Sunday 13 January 2008

Liquidity of the Space



Art in everyday life throw a denunciation of political and social situations is what Emily Jacir presents in her project Were We Come From in which she asked Palestinians around the world "If I could do something for you, anywhere in Palestine, what would it be?" She then documented herself fulfilling the requests for people who are prohibited entry into their own homeland and/or who are restricted from movement within it. These included visiting a mother's grave, playing soccer with a boy in Haifa, and visiting a student's family in Gaza because he is prevented from traveling home while at school in the West Bank.

A different notion of the space where the artwork becomes a performance in an expanded, dilated, blended, mingled space; the artist becomes the medium who carries out people's wills being (because of her privileged position) the active participant of the piece. The traces she leaves among the Palestine territory actualise the fictive and impossible presence of these Palestinians quivering the notion of participation in the art field. A new conception of the spatiality, a liquid one?

2 comments:

x1x1x2 said...

It's very Bourriaud. Lovely project really, simple but sincere and it has heart in it.

Marianne Mulvey said...

This is negotiation, I think, maybe.