Aissa Deebi, This is How I Saw, Gaza, Edition #3, 2019. Hybrid print, 50cm x 70cm. Artwork commissioned and printed by the Department of Painting and Printmaking, at VCU School of the Arts, Richmond, VA, USA. Courtesy of the artist.This art work reflects the theme of "Elusive Viewpoints"
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Elusive Viewpoints
The classic panorama of the Old City of Jerusalem has been dominated by the view of its Holy sites. Jawad Almalhi’s, Tower of Babel Re-visited offers an alternative panorama of Jerusalem. The photograph allows us a vantage point to view the refugee camp, settlements, Separation Wall and the unfinished Palace of King Hussein. Almalhi searched for a vantage point to photograph the refugee camp, impossible from within its confined passageways, and to capture the encirclement of settlements. The panorama reveals the intensely accumulative topographies of the built environment of refugees which have become a testimony of dispossession.
From another viewpoint, Aissa Deebi in This is How I Saw, Gaza, explores the wars on Gaza Strip, via re-representations of TV news screen- as Gaza is a place which he is not permitted to enter. The series of prints offer a frightening and sombre grid of terrifying violence. During her lifetime, Sophie Halaby (1906-1998) created tens of drawings and watercolours of Jerusalem, Jericho and Palestinian landscapes from different viewpoints. Halaby was one of few women artists of her generation who studied arts in Italy and France between 1928-1933.1 In particular, she continually and diligently studied the hills of Jerusalem, repeatedly sketching and painting them. Uncannily, her landscapes have a melancholic and foreboding quality, which perhaps reflect the transformations of the political eras she lived through. Jack Persekian’s series Past Tense is a detailed study of Jerusalem through archival photographs of the Matson Collection juxtaposed with presentday documentation of the exact sites. The photographs reveal the detailed transformation of the city, and a lost landscape, highlighting detailed changes of each location.
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