Fragmentation

Fragmentation

Bashir Makhoul explores the paradox of singularity and repetition in his series, One Centimeter of My Sand, One Grain of My Soil, One Centimeter of My Blood, One Drop of My Tears. The formal repetition of the pattern implies an infinity which contradicts the singularity of the object and the question of ownership that is implied by the title. The cm of blood, the drop of water, the grain of soil could be of anyone and any place. However, the paradox of ownership highlights the anomalies of national identities, in which blood and land are recurring powerful symbols that tie us to homelands, nations and our landscapes.

In Steve Sabella's work No Man's Land, it is precisely the recurring elements of any landscape that are questioned as we do not know where we are - the specificity of place has been lost as the photographs are a sophisticated seamless collage of everyday elements from the landscape, rotting leaves, feathers, pollen and dust on the surface of a lake. We seem to float in an abyss, an infinity with no rootedness or grounding, in which fragments from the landscape create a cosmos.

Hasan Daraghmeh's Flower of Salt consists of hours of video footage of everyday sites in Jericho, Ramallah and al-Am’ari refugee camp from his personal archive. In this work, he reduces the frame size until the vastness of the landscape becomes a texture of colour collapsing the landscape in which the personal intimate memories of place become a vibrating pixel on the screen.

Sliman Mansour's Drought consists of hundreds of fragments of dry mud, which make p an outline of a figure (possibly a self-portrait), accompanied by a pattern of olive trees. The work recalls a colourless mosaic, of parched and dried earth which appears to be in a process of disintegration that is held in delicate suspension.

The above works of Bashir Makhoul, Steve Sabella, Hasan Daraghmeh and Sliman Mansour all speak to a loss of ground, the disappearance of any specificity of location. Each work explores how pattern and repetition can probe the affiliations of identity to place and the paradoxes of our relationship to landscapes and homelands.