See Nadia Yaqub, Palestinian Cinema in the Days of Revolution (University of Texas Press, 2018), and Dan Walsh’s personal collection, digital archive, and life-long interest in Palestine Poster Project →.
See Rasha Salti and Kristine Khoury’s remarkable research, project, and publication Past Disquiet: Artists, International Solidarity, and Museums in Exile that departed from the 1978 International Art Exhibition for Palestine in Beirut.
For now, notwithstanding the spectacular televised hijacking of five aircrafts to a small landing strip in Jordan in 1970, aka “Dawson’s Field.”
The title of a 1976 publication by the Palestine Cinema Institution of Hani Jawharieh’s works of Palestinian Fedayeen following his death; similarly, the book title subheading Palestinian Lives of Edward Said’s photo-book After the Last Sky; or, simply, a 2019 Google Image search of the same search words: “Palestinian Images.”
This paragraph revisits a forward I wrote in the catalog for the exhibition “Palestinian Political Posters” from the collection of George Michael Al Ama and Saleh Abd Al Jawad, curated by Inass Yassin, December 2013: Political Posters, exh. cat. (Birzeit University 2014).
Edward W. Said, After The Last Sky (Faber and Faber, 1986), 4.
Said, After The Last Sky, 42.
From Benjamin Netanyahu’s infamous wording to CNN during the 2014 war on Gaza: “They want to pile up as many civilian dead as they can. They use telegenically dead Palestinians for their cause. They want the more dead, the better” →. See also Ozge Ersoy and Bikem Ekberzade with Thomas Keenan, tel·e·gen·ic (PRODUCE 2, 2014) →.
Sherene Seikaly, “Gaza as Archive,” in Gaza as Metaphor, eds. Helga Tawil-Souri and Dina Matar (Hurst and Company, 2016), 228.
Azoulay has arguably contributed to finally writing the Palestinian struggle as a civil rights movement. See Ariella Azoulay, The Civil Contract of Photography (Zone Books, 2008).
Iman Mersal has positively analyzed that same mother (the oft-discussed “Palestinian women” in the region), calling her the “instrumental” mother but one who turns into a “standardized mother” precisely because she keeps reappearing in images. This is the point at which she argues that “all Palestinian mothers become a single Palestinian mother,” in Iman Mersal, How to Mend: Motherhood and Its Ghosts (Kayfa Ta and Sternberg Press, 2018), 66.
See my “Cruel Images,” e-flux journal, no. 96 (January 2019) →.
Cited in After the Last Sky, 2. The poem is “The Earth Is Closing In on Us,” and was published in Darwish’s magazine Alkarmel in November 1984.
As quoted in the Palestine Poster Project archive →.
Subversive Films, The Syllabus (2017), 2. An art project in the form of printed matter that was commissioned by Tirdad Zolghadr for the 5th Riwaq Biennale, and later co-commissioned and expanded by Lara Khalidi. Jawharieh’s notes were most likely written sometime in the 1970s. Subversive Films writes that though the manuscript is seemingly devoid of “revolutionary context,” its fascination lies in its use as a teaching tool-set.
Interview with Salah Abu Hanud in Amman Jordan by artist Ala Younis, January 2012, when we found the earliest works of this group among discarded and newly categorized reels that belonged to a former Soviet cultural center in Amman.
Supplement to Subversive Films, The Syllabus.
Subversive Films and the Egyptian collective Mosireen cowrite and expand on such circumstances in a printed collection of their respective syllabi.
Subversive Films, The Syllabus, 10.
Subversive Films, The Syllabus, 33.
Impelled by Laura U. Marks thesis of the haptic in The Skin of the Film: Intercultural Cinema, Embodiment and the Senses (Duke University Press, 2000).
Vladimir Tamari, “Remembering My Friend, Hani Jawhariyyeh,” Jerusalem Quarterly, no. 67 (Autumn 2016): 19–27.
Or, like the exact moment the stage curtain falls and crashes on the ground in René Pollesch’s recent play Cry Baby. Here, a long white bedroom drape forms the background of the entire play until it crashes and falls, and one realizes the copious depth still left to the Deutsche Theater. The farthest visible point to us as spectators is now a black sheen drape hung in folded layers with ever more dimensionality.
Eisenman sets out to inquire why exactly this is so, why his anger at Abu Ghraib’s image of torture and suffering was “accompanied by a shock of recognition” with “treasured sculpture’s and paintings from a distant past,” in Stephen F. Eisenmann, The Abu Ghraib Effect (Reaktion Books, 2007), 11.
Ilana Feldman, “Gaza: Isolation,” in Gaza as Metaphor, eds. Helga Tawil-Souri and Dina Matar (Hurst and Company, 2016), 95-101.
As picked up by many on social media, news agencies then chose to screen-grab Laleh Khalili’s Twitter post: “Holy shit what an image: ‘13th attempt to break the Gaza Blockade by sea.’ Photo by Mustafa Hassouna (Andalou Agency for Getty)” →.
Buren states: “For me, colour is pure thought, and therefore completely inexpressible, every bit as abstract as a mathematical formula or a philosophical concept” (italics my own), quoted in Anna McNay, “Daniel Buren: Comme Un Jeu d’Enfant / Like Child’s Play, Work In Situ,” Studio International, September 2014 →.
Which would be to depoliticize them, or to kill them as images, per social media’s arbitrary offshore decision-making on what it deems as imagery too violent to be viewed. See Norman Finkelstein and his battle with YouTube over removing a tribute to Yaser Murtaja, which the site deemed as inciting violence →.
In Étienne Balibar, “Outlines of a Topography of Cruelty: Citizenship and Civility in the Era of Global Violence, ” in We, the People of Europe? Reflections on Transnational Citizenship (Princeton University Press, 2004).
From Gilles Deleuze’s analysis of Foucault’s Archaeology of the Present (1969), which forms a crucial foundation for Forensic Architecture’s work.
Iman Mersal, How to Mend: Motherhood and Its Ghosts (Kayfa Ta and Sternberg Press, 2018), 82.
Mersal, How to Mend, 80.
Mersal, How to Mend, 88.
Or “that which is implicitly known,” as put by Ridade Öztürk, “Sufism in Cinema: The Case of Bab'Aziz: The Prince Who Contemplated His Soul,” Film-Philosophy 23, no. 1 (2019): 55-71. Thank you also to Haytham El-Wardany for an email conversation with me on Kashf.
James Bridle, New Dark Age: Technology and the End of the Future (Verso Books, 2019), 6.
From the earliest assertions in Walter Benjamin’s writing, to Ariella Azoulay and Hito Steryl among others.
See also Doreen Mende’s decisive analysis on the slowing-down of images via navigation in her lecture “The Navigation Principle: Slow Image” →.
Announcement for “e-flux journal and Harun Farocki Institut present: ‘Art After Culture: Navigation Beyond Vision’ at Haus der Kulturen der Welt” →.
Doreen Mende, introduction to “Art After Culture: Navigation Beyond Vision” conference, HKW, Berlin, April 2019.
“e-flux journal and Harun Farocki Institut present: ‘Art After Culture: Navigation Beyond Vision’ at Haus der Kulturen der Welt.”
As argued by Bridle in New Dark Age.
In other words, it’s actually that singular image frame that is hosting us in its womb.
Paul L. Anderson, Pictorial Photography: Its Principles and Practice, first published 1917. Quoted in Anderson, The Technique of Pictorial Photography (J. B. Lippincott Company, 1939).
Anderson, Pictorial Photography, my italics.
The protests were dubbed “The Great March of Return,” leading up to Nakbah Day in May, which annually commemorates the Palestinian expulsion. See →.
As told to me by Rushdi Sarraj in conversation; see also Atef Abu Saif’s diary The Drone Eats With Me (Beacon Press, 2016).
As told to me by Rushdi Sarraj.
Image courtesy of the author.