Exhibition
Maj Hasager
On Site , 2010
Documentary film 44 min, HD quality.
The documentary film project On Site takes its point of departure in six former Palestinian villages now located in Israel. These sites have been selected on the basis of young Palestinians’ inherited memories of their families’ villages being destroyed and depopulated in the 1948 war, revealed through interviews conducted in spring 2009. The young people never appear in the film, but their stories are narrated through six voiceovers. The voiceovers introduce the different sites, and describe each Palestinian interviewee’s relationship to the place their grandparents fled in 1948. These stories function as direct links to the visited places, since their place of origin has determined the artist’s journey. The film intends to investigate the reality of what is there now, compared to the collective memory of a particular place.
The six sites were re-visited in December 2009 to interview the Israelis who now inhabit these places. The film consists of interviews and images from the surroundings, and is divided into “locations”. Spontaneous interviews with by passers at each of the sites were conducted. These Israelis were interviewed on their relation to their current home, their knowledge of the former Arab villages and their opinion on Israel’s strategy in relation to these places. The series of overall shots and detail images aim to portray the sites with the remains of the Arab villages as the focal point, and through different perspectives, to investigate layers of belonging, nation building/nationality and construction of history.
The artist has been working in close relation with a researcher and translator, who conducted the interviews in Hebrew.
This project is dedicated to Layan Shawabkeh
Maj Hasager
Memories of Imagined Places, 2010
11 Photographs and text, 54.5 x 84cm
Memories of Imagined Places is a work of photographic and textual historiography that investigates the construction of contemporary space through architecture, the relation to the past and through collective and inherited memory. The point of departure within the work is Palestinian villages that existed before 1948, and sites have been selected on the basis of young Palestinians’ inherited memories of their families’ villages being destroyed and depopulated. The descriptions of these villages told by young Palestinians (age 17-29), introduce the viewer to different landscapes, layers of loss, memory, nostalgia and politics.
11 villages in the former districts of Jaffa, al-Ramlah, Gaza, Hebron have been selected on this basis, and the artist located the sites with help from researcher and writer Noga Kadman. She travelled to the destroyed villages to produce new images of what remains of these different places.
Memories of Imagined Places intends to investigate the reality of what is there now, compared to the collective memory of this particular place and images are presented alongside narrative texts, contained within the same frame. The texts stem directly from conducted interviews with the young people, and they are both accounts of oral history as well as projections of desire.
Each of the participants received a smaller version of the image, which they selected of their village. The image is in black and white and has been produced in the darkroom for them to keep.
Helen de Main
Silwan Hoard – Abasi Family, 2010
Bronze, MDF, paint, dimensions variable
The bronze objects presented here are replicas of objects collected by the artist from the remains of the Abasi family home in Silwan, which was demolished by the Jerusalem municipality in March 2009. With permission from, and assistance by members of the family, she selected fragments of objects that once formed the outer construction of their home.
These objects have then undergone a variety of processes involved in re-casting them in bronze, using the lost wax technique that has been employed in the making of bronzes since antiquity. The original materials used in the building have been elevated in status through their transformation into bronze – imbuing them with a sense of monumentality and inherent cultural worth and at the same time making them materially very hard to destroy.
The artist spent time researching in different areas of Silwan, where the Palestinian population are living and in the archaeological site of the ‘City of David’ and observing the different narratives being placed upon two sites that are situated so close together, from a contemporary and historic perspective.
The work plays with the hierarchies of objects within these contexts, referencing cultural artefacts and museum like displays, and uses these objects to think about ideas of permanency, stability and claims to land.
Helen de Main
One month in Ramallah – Al Quds/Guardian, 2010
Photo polymer prints, 56 prints 25 x 25cm each
One month in Ramallah uses imagery taken from the Palestinian and British newspapers Al Quds and the Guardian. For the duration of March 2009 the artist collected each edition of Al Quds whilst on residency in Ramallah, and someone else in the UK collected the Guardian on her behalf.
Images were selected from each issue of both papers on an instinctive basis, for their formal qualities as photographs, and a personal interest in the story being presented and printing plates made from each of them.
The prints are simply arranged consecutively in date order, grouped together by week and double hung with one newspaper above the other. Presented side by side in this way, direct comparisons can be made to the types of images, content of news and media rhetoric that each of these institutions represent. Despite a broad spectrum of stories being covered, from different cultural perspectives, parallels begin to appear between the images, both formally and conceptually. The international weighting of images depicted in the Guardian, comparative to the more local focus of Al Quds, generates ideas of the effects of media image on the population viewing them, and the role of reporting can play in times of national crisis.
The images build up a document of a period of time, March 2009, not recent enough to be current, and not old enough to be history. Taken out of the context of the newspaper and presented individually at an intimate scale, a delicacy is drawn out of these mass produced media images.
Maj Hasager
Imperial Airways Gaza, 2010
Installation, three posters 50 cm x 70 cm, 500 copies printed of each.
Imperial Airways Gaza investigates the relationships between text, image and position of power as well as history, when interpreted through time. The three posters take their point of departure in the disputed lands of historic Palestine, more specifically in the airstrip in Gaza, which was established during the British mandate period. Through text and image the construction and reproduction of history is explored, from a colonial past to present strategies of occupation and resistance.
Poster #1 is a found black and white image photographed outside Imperial Airways Gaza in 1935, by Swedish photographer Eric Matson.
Poster #2 depicts a Google Map of Gaza Airport, 2009 combined with a narrative text. The text describes a scene of an intercultural meeting, which took place in Jerusalem, and furthermore questions the commercial relationship to heritage and photographic distribution.
Poster #3 depicts the demolished airstrip in Gaza photographed in 2007, but the image is reworked, so it appears at first sight to be monochrome. It also contains the same text as poster #2, translated into Arabic.
The posters in the exhibition space are placed on plinths situated on the floor in relation to the posters hung on the wall. This mode of presentation references the way in which martyrs in the West Bank and Gaza are portrayed. The posters are to take home for people visiting the exhibition.
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