An impressive showcase of art under occupation
▶ Budgets aren’t big, but Qalandiya International has a certain aesthetic, finds Melissa Gronlund
“Before, we used the city to show art,” says Jack Persekian, founder of the Jerusalem Show. “Now we use art to show the city.” The latest instalment of the 10-year-old Jerusalem Show, an exhibition of Palestinian and international contemporary art, opened Wednesday night in sites spread across the Old City.
Old women scrubbed the slippery stone streets that have seen millions of tourists pass by: but this week, it is art pilgrims on the move as they take in the show’s venues. There is the Ma’amal Foundation, which Persekian directs; Lutheran School, which hung its artworks among maps and chalkboard scribbles; and a shopfront by the Church of the Holy Sepulchre.
The exhibition is part of the just-opened Qalandiya International, which runs until the end of the month. The biennial event, which brings together art spaces across Jerusalem and Ramallah, was established in 2012, growing out of the Jerusalem Show, and is now a focal point for the city’s art scene. Budgets aren’t large, and because few works can be shipped in, it has developed a certain aesthetic: work feels local, a lot of it made or printed in situ.
At the Lutheran School, Palestinian artist Yazan Khalili, who is also co-curating a show, scrawled his contribution on a chalkboard in a now disused classroom. American artist Blake Shaw, showing work in the Interlude exhibition, made his video onsite: visitors watched through glass panels as a female presenter stood in front of a green screen, and then ducked into a room to watch the developing product.
Over the next few days, Qalandiya will open further exhibitions, most of them in Ramallah, the centre of Palestine’s art scene. Many of Ramallah’s artists were not able to attend the Jerusalem Show on Wednesday night because they did not have the right permits; the bus of art visitors heading there was largely filled with visitors from the west. The National, in a special focus on Palestine’s art scene, will be reporting on the events.
The Jerusalem Show iX, curated by Persekian and Kirsten Scheid, a professor at the American University of Beirut, used archives to frustrate the present. Arguing that historical events are cherry-picked to justify a status quo, Persekian and Scheid worked with artists to re-investigate the past.
A series of late Ottoman-era photographs flick by in a slide projector, displaying an archive of Armenian photography amassed by Joseph Malikian: Bedouin Palestinians, Palestinians in native dress, European tourists in Bedouin dress, Turks, Armenians, and others. Some – both Arabs and tourists – posed with water jugs, balancing them on their shoulders. A suite of the photos were hand-tinted by the mother of the children depicted: one daughter stood among flowers in a Jerusalem garden in a pink-crocheted sweater; in another photo, she balanced her head on a kooky-looking doll. We watch this child grow up. It is a deftly put-together performance of the joys of documentation, particularly of the obliterated Palestinian past, and the squeamishness of enjoying such obvious Orientalist tropes.
And then the work is complicated further. Playing in the same room is a video by Palestinian artist Essa Grayeb, who filmed young, contemporary Jerusalem photographers discussing these same images and their unintended messages: photography started out as western, one of them points out, and remains so today.
As Persekian notes, the layers of the history of this city rise to the surface in intimate, unsettling ways. Emily Jacir shows a follow-up project to her well-known Ex Libris from 2012, in which she documented the 30,000 books that the Israelis confiscated from the Palestinians in 1948 and kept inaccessible in the Jewish National Library. At the Lutheran School, Jacir made a card catalogue stocked with different names of libraries in Jerusalem, with information on what they contain, such as Quranic manuscripts from the Mamluk period in the Islamic Museum, or 12th-century manuscripts from the Is’af al-Nashashibi Library. She also included, crucially, information for how to access the holdings.
Similarly, the Daughers’ and Sons’ Manuscript, from the time of Crusades warrior Saladin, is locked away in a Jerusalem library for security reasons. Palestinian author Adania Shibli created a copying station that will move to different libraries in the city, with residents invited into the role of ancient calligraphers to create a new, publicly accessible version.
The Jerusalem Show iX used archives to frustrate the present – the curators worked with artists to reinvestigate the past