Art & Culture in Palestine with Emily Jacir

For this week’s show, SWANA Region Radio brings you a different kind of news from Bethlehem than you might be accustomed to in this season of commercialized Christian celebration. David Lloyd and Rana Sharif have a special one-hour conversation with Palestinian artist and filmmaker Emily Jacir. We discuss her own work, the cultural vitality of Palestine, and also the project that she has been working on to restore the family home in Bethlehem into a cultural center, Dar Jacir.

Emily Jacir lives and works between Bethlehem, Palestine and Rome, Italy. Jacir is an artist and filmmaker who is primarily concerned with transformation, questions of translation, resistance and silenced historical narratives. Her work investigates personal and collective movement through public space and its implications on the physical and social experience of trans-Mediterranean space and time. Her remarkably various work includes Where We Come From (2001-2003), in which the artist asked Palestinians living both abroad and within the occupied territories: “If I could do anything for you, anywhere in Palestine, what would it be?”; Material for a film (2005), based on the life of Wael Zuaiter, a Palestinian intellectual living in Rome who was assassinated in 1972 by Israeli agents; the censored installation stazione (2009), which would have displayed the Arabic names of the Venice vaporetto halts; and TRANSLATIO, an installation of the Stations, consisting of various found Palestinian objects, at the church of San Raffaele in Milano in 2016. Her recent retrospective Europa, shown at the Whitechapel Gallery in London (2015) and the Irish Museum of Modern Art (2016-17), which focused on Jacir's manifold practice in Europe, in particular Italy and the Mediterranean.

Jacir has been actively involved in education in Palestine since 2000 and is deeply invested in creating alternative spaces of knowledge production. She is the Founding Director of Dar Yusuf Nasri Jacir Center for Art and Research in Bethlehem, about which we will talk more. She is one of the founders and was a full-time professor at the International Academy of Art Palestine in Ramallah from 2007 – 2017 (when the Academy closed) and led the first year of the Ashkal Alwan Home Workspace Program in Beirut. Jacir is the recipient of several awards, including a Golden Lion at the 52nd Venice Biennale (2007); a Prince Claus Award (2007); the Guggenheim’s Hugo Boss Prize (2008) for Material for a film; the Herb Alpert Award (2011) and the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation Rome Prize Fellow at the American Academy in Rome (2015). Her works have been in important exhibitions internationally, including the Museum of Modern Art, New York; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA); dOCUMENTA 13 (2012); and, multiple times, the Venice Biennale.

If in this season of giving, you would like to donate to the valuable work of Dar Jacir, please contact them at info@darjacir.com.