This screening is part of: MY HOMELAND IS NOT A SUITCASE: ANNEMARIE JACIR, EMILY JACIR, AND DAR JACIR FOR ART AND RESEARCH

Film Notes

PART 2: EMILY JACIR
Emily Jacir has built a complex and compelling oeuvre through a diverse range of media and methodologies that include unearthing historical material, performative gestures, and in-depth research. Her artistic career has seen her exhibit widely throughout the world, and receive numerous awards including the Hugo Boss Prize in 2008 and the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation Rome Prize Fellow in Visual Arts in 2015; an honorary doctorate from NCAD in Dublin, Ireland; an American Academy of Arts and Letters prize (2023); the Andrew W. Mellon Rome Prize Fellowship at the American Academy in Rome (2015); and the Alpert Award (2011) and Hugo Boss Prize, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York (2008). She has also played a crucial role in researching, restoring, and exhibiting Palestinian cinema over the years. In collaboration with Monica Maurer, she helped unearth, reassemble, and restore works of early Palestinian cinema, including TALL EL-ZAATAR (1977), and has curated several important festivals or programs devoted to such films, including establishing the Alwan Arab Film Festival in New York from 1999-2002, which showcased Palestinian cinema for the first time in NYC; the 2002 Palestine International Video Festival (the first video festival to take place in Palestine and show the work of regional videomakers as well as international artists), and the New York Arab and South Asian Film Festival in 2007. Jacir has been actively involved in education in Palestine since 2000 and is deeply invested in creating alternative spaces for knowledge production internationally.

EMILY JACIR SELECTS:
Jayce Salloum & Elia Suleiman
INTRODUCTION TO THE END OF AN ARGUMENT: (INTIFADA) SPEAKING FOR ONESELF…SPEAKING FOR OTHERS…
1990, 45 min, video
With a combination of Hollywood, European, and Israeli film; documentary; news coverage; and excerpts of “live” footage shot in the West Bank and Gaza strip, INTRODUCTION TO THE END OF AN ARGUMENT critiques representations of the Middle East, Arab culture, and the Palestinian people produced by the West. The video mimics the dominant media’s forms of representation, subverting its methodology and construction. A process of displacement and deconstruction is enacted attempting to arrest the imagery and ideology, decolonizing and recontextualizing it to provide a space for a marginalized voice consistently denied expression in the media.