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Third Text

ISSN: 0952-8822 (Print) 1475-5297 (Online) Journal homepage: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/ctte20

Qalandiya International I and II

Nicola Gray

To cite this article: Nicola Gray (2015) Qalandiya International I and II, Third Text, 29:3,165-183, DOI: 10.1080/09528822.2015.1083698

To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/09528822.2015.1083698

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Qalandiya International I and II

Cultural Resistance in a Palestinian Biennale

Nicola Gray

WHAT’S IN A NAME?‘QALANDIYA’ RECLAIMED, AND ‘BIENNALE’ REIMAGINED

Venice, Sao Paulo, Sydney, Sharjah. . . are all place-names that immedi-ately conjure up a ‘biennale’, the biannual mega-exhibitions that featureprominently in the diaries of the contemporary artworld constituency.These carefully staged large-scale projects reflect and influence trendsand practice, and are a showcase for artists and curators as well as forcollectors, students and the media. Barometers of current trends andone-stop shops for a snapshot of the artworld, they are also platformsfor discussion and assessment. Local and regional surroundings inevitablyimpact in some way, but the model and formats are usually remarkablysimilar.

The Qalandiya International project (QI for short) masquerades as a‘biennale’; however, it is completely different. The name ‘Qalandiya’does not signify a globally renowned city, and its immediate locale is atroubled one. This is ‘Filasteen’, the ‘occupied Palestinian territories’,‘the West Bank’, ‘Judea and Samaria’ (depending on who is doing thenaming), and ‘Qalandiya’ is usually associated with the military check-point operated by the Israel Defence Forces (IDF). The site of frequentclashes between young Israeli soldiers and Palestinians of all ages, anda traffic nightmare amidst piles of rubbish and rubble on what used tobe the main road north out of Jerusalem, the Qalandiya checkpoint isone of the main points of entry into or out of the Israeli-occupied WestBank. The name is symptomatic of the oppressive grip of the long-stand-ing military occupation (since 1967) on all aspects of Palestinian life,which has been intensifying since the Second Intifada erupted in 2000.Yet the name and the place overlay other histories: it is also the nameof a village divided by the ‘separation wall’, and of a UN-administered

Third Text, 2015

Vol. 29, No. 3, 165–183, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/09528822.2015.1083698

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refugee camp now solidified in concrete that is home to over three gen-erations of Palestinian refugees. A place of disconnection today, it usedto signify links to the rest of the world, as this was also the site of theJerusalem International Airport. Built by the British Mandate auth-orities in the 1930s, ‘Kalandia’ airport was administered by Jordanfrom 1949 to 1967, after which it came under Israeli control. Therunway and terminal buildings are still there, but the airport hasbeen closed since 2001, and few of those who pass through the check-point on a daily basis now glance to the side, where the derelict runwayis still visible.

In this geographically small but highly pressurised environment,‘Qalandiya’, as a name and place, is therefore loaded with meaning(s),and when in 2012 a group of Palestinian cultural organisations collabo-rated on producing a ‘biennale’, they decided to reclaim the name forthe first Qalandiya International. The inaugural QI, ‘Art and Life inPalestine’, took place across venues in Ramallah, Jerusalem, WestBank villages and Nazareth, from 1 to 15 November 2012.1 The aimwas to initiate a different kind of ‘biennale’, one that would not onlyinsert loaded names (of both Qalandiya and Palestine) into the inter-national lexicon with another resonance, but which would alsostrengthen Palestinian cultural life and practice. Palestine and all Pales-tinians have had to struggle with the complex legacies of a long historyof colonialism, dispossession and the erosion of fundamental rights andfreedoms. These legacies continue to have profound and ongoing conse-quences for all aspects of life, identity and culture, and have resulted inan increasingly fragmented society and geography in what was historicalPalestine. The relentless processes of Zionist settlement and militaryoccupation have had a serious impact; exiled and divided, Palestinianshave been cast wide by these processes. Yet, despite the diaspora andongoing lack of a viable national polity, and facing the theft of landand the failures of leadership and political will, being ‘Palestinian’ is aforceful and unifying concept, if not a political and geophysicalreality. Cultural organisations, particularly in the ‘centres’ of Jerusalemand Ramallah, have been endeavouring for some years now to establishinfrastructures, initiate programmes to support cultural practice, andcreate important links for collaboration – both internationally andinternally. Qalandiya International is, so far, the most ambitious ofthese.

The various foundations and cultural initiatives have had to deal withdifficult daily realities, and have sometimes struggled with envisioning,funding and producing their programmes. Pooling resources and organ-ising a collective event in a condensed time period presents a unifyingforce in contrast to the more customary picture of division and conflict.Qalandiya International reclaims a name from layered histories, over-turning connotations of humiliation and aggression and associating itwith an event that aims to inscribe Palestine on the global culturalmap. More importantly, it is an act of defiant cultural resistance; anattempt at inclusive and positive action to overcome fragmentationand create new opportunities for cultural practitioners and audiencesalike.

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1 Featuring exhibitions,workshops, performances,film screenings, asymposium, walks and talks,QI 2012 was conceived andco-produced by (inJerusalem) Al MamalFoundation forContemporary Art and AlHoash-Palestinian ArtCourt, and (in Ramallah) theInternational Academy ofArt Palestine, A M QattanFoundation, Khalil SakakiniCultural Centre, and RiwaqCentre for ArchitecturalConservation. Seehttp://www.qalandiyainternational.org/2012/ foronline documentation of QI2012. There was a significantinternational mediapresence, and there arevarious reviews to be foundonline.

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QALANDIYA INTERNATIONAL I, 2012:‘ART AND LIFE IN PALESTINE’

QI 2012, with its general theme of ‘art and life in Palestine’, did not have afamous curator, or one overwhelmingly huge, themed exhibition sprawl-ing across locations. The core organising group consisted of existing cul-tural organisations – including the International Academy of ArtPalestine, which only opened in 2006 and has a small intake of students.(How many other ‘biennales’ welcome their regional art school into theirprogramming?) Other organisations had projects that had been in placefor some time, and some of these became part of QI. The A M QattanFoundation, for example, has organised its biannual Young ArtistsAward since 2000, while the Al Ma’mal Foundation for ContemporaryArt in Jerusalem had produced five Jerusalem Show exhibitions since2007. But new collaborations and programmes were also initiated;

Jumana Emil Abboud, Eye of the Tiger: Wound, 2012, installation with wind chimes for a community garden in the WestBank village of Hajjah, ‘Gestures in Time’, Qalandiya International 2012, photo: courtesy of Issa Freij and the artist

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with variable funding streams and capacities, it makes sense to joinforces. Rather than different projects scattered over time and geography,with their own audiences and sometimes with repetitions and dupli-cations, collaborating can be a strengthening process. Combined publi-city can have greater impact, with different audiences reached andboundaries crossed. It also creates a reason for others to visit somewherethat might not be on the international artworld’s lists of must-sees.

The venues for QI 2012 included the usual cultural centres in Jerusa-lem and Ramallah, but performances, artworks, film screenings and talkswere also taken out to villages in other parts of the West Bank. Two of thepartners, Al Ma’mal and the Riwaq Center for Architectural Conserva-tion, collaborated on an exhibition and programme, ‘Gestures in Time’.Riwaq, with its remit of renovating and reinvigorating old villagecentres, is able to offer different kinds of spaces for performances, instal-lations and film screenings, and in so doing can bring contemporary art tonew audiences that would never usually encounter it. QI aims to beinclusive, to overcome isolation and generate links, communicationsand mutual support, and QI 2012 extended right across a fragmentedPalestine – from Jerusalem, Ramallah and West Bank villages, to Gaza,Nazareth and into Jordan.

QALANDIYA INTERNATIONAL II, 2014:THE BACKGROUND NOISE

Plans were in place and funding applications prepared for a QI 2014, butas can so often be the case in this context, external events interceded.Palestinian life, art and politics are interconnected in unavoidable ways,and the effects are inescapable. The ever-present background ‘noise’dramatically increased in volume in the summer of 2014 with the Junekidnapping and killing of three Jewish teenagers near Hebron.2 The sub-sequent crackdown by the Israeli military led to hundreds of arrests and atleast five Palestinian deaths, and then the apparently retaliatory abduc-tion and murder a few days later of a young Palestinian teenager fromShufat refugee camp outside Jerusalem. With its powerful propagandamachine, there is evidence that the Israeli authorities manipulated infor-mation and deliberately escalated the situation,3 giving it a pretext tounleash the full force of its military might in its ‘Operation ProtectiveEdge’ on the captive population in the Gaza strip.4

Modern Palestinian history is punctuated by liberation struggles, crys-tallising in the First and Second Intifadas – both of which escalated fol-lowing particularly provocative events. In the summer of 2014 it felt asif a Third Intifada was under way, as the disproportionate attack onGaza led to a steady rise of tensions at flashpoints in East Jerusalemand the West Bank.

Eventually, after a series of ceasefire agreements brokered by Egypt,the bombing ceased at the end of August. Shocked and forced into paraly-sis, QI’s plans had necessarily been put on hold. But once some semblanceof normal life could be resumed, rather than cancelling or postponing, itwas decided that it was essential to go ahead with a second QI and torespond in a positive and defiant way to yet another Palestiniantragedy. Even at quieter times, this is no small undertaking. To organise

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2 This was no random act ofso-called ‘terrorism’. Let itnot be forgotten that in andaround Hebron (and acrossthe West Bank), Palestinianmen, women and childrenare subjected daily toaggression and humiliationat the hands of Jewishsettlers and IDF soldiers, andhave been for many yearsnow. Mainstreaminternational media rarelyreport on the quotidianaction of the militaryoccupation, but attentivesearching can readily bringto light the facts.

3 See the reports on theMondoweiss and ElectronicIntifada websites for someobservations on this. Forexample, Adam Horowitzand Phil Weiss, ‘Claim thatHamas killed 3 teens isturning out to be the WMDof Gaza onslaught’,Mondoweiss, 26 July 2014,http://mondoweiss.net/2014/07/killed-turning-onslaught,accessed 17 April 2015; andMax Blumenthal,‘Netanyahu governmentknew teens were dead as itwhipped up racist frenzy’,The Electronic Intifada 8July 2014, http://electronicintifada.net/content/netanyahu-government-knew-teens-were-dead-it-whipped-racist-frenzy/13533,accessed 5 May 2015.

4 According to the UN Officefor the Coordination ofHumanitarian Affairs, inJuly and August 2014 at least2,205 Palestinians werekilled in Israel’s OperationProtective Edge assault onGaza, of whom at least1,483 were civilians,including 521 children and283 women. Manythousands were severelyinjured, and hundreds ofthousands displaced fromtheir homes. Around 18,000homes were destroyed orseverely damaged; 244schools were damaged.Sixty-six Israeli soldiers died,and seven civilians in Israelwere killed by rockets firedfrom within the Strip.Sourced from the UNOCHA, 15 October 2014.

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Qalandiya International 2014 poster, featuring an image of young girls at the Women’s Activity Centre in Qalandiya playingbasketball in the 1950s, image: courtesy of Qalandiya International, original photo courtesy of the UNWRA archive

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any event usually needs certain prerequisites taken for granted elsewhere:freedom of movement and the ability to hold meetings, for example. Butin this fractured space, and given the tense and uncertain status quo at thetime, how and where to meet, who can and who cannot go throughcheckpoints, were all factors that affected smooth organisation. As AliaRayyan, the Director of Al Hoash in Jerusalem, said at the openingpress conference: ‘If you know how to organise a biennale – forget itand start again.’

WHAT’S IN A THEME?‘ARCHIVES, LIVED AND SHARED’

The framework theme for QI 2014, ‘Archives, Lived and Shared’, hadalready been formulated, a notion on the minds of many before the bien-nale, but probably inspired by the addition of the Palestinian Museum asa QI partner.5 ‘Archives’ have been a thematic in contemporary artpractice and theory for some time. In 2004, in an essay published in theUS-based journal October, the American writer Hal Foster identified‘an archival impulse at work in contemporary art’,6 but the threeEuropean/North American artists he discusses (Thomas Hirschorn,Tacita Dean and Sam Durant) were easily able to access archivalsources that they could subject to their ‘secondary manipulations’.7 InPalestine, such sources are not a given, nor is access to them.

Jacques Derrida, on the other hand, in his Archive Fever: A FreudianImpression (1995), gives a deconstructivist analysis of the Freudian per-spective on the ‘archival impulse’. Both Foster and Derrida could besaid to be highly Eurocentric in their outlook and spheres of consider-ation, yet Derrida’s philosophical discussions can be seen as relevant tothe Palestinian context.8 But the question of archives, and archiving,has other, more pragmatic resonances in contemporary Palestine. Thehistory of dispossession and displacement means that it has been difficult,if not impossible, to create and maintain any archives at all, particularlyof a material nature. Even immaterially, the ‘archival impulse’ can befocused primarily on memories, which can be selective and incomplete,and die with their keepers.

The preservation and management of cultural heritage, of documents,correspondence and the important record that photographic documen-tation represents, are essential to a society’s knowledge and consciousnessof itself, and crucial to an understanding of the present. But peaceful stab-ility and organisational infrastructure are prerequisites for the compi-lation, management and care of archival material, whatever form itmight be in. In the Palestinian context, archives have existed, but theymay be informal, partial, in private hands and inaccessible to many. Col-lections of photographs, artefacts, recordings, film and documents havebeen scattered, broken up and often destroyed or lost. Where there areany, they may not be classified or properly cared for; even the architec-tural heritage is currently being destroyed at an alarming rate.9 The chal-lenges to gather and manage archival collections in this particular contextare great, and the choice of the theme of ‘Archives, Lived and Shared’ wasa significant one. QI 2014′s various projects negotiated the idea of archiv-ing and the archive in different ways, some directly, some tangentially,

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5 The Palestinian Museum is aprivately funded initiativedue to open in Birzeit, nearRamallah, in 2016. TheMuseum will not just displaythings, although somecollections are in the processof being put together, butaims to be a dynamic centrefor creating andcommunicating knowledgeabout Palestine, its history,culture and contemporarysociety. See http://www.palmuseum.org

6 Hal Foster, ‘An ArchivalImpulse’, October 110,autumn 2004, p 3

7 Ibid, p 4

8 For example, in discussingthe French terms trouble del’archive, or the condition ofbeing en mal d’archive(roughly translated as ‘inneed of archives’), he writesof the ‘compulsive,repetitive, and nostalgicdesire for the archive, anirrepressible desire to returnto the origin, ahomesickness, a nostalgiafor the return to the mostarchaic place of absolutecommencement’, in JacquesDerrida, Archive Fever, EricPrenowitz, trans, Universityof Chicago Press, 1996, p 91.This could also be applied,however, to the Zionist idealof the ‘Jewish homeland’.

9 As the Palestinian NGO- anddonor-dependent economybecomes increasingly centredin Ramallah-Al Bireh, theadministrative base for thePalestinian Authority, thereis a rapid loss of old housesand other buildings as theyare destroyed to build high-rise apartments and offices.There are few regulations forthis unfettered development,and in the areas where thereis no overall control fromeither the PA or Israel thereare none at all.

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but all in some way opened it up for further consideration and imagina-tive exploration.

QI 2014 EXHIBITIONS:MUSEUMS, COLLECTING AND DOCUMENTING;DISPLACEMENTS, FRACTURES AND DREAMS

Museums, Collecting and Documenting

Following the tragedies of the summer, and with a surge of energy anddetermination, QI 2014’s multifarious events were hurriedly put togetherin the space of a few weeks. For over three weeks, from 22 October to15 November, gallery spaces, rooms, corridors, stairways and half-builtor abandoned spaces – in Ramallah, Jerusalem, Gaza and Haifa, aswell as Bethlehem – hosted photography, paintings, installations,videos, performances, a symposium, panel discussions, book launches,film screenings, artists’ talks and more.

The ‘archives lived and shared’ theme was interpreted broadly. Themost direct interpretation was the Palestinian Museum’s documentarysurvey exhibition, ‘Introduction to Palestinian Museums’ in the AlBireh Municipality Cultural Centre. With only a flawed illusion of state-hood, no national museum has ever been created as might be found else-where to emphasise national narratives (or display the trophies ofempire). While its permanent home is under construction, the PalestinianMuseum has been researching and making links with other museumsalready in existence that were dedicated in some form to Palestine. Itfound over fifty-one in Palestine and five abroad, none of them of any sig-nificant size or well funded, but each in its unique and eclectic way repre-senting a multi-layered archive of regional history and the Palestinianexperience. The exhibition presented images and information fromthirty-nine of these museums – a fascinating archive of archives of thehuman impulse to document, record and preserve. The museums rangefrom archaeological collections in private houses (the Shahwan FamilyMuseum in Khan Younis, Gaza); testimonies to suffering and injustice(the Abu Jihad Museum for the Movement of Prisoners’ Affairs in AbuDis); or the International Nativity Museum in Bethlehem – to othersinitiated from ‘outside’ and built with foreign funds, such as theRussian Museum in Jericho, which houses a Byzantine archaeologicalsite and was inaugurated in 2010 for Jericho’s 10,000th-yearcelebrations.

In Moscow itself, you could visit the Imperial Orthodox PalestinianSociety headquarters, with its archive of photographs of pilgrimages tothe Holy Land. The Samaritan Museum on Mount Gerizim, nearNablus, was established by one of the world’s smallest and oldest reli-gious sects; although not formally recognised by Orthodox Judaism,Samaritanism claims to be the true religion of the ancient Israelites; themuseum includes what is said to be the oldest Torah in the world atover 3,500 years old. Other museums were established for educationalpurposes: the Educational Museum and Zoo in Qalqilya, or the MathMuseum at Al Quds University in Abu Dis. In Lebanon, the Museumof Memory and Heritage in Shatila refugee camp was created in 2004

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with some of the few possessions people brought with them as they fledthe Nakba in 1948–1949; a treasured collection of objects, documentsand photographs, but also including an axe reputedly used in the Sabraand Shatila massacres of 1982.

Establishing a ‘National Gallery of Art’ has also not been a priority.Among the cultural institutions founded in the last fifteen years or so,there has not been one (yet) with the appropriate space or resources tohouse collections or mount major art exhibitions or comprehensive retro-spectives. Al Hoash in East Jerusalem has produced exhibitions of twosignificant Palestinian artists (Sliman Mansour in 2011, and the lateMustafa Hallaj for QI 2012), and there are several initiatives to establishsome collections of art, by both private individuals and cultural organis-ations, but there has been little co-ordination. Al Hoash recently insti-gated its Collectors’ Room to mount small yet focused exhibitions ofwork from some of these initiatives. For QI 2014, the exhibition‘Recall’ attempted a ‘mnemonics of crucial moments in Palestinianhistory’, and represented some of the artists across the generations – asmall but important gesture at another form of ‘archive’, as opportunitiesto actually view historical works are few.

‘Recall’ accompanied Al Hoash’s main exhibition, ‘Imagery: BeyondOblivion and Remembering’, of photographic, video and conceptualwork from and about Gaza by Mohamed Hawajri, Mohamed Harb,Eduardo Soteras Jalil and Mohamed Abu Sal. The irony of the virtualfantasy of Abu Sal’s ‘Metro in Gaza’ project, with its imagined Gazaunderground system, contrasted with, but was also complemented by,Soteras Jalil’s, Mohamed Harb’s and Mohamed Hawajri’s moregraphic and current photographic imagery.

Displacements, Fractures and Dreams

Conversations with art and archives, in the contemporary art formatfamiliar to other biennales, could be found in five of the other main QIevents: the Young Artist Award exhibition, ‘Suspended Accounts’;‘Outside the Archive’ (Ramallah Municipality’s own contribution);MinRASY PROJECTS’ two offerings at the Khalil Sakakini CulturalCentre in Ramallah; the Jerusalem Show VII, ‘Fractures’; and ‘Manam’,a large exhibition in Haifa.

The Young Artist Award has made a significant contribution to thePalestinian cultural calendar as a competitive programme for artistsunder thirty years of age, offering young artists an opportunity andresources to develop and exhibit new work. This was the first time theAward had been given a thematic framework, and Italian curatorViviana Checchia had worked with the nine young artists over the preced-ing six months through online workshops and seminars around ideas of‘self-historicisation’ and using archival methodologies.10 In the final exhi-bition, ‘Suspended Accounts’, each of the young artists had engaged witha personal trajectory through art and Palestinian history, whetherthrough the history of art, family stories of diaspora, the erasure of Pales-tinian identity for those living in Israeli society or the disrespect of funda-mental rights accorded the bodies of prisoners who die in Israeli custody.

Artists anywhere have a dialogue with the work of artists who havegone before them; for two of these young artists there was a direct engage-ment with the Palestinian art archive, or lack of it. Noor Abu Arafeh’s

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10 Not all the participantswere permitted or able tobe in Palestine. The Awardis open to ‘Palestinian’artists, but ‘Palestinian’, inall contexts, not only meansfrom occupied Palestine butfrom anywhere in theglobal diaspora.

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Observational Desire on a Memory that Remains mixed fiction and factin a video installation about memory, exile, art and the writing/documen-tation of history. And in a conversation of sorts, Bashar Khalaf alsoengaged with the history of art in Palestine in a series of enigmatic paint-ings, Shadow of the Shadow, ‘quoting’ from iconic works of the moresenior artist, Sliman Mansour, ‘recalling the past into the present’ asthe artist himself stated.

Archives can be stored away, unorganised, hidden and forgotten, andany town council is probably going to have a treasury of informationlying abandoned somewhere in a filing cabinet or cupboard. Ramallahis no exception, and curator Yazid Anani worked with the RamallahMunicipality on ‘Outside the Archive’, a series of visual art projects, per-formances and talks in the Municipality’s own buildings and otherdisused spaces in the old city centre. From boxes of negatives bequeathed

Bashar Khalaf, untitled painting from the Shadow of the Shadow series, 2014, oil on canvas, 135×115 cm (with reproduc-tion of Sliman Mansour’s painting, left, Early in the Morning, 1978), photo: courtesy of A M Qattan Foundation and Rula

Halawani

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to the city by the family of a local studio photographer (Garo Kuftedjian),Ahlam Shibli printed some of these images of family portraits or wed-dings, keeping the negative format, and juxtaposing them with her ownphotographs of the rapid urban development the contemporary city isundergoing, thus commenting on collective existence and continuity ofbelonging, but also on the inevitable erasures happening in an over-crowded and contained space.

Emily Jacir also used the city archives in her ongoing project, [in mem-oriam], investigating public acts and rituals of death. In the Municipalityoffices themselves, Jacir’s installation exhibited documents and lettersillustrating the complex Palestinian relationship with death, exile andthe homeland: letters from 1960, for example, from an ex-Ramallahiteliving in New York requesting help with purchasing and transporting aFord vehicle to the town, via Beirut, for use as a much-needed ambulanceand hearse. Taking as his point of departure the Palestinian BroadcastingService and its ‘Jerusalem Calling’ station, in Document[ary] Iyad Issaexplored the colonial influences on history and culture, and the ephemer-ality and loss of less tangible archival sources. Originally set up by theBritish mandate in Jerusalem in 1936, Radio Al Quds, as it became inArabic, continued to broadcast from Ramallah until 1967 and waswidely listened to.

Ahlam Shibli, Untitled (Ramallah Archive, no. 6), 2014, 70×100 cm, chromogenic colour print, photo: courtesy of the artist and

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At the Khalil Sakakini Cultural Centre in Ramallah, MinRASY PRO-JECTS inserted the sometimes invisible presence of the Palestinian diasporainto QI with a visual discourse on the double absence of the refugee, fromPalestine itself and its history, and from the places of exile – specificallyKuwait in this instance, where many Palestinians who were unable toreturn home set up businesses or found work. The relationship of refugeesor exiles with their place of origin is profound and complicated; in this case,with the Israeli control of all border crossings, people of Palestinian descentfrom other Arab states are routinely denied entry. Images of empty planeseats suggested this absence as an imagined presence in QI of Kuwaitiartists, while facsimiles of the passports of MinRASY PROJECTSfounder Rana Sadik were a personal archive of these necessary documents,an emblematic but very real problem for all Palestinian refugees. No Pales-tinian (or Kuwaiti) passport was shown, as both are denied; instead, therewere Rana’s Lebanese documents de voyage pour les refugies Palestiniens,and passports for the US, Italy and Jordan.

Also shown at the Sakakini centre, MoMRtA (Museum of Manufac-tured Response to Absence) is an ongoing project curated by AlaYounis for MinRASY PROJECTS. For this nomadic collection ofobjects, small enough to be portable and displayed on the wall or inmuseum-like vitrines, artists are commissioned to respond to the Palesti-nian ‘absence’ in the Kuwaiti state narrative. At the time of the Gulf Warin 1991, Kuwait was home and workplace for over 400,000 Palestinians.Most either left (for Jordan, or Europe if they could) following the Iraqiinvasion, or soon after when they were denied work permits and it becamedifficult for them to stay – refugees for a second time. MoMRtA’s smallobjects, unattributed in the display to individual artists, are poetic commentson this invisibility and displacement, slightly out of synch with the majorsocio-geographic shifts they hint at.

Of all the QI 2014 projects, Al Ma’mal Foundation’s JerusalemShow VII ‘Fractures’ was perhaps the most familiar in format to aninternational biennale-goer in that it had a curatorial framework andan international curator. Works recognisable as ‘contemporary art’ byartists from Palestine, as well as Turkey, Northern Ireland, Japan andmore, were installed in various venues around the old city. CuratorBasak Senova did not pay straightforward homage to the QI thematicof ‘archives, lived and shared’; it was the city of Jerusalem itself, withits complexities, divisions, tensions, auras and evidences of centuriesof history/ies, that was understood as a shared and lived archive, ‘acity that persistently folds multiple paths into contradictory presents’(Senova). The physical locations – such as Al Ma’mal’s former TileFactory, the old hamams or baths, the Austrian Hospice, the KhalidiLibrary11 – are archives themselves in this city that has survived centu-ries of the crushing expectations of religion and history. The seven chap-ters of ‘Fractures’ (Intensities, Details, Intervals, Measures, Lines,Writing and Fabric) also included a screening programme, a travellingaction/performance, artists’ book launches, readings and talks, and achildren’s activity book – developments from the curator’s and theartists’ research processes, and all embedded in the fabric of the oldcity.12 Such researches led to Hera Buyuktascıyan’s in-depth investi-gation (and site-specific installation) into one of the city’s lost watersources, the Patriarch’s Pool;13 while Majd Abdel Hamid’s Hourglasses

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11 Housed in the second-oldest Mamluk building inJerusalem’s old city, fromthe thirteenth century, theKhalidi Library hosts thelargest private collection ofArabic manuscripts inJerusalem and is one of thelargest in the Arab world. Itholds over 12,000manuscripts and boundbooks in Arabic as well asTurkish and Farsi.

12 See the online catalogue athttp://www.ibraaz.com forthe Jerusalem Show VII

13 Many of the exhibition sitesare not normally open tothe public. The Patriarch’sPool is one of the city’sancient water reservoirs, adeep and open space hiddenin the Christian quarter ofthis city of tight spaces,only visible from thewindows of the buildingsthat look out on it. It wasfed originally via anaqueduct from the MamillaPool outside the city walls.It is kept locked because ofthe fear that zealous Jewishsettlers might claim it, asthey try to do with anyspace in the city.

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were installed in the window of a religious shop in the Christian quarterof the city, metaphors of the sands of time passing, except that the‘sand’ includes pulverised concrete dust chipped off the separationwall. Not all the works directly referenced ‘Jerusalem’, but all theoften beautiful and elegiac images in ‘Fractures’, whether photographic,moving or performed, had many resonances with their situation andcontext.

The other main QI 2014 exhibition was ‘Manam’, organised in Haifaby the Arab Culture Association and curated by Rula Khoury. QI, asopposed to other biennale sites, has to contend with some very real bar-riers in the form of walls, roadblocks and checkpoints imposed by a mili-tary occupier that does not know the event is even taking place.Accessibility to Jerusalem or the ‘48’ areas is denied to West Bank orGaza ID holders, unless the lengthy process of special permit applicationsis pursued, the outcomes of which can be arbitrary and take time. Thismeant that many of QI’s participants and a large part of its audiencewere not able to go to Haifa for ‘Manam’, or did not attempt to(although the risky process of some people-smuggling through check-points meant that at least a few attended the opening). This does notdiminish its importance to its regional audience, but it is a sad factthat many of the artists (all Palestinian) whose work it featured couldnot be there.

An ambitious gathering of works by thirty-two artists from across his-torical Palestine and beyond, ‘Manam’ (which translates roughly as

The Museum of Manufactured Response to Absence: Mesrop, Fils, 2012, 18 carat gold, diameter 4 cm, photo: courtesy of

MoMRtA

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‘sleep’, or ‘dream’) explored the many avenues of hope, failure, paralysis,fantasy, dreams, memories, longings, fears, myths and narratives thatconstitute the Palestinian manam.14 Installed in an undecorated, darkspace, formerly a nightclub and cinema, some of the work searched formeaning in the melancholia of photographs and images (AmerShomali); others escaped into the realm of fantasy (the lateHassan Hourani), or bad dreams (Manar Zuabi in her performanceHumma [Fever], and Khaled Hourani); while others were subtle explora-tions of desire and history using video (Jumana Emil Abboud and MirnaBamieh).

Hera Buyuktascıyan, The Recovery of an Early Water, 2014, site-specific installation at Patriarch’s Pool, old city, Jerusalem,

commissioned by Al Ma’mal Foundation for Contemporary Art for The Jerusalem Show VII, photo: courtesy of the artistand Al Ma’mal

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14 The concept was inspiredby Syrian directorMohamad Malas’s film, Al-Manam, made between1980 and 1981 (before the1982 Sabra and Shatilamassacres) but not releaseduntil 1987. The filmfeatures a collection ofinterviews with Palestinianrefugees in Lebanon duringthe civil war about theirdreams at night. It wasscreened in Haifa for QI2014.

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Amer Shomali, A Boy with Nothing (Golden Frame), 2013, acrylic on canvas, 140×100 cm, photo: courtesy of the artist

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OFF QALANDIYA

Besides exhibition projects, QI 2014 also had book launches, readings,lectures, workshops, artists’ talks, tours and visits, film screenings, livemusic and performances. As with any biennale, it was impossible totake in everything and I will restrict myself here to commenting onjust some of the ‘off Qalandiya’ events that contributed most to thegreater dialogue.

Discourse and analysis, both written and spoken, are always impor-tant for an understanding of cultural practice and for whoever engageswith it. ‘OFF Qalandiya’ was a one-day open discussion forum on therole of visual art and the relationship between local and international cul-tural practitioners, audiences and the institutional players. In the Palesti-nian context, it is sometimes difficult to take a step back and assess whatis going on in the immediate surroundings, so any format that enablescontributions to a dialogue can be productive, and beginning such adialogue with questions without aiming for clear answers is a goodway to go. The broad questions, for example, of ‘Why do artists dowhat they do?’ and ‘In what context do they do it?’ are not asked oftenenough.

Mirna Bamieh, detail of Interrupted Biographies, 2014, mixed media installation and video (11 minutes), photo: courtesy of

Nicola Gray

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A more comprehensive forum was the three-day conference, ‘QalandiyaEncounters’, co-organised by all the QI partners and really at the heart ofthe QI initiative. ‘Archives lived and shared’, and the various QI projects,formed the basis of presentations from speakers who were social scientists,museum professionals, curators, cultural theorists, historians, artists andfilm-makers, from both Palestine and abroad. The conference attracted asurprisingly diverse audience of students, teachers, cultural workers,artists, and unspecified others, given that such events can often be self-selecting participants speaking to each other. Like most places, there arealways elites of sorts, but politics, life and culture are closely intertwinedin Palestine, and both the symposium and its audience reflected this.

Basel el Maqousi executing his work U.N.L. for the ‘87′ exhibition in Eltiqa Artists House, Gaza City. The work was on a

wall (240×590 cm) and features the names of persons arrested, wounded or killed in the First Intifada for painting slogansand information on walls. In the absence of any media able to communicate daily news or Palestinian opinion, the walls wereused as an informal media platform. The UNL (Unified National Leadership, or al-Qiyada al Muwhhada in Arabic) was a

coalition of Palestinian leaders that mobilised grassroots support for the Intifada as the PLO leadership was in exile abroad,photo: courtesy of Shareef Sarhan

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Mapping Procession (Day 1), 29 October 2014. Gathering in Ramallah’s Al Manara Square at the start of the Procession,photo: courtesy of Nicola Gray

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A DIFFERENT LOOKING INTO THE ‘ARCHIVE’:GAZA, AND REMEMBERING THE FIRST INTIFADA

Two of QI 2014’s projects looked back into the Palestinian archive – notat documents, but at the direct action of the First Intifada. Known as ‘thestones revolution’ because of the stone throwing that came to characteriseit, the First Intifada was a spontaneous and largely grassroots uprisingagainst Israeli occupation. Sparked off in 1987 when an Israeli truckdriver ran down a group of Palestinian workers at the Erez checkpointin the north of the Gaza strip, it has particular resonance in Gaza,where the demonstrations and stone throwing began in the Jabaliyarefugee camp and soon spread across the rest of Gaza and the WestBank. Many feel that this spirit of resistance and the events of the Intifadaitself have been forgotten, although in reality the space for such action hasbeen pretty much closed, in all senses.

With an admirable spirit of positivism so soon after the very recenthorrors of death and destruction inflicted on Gaza, a group of artistsmounted an exhibition titled simply ‘87’ in the Eltiqa Artists House inGaza City. Their works commemorated – and mourned – the Intifada’sspirit of street-level resistance that would have actually been uselessagainst the massive deployment of indiscriminate power they had justundergone. The First Intifada, with its identity-concealing, scarf-wrapped stone-throwers and its spray-painted words on walls, wheregraffiti was not just a youthful symbolic gesture but conveyed criticalinformation in times of curfew and media suppression, had been a forma-tive experience for this generation of artists, who were children or teen-agers at the time. Engaging with this in works of art, almost thirtyyears later, could be said to be a way of expressing opposition, of demon-strating by proxy, but also of reclaiming confidence, of refusing to beparalysed into an inability to act. The space of art, in the mind and inpraxis, and in the literal space of a ‘house for art’, can be empowering.

In Ramallah, another project, ‘Mapping Performance’ also comme-morated the First Intifada. In an intervention in the public space, ratherthan the safer space of a ‘house for art’, a procession of acrobats, jugglersand stilt walkers led a tour through Ramallah, stopping at performances,projections and installations. Some felt the event trivialised the First Inti-fada and its relevance to the history of Palestinian resistance, and as anintervention it was perhaps bound to fail in its ambition. This is not acity where interventions are a regular occurrence (nor are demonstrationsthese days), so ‘occupying’ public space in this way meant more to its(mostly young) participants.

(CONCLUSION)

It is difficult – and for me, impossible – to review such a project as Qalan-diya International without giving some consideration to the greatercontext. Artists and cultural practices do not operate in an aestheticvacuum. If you paid attention and tuned into it, there was much back-ground noise during QI 2014. Palestine has always been troubled, butit was especially so in 2014. Word limits do not allow specifics to begiven here, but independent research could find the details for the time

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period of QI 2014. I will only relate that the smell of tear gas was discern-ible on the opening night of the Jerusalem Show – and a young Palesti-nian-American teenager visiting family was killed that evening inclashes between demonstrators and Israeli police near Ramallah.

I write (conclusion) in brackets, because there is no sign of conclusionto the greater Palestinian story, of which the Qalandiya Internationalinitiative is, let us admit, a minor and very recent contribution. But its rel-evance is perhaps greater than the sum of its parts. Its significance is in itsambitions, and its collaborative nature and spirit; and in the spaces ofopportunity it generates. Creating links and threads across fragmentedand divided groups and between nodes and places of operation is impor-tant – important anywhere, I would argue, but particularly so in thePalestinian context. These links and threads are being created not justbetween cultural leaders and practitioners, but also across communities,ages, social leaders and borders.

Potentially a fragile coalition, and operating in a unique context, thefuture of QI is less under control than in most environments, but in insti-gating a biennale programme there is a timetable to work around andoptions each time for reinvention and reframing. And for new partnersto join and shape its future – because there will be a future, there hasto be.

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