her insistence on a hard-and-fast separation between the two: “They are two completely different things”–This while discussing an exhibit commemorating the 1972 assassination of a Palestinian intellectual by Israeli intelligence. Then asked whether she thought the exhibition would attract controversy, Jacir responded “Unfortunately I am afraid it might.” Yet controversy that provokes debate and raises questions is no bad thing, and Jacir’s defensiveness on this point tells us much about the status of political activism within the institutional culture of the art world. While Jacir understandably would not want her work to be read through the lens of identity politics, or reduced to political sound bites about the suffering and injustice experienced by Palestinians, the exchange raises questions about the role politics can and should play in art. It also underscores the way in which institutional recognition can circumscribe the space of opposition, in effect co-opting and neutralizing it.

Click here for complete article

Before I arrived, before I read Darwish, before I knew where it was on a map and some time after my mother tried to describe what her father’s father told her about it, Beirut was a part of me.  At family gatherings in Boston or New Jersey or New Hampshire, sitting on wall-to-wall carpets or on soft couches in rooms with homemade tabouleh and store-bought hommous on the coffee table, conversation would struggle toward remembering.  None of us actually know why the strangers whose blood we share left Beirut in the 1920s – there are rumors of flight from the law or from politics, others say our ascendants were merchants seeking a better life.

On October 6th 2008, when my short video, Israel’s Generals Speak came out on the internet, the media in Israel had a field day. “Israeli Generals Mislead,” cried the headlines, because one of the military people whom we interviewed for the piece said we took his words out of context. In the video, seven senior retired military men, and a former head of the Mossad, expressed support for the candidacy of Barack Obama, or his policies.

This article presents an insider's look at the making of the exhibition Palestine 1948 at the Tropenmuseum Amsterdam. The exhibition concurred with the 60-year commemoration of al-Nakba, a term used in the Arab world to refer to the exodus of the Palestinians following the establishment of the State of Israel in 1948. Featuring video-interviews and photographic testimonies, the exhibition showed how al-Nakba affected the lives of individual Palestinians. The choice for telling the story of the creation of Israel from a Palestinian perspective was anything but obvious for a museum in the Netherlands - a country known for its pro-Israel stance. It did not take long before the museum was blamed for being 'one-sided', leading to a law-suit on the grounds that the exhibition incited hatred against Jews. The article discusses the negotiation processes that took place during the exhibition.

What the conflicts over the newly planned mosques in countries such as Slovenia, Austria, Germany, Italy, and the United States have in common is the attitude that it is acceptable to build a new mosque, as long as it does not look like one.  Notwithstanding the fact that Muslim citizens in these countries have a legal right to build their places of worship, such an understanding of the mosque as a specific building type very much goes against its fluid architectural concept and its multifaceted formal possibilities. While a lack of understanding and knowledge is evident in such debates, the growing public visibility of Muslims in Western Europe and the United States conditions an increasing fear of and preoccupation with the “other.” Ongoing debates over cultural and religious pluralism in the West also reveal the xenophobic and orientalist thinking that often informs these discussions.

Upon its unveiling in a city with one square foot of green space per inhabitant, Cairo’s 74-acre Al Azhar Park in 2005 was rightfully heralded as the greatest green space in the city’s modern history.(1) The Park was part of an urban revitalization project in the old city aimed at improving the life of the local community as well as restoring its historic fabric.(2)  Investigating the complex spatial politics of the site might seem counterintuitive given its celebrated civic nature; it is in fact crucial that we understand the way architectural interventions such as this remap social space, extending and consolidating hierarchies of inclusion and exclusion. The boundaries of the Park and public use of it since its completion reveal the complicated nature of civic belonging in class-stratified Cairo. The ambiguous spatial relationship between the Park and its surroundings is perhaps nowhere more apparent than along the edge it shares with the neighborhood of Darb al-Ahmar. In an effort to respond to the specific spatial politics of the Park as well as to material and historic trajectories of building and habitation in Cairo, I worked on an architectural design proposal for an urban housing block within this common boundary.  The project takes issue with both the monumentalism(3) and contextualism(4) of many recent architectural projects in the Middle East, developing in its place an anisotropic(5) urban strategy that modulates in supple response to particular site conditions and design intentions. The project also proposes an alternative urbanism, reconsidering foundational aspects of the modernist master plan that continue to shape our creation and understanding of form within cities. Before turning to discuss the project, I will briefly describe Al Azhar Park and Darb al-Ahmar.

When I initiated a series of small summer workshops in six Palestinian camps in Lebanon in 2001 with photographer Simon Lourié, I never imagined that we would be going back and forth to the camps for four years, or that I would finally decide to live in one of them, Burj al-Shamali.