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| As part of the Intimate Terrains exhibition’s September 2019 programme, the Museum hosted artist Rana Bishara in an Objects-in-Focus event to discuss her installation, the Roadmap to Elimination (2006–ongoing). In it, Bishara used cactus to represent the remains and ruins of the landscape, invoking the plant’s unique symbolic value as a natural delineator of Palestinian areas that were destroyed and erased in 1948, and as a recognized symbol of steadfastness. In the installation, Bishara created a chamber in which dried cacti remains were sown with the black threads that hung them from above. The fragile looking husks cast their shadows on walls plastered with maps that convey the systematic fragmentation and disappearance of the Palestinian landscape. As Intimate Terrains curator, Tina Sherwell, describes: ‘The cactus forms themselves echo the maps and speak of a perforated fragile landscape.’ |