About BASAR

BASAR takes its name from the Arabic “baṣar”, or sight, and speaks to the shift the residency can prompt in participants’ relationship to Palestine. It also gestures towards “baṣīra”, or insight: a seeing steeped in experience and research. Conceived for Palestinian artists and cultural practitioners in the diaspora, BASAR recognises ties to Palestine that predate the journey itself: ties formed through memory, language, stories, images, and everyday cultural practices, and inflected, too, by distance and separation from the homeland.

Bringing these ties into contact with Palestine as lived—people, places, everyday realities, archives, and culturescape—BASAR creates space for residents to revisit the image of Palestine formed at a distance and bring it into dialogue with the Palestine they experience firsthand. From this dialogue, a deeper, more intricate relationship to Palestine can take shape, informing the questions their work asks, the paths it charts, and the practices it gives rise to.

“Baṣar” also invokes “ṣabr”: endurance, a word that, for Palestinians, carries both the forced distance of diaspora and the experience of remaining under occupation. Another turn of the letters opens onto “ṣabbāra”, the cactus, long rooted in the Palestinian landscape and often remaining at the sites of villages forcibly emptied of their people: a living trace of places where Palestinian life was uprooted. Through the twin resonances of “baṣar” and “ṣabr”, BASAR brings participants to live and work on a land marked by forced displacement and continued Palestinian presence. Here, the Palestine held in imagination meets Palestine as lived, and the space in between becomes material for artistic practice: what of that imagined Palestine endures after experiencing Palestine firsthand, and what new image might emerge from holding both in view?