Magazine

The Mosaic Shattered: Exile & Resistance (1949-1986)

The film follows foraged goods in their journey from wild grasses to the kitchen table. In the field, knife-bearing hands pick and dethorn the ‘akkoub, gathering it in plastic baskets that are later emptied on the street floor for neighbors to buy and prepare. Two women sit side by side at the kitchen table, ridding the ‘akkoub of the remaining thorns. But not all is well.

Irish-Palestinian artist Rosalind Nashashibi works across painting and filmmaking, merging these disciplines to explore themes of time, ritual, and human relationships that combine the urgency of the contemporary with art historical notions of composition. She gained international recognition in the early 2000s for her observational films that blur the line between documentary and artistic expression. Her paintings often feature abstracted figures and forms rendered in vivid colors, while her films are known for their meditative quality and careful attention to everyday moments and social dynamics.

Akram Al-Ashqar’s film First Picture (2006) follows a young boy, Nour, who was born in an Israeli prison. Nour, meaning “light” in Arabic, was aptly named for the hope and comfort he brought to the girl prisoners in their dark cells, illuminating their spirits in the midst of despair. The camera films Nour’s first steps as he exits the detention center after spending his first years confined within its opaque walls. Nour’s mother, Manal, was detained while pregnant for participating in the resistance against the occupation in the Tulkarm Camp for Palestinian Refugees - what was meant to be a temporary site for displaced Palestinians from the 1948 Nakba that eventually edified into a long-lasting camp built on shoddy infrastructure and condemned to the poverty of those stripped of their land and possessions and forced to flee.

Excerpts from Dr. Layal Ftouni’s “They Make Death, and I’m the Labor of Life: Palestinian Prisoners’ Sperm Smuggling as an Affirmation of Life” published in Critical Times, Duke University Press, 2024.

After 1948 and the establishment of the State of Israel, the Zionist interests involved populating the expropriated Palestinian lands with a Jewish population. Zionist aspirations had always been conceived with European Jews in mind, but Israel’s immediate need for people and labor meant that the focus shifted to Jewish populations in Arab countries—who Ben-Guiron chillingly compared to Africans brought to America through the transatlantic slave trade. The mass-migration that occurred following the events of the Nakba were not as natural as one may be persuaded to believe, leading Israeli authorities to launch a variety of strategies in an effort to promote said expatriation. The result was a number of operations, listed in this article, that managed to secure significant waves of immigration through an emphasis on the Arab world’s allegedly widespread antisemitism, and a resulting urgency to flee the territory. This narrative, once put into motion, would continue to shape conversations surrounding Arab Jews—or Mizrahi Jews, as they are referred to in Israel—and would simultaneously set a precedent for the current weaponization of Antisemitism claims by Israel and its supporters.

Huda Takriti is a Vienna-based Syrian artist whose work uses video and installation to question hidden histories within colonial archives. Her work analyses how systems of power define memory through a decolonial and feminist lens. Her 2022 short film, Refusing to Meet Your Eye, focuses on photographic evidence documenting the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP)’s 1969 hijacking of TWA Flight 840—she singles in on a missing photograph documented only in the memory of the hijacking’s organisers. Takriti zooms into this archival lacuna in an effort to question the processes of truth-making, flagging the absence of evidence as a tool for making the past, rather than proof of nonexistence.

Marc Rudin (1945-2023) was a Swiss artist and graphic designer who later became known under the name Jihad Mansour. Born in Zurich in 1947, he initially worked as a graphic designer in Switzerland during the 1960s and early 1970s. During this period, he became progressively more involved with left-wing political movements and various activist circles. He was also a musician playing folkloric music in Switzerland when he first made contact with Palestinian activists and was made aware of their cause. He was already creating graphic design and posters with activist intentions which was to accelerate with his first visit to Lebanon in 1976.

Neon American Anthem (red) is a participatory installation designed to activate museum or institutional space. The work offers visitors a place to kneel and follow the directive of a neon sign on the wall that reads: I’ve composed a new American national anthem: take a knee and scream until you can’t breathe.

This text highlights two works by Basel Abbas and Ruanne Abou-Rahme that explore Palestinian identity, memory, and resistance. Collapse (2009) examines the fragmentation of collective memory through archival footage and poetic visuals, emphasizing the political power of broken histories. And Yet My Mask is Powerful (2016) reimagines ruins as sites of resilience, blending ancient artifacts and contemporary crises to question whether destruction can inspire renewal. Both works confront colonial violence and the enduring cycles of erasure, offering powerful meditations on defiance and reimagination.

Daniela Ortiz is an artist and activist whose artistic work materialises anti-colonial and anti-imperial struggle into a diverse range of media. The ABC’s of Racist Europe is an illustrated children’s book with the aim of serving as a pedagogical tool against the rise of fascism and racism within European colonial institutions.

Lawrence Abu Hamdan’s ‘Diary of a Sky’ compiles audio recordings from Israeli fighter jets and drones flying over Lebanon throughout the year 2020-2021. The film unravels the only purpose of these fighter jets, ceaselessly flying over Beirut, who slowly succeed in transforming the landscape from the quotidian experience of everyday life into an overhead space of psychological warfare where civilians are actively intimidated by the constant sound of potential escalation. The video work weaves together a thesis about the politics of sound - an area that is often left out of image-based media - and its connections to militarist power.