In collaboration with the Institute for Palestine Studies
Speakers: The artist Nabil Anani, the foreword writer Abdul-Rahim al-Shaikh.

Tuesday, August 13th | 18:30-20:00
Location: The Palestinian Museum
Language: Arabic

The book launch will be accompanied by exhibiting a selection of artworks by Nabil Anani on the natural landscape of Palestine at the Palestinian Museum until mid-September. 

About the event:

The Land and I presents a selection of artworks by Nabil Anani that explores the natural landscape in Palestine from the beginning of the 1970s until today, encompassing over 183 works. The book serves as a chromatic record of the Palestinian landscape and a key source of inspiration for Anani during a career spanning five decades. During this journey, the natural landscape in Palestine has undergone radical changes within the context of ongoing Zionist colonial attempts to dominate and seize the Palestinian land. Therefore, Anani's book is a visual documentation of the Palestinian natural landscape over the years, countering the continuous attempts to obliterate and alter the Palestinian topography.

Through his insightful analysis, Abdul-Rahim Al-Shaikh proposes that the book serves as “an exercise in looking at the Palestinian body that became a landscape, and the landscape that became a body”. The artworks were chosen by curator Rana Anani to reveal the accumulative stages of Anani's creative journey, underlining the development of his study of color and form and his varied experiments with techniques.

Participants:

Nabil Anani: Born in Latrun, Palestine, in 1943. He is a key founder of the contemporary Palestinian art movement. Anani graduated in fine art from Alexandria University, Egypt, in 1969. Upon his return to Palestine, he began a career as an artist and a teacher-trainer at the UN College in Ramallah. Anani held his first exhibition in Jerusalem in 1972 and has since exhibited widely in solo and group shows locally, and in Europe, North America, the Middle East, North Africa, and Japan. His works are held in many museums and private collections, including the Agha Khan Museum in Canada and the Jordanian National Museum. He has pioneered the use of local media, such as leather, henna, natural dyes, paper-mâché, wood, beads, and copper through his works.

Abdul-Rahim Al-Shaikh: A poet, professor of philosophy and cultural studies at Birzeit University. His work is focused on poetics, theory, and translation, with a special emphasis on the representations of Palestinian identity in prison, camp, and cemetery. His latest publications include The Drawer of the Circle (2024), Conceptualizing Modern Palestine II (2023), and The Other Voice: An Introduction to the Phenomenology of Metamorphosis (2021), all in Arabic. Currently, he is working on two ongoing projects: “The Palestinian Living Cemetery” and “Parallel Consciousness: Walid Daqqah's Prison.”

Rana Anani: A curator, writer, and researcher on visual arts and culture, she has worked for years in the field of printing and was among the founding staff of the Palestinian Museum. She was the Head of Communication of the Palestinian Museum, the Project Manager of Qalandiya International 2018, the coordinator of the Palestinian Pavilion at the Cannes Film Festival, and an Associate Curator of Sharjah Biennale 13 off-site project “Shifting Grounds” in Ramallah. Currently, she is the editor of the website of the Institute of Palestine Studies, Ramallah/Beirut.