Culture
16 April 2024
Dima Srouji and Jasbir Puar
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Dima Srouji, (Born 1990, Nazareth), architect and visual artist whose work delves into the cultural depth of the ground and its narratives. She, working with heterogeneous mediums—including glass, text, archives, and film—collaborates closely with specialists from various disciplines to explore cultural heritage and public space, particularly in the Middle East and Palestine. Her artistic creations reflect on liberation imaginaries and question the implications of heritage in conflict zones.
Jasbir K. Puar, (born 1967 based in New Jersey, USA), Professor at Rutgers University and theorist in gender studies, intertwines academic rigour with activism. Her seminal works, including The Right to Maim and Terrorist Assemblages, navigate intricate intersections of feminism, queerness, and race, offering critical insights into global political landscapes. Puar’s research delves into the dynamics of debility, capacity, and disability, challenging reigning discourses and inviting catalytic societal introspection.
For When Solidarity Is Not a Metaphor, Dima Srouji and Jasbir Puar present works from the series Revolutionary Enclosures (Until the Apricots) (2023), consisting of a fully wallpapered room in the Navy Officers’ Club, Venice.
The wallpaper room, covered in pink floral ‘dumdum’ bullets, recalls the artist’s grandmother’s wallpaper in her living room in Bethlehem. This living space was a safe space where textures and tones of the environment, the voice of parents watching TV in the background, is all that was required to create a sense of safety during the second intifada. On the table is a personal letter that the artist’s father wrote to his friends trying to make their voices heard in the West. On the wall are charcoal drawings of dumdum injuries, a scene from the Church of Nativity siege where the church became a true sanctuary, and a recent vignette of genocide in Gaza. The everydayness of the wallpaper blurs the violence of the bullet calling out the invisibility of being Palestinian today.
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