“If I could do something for you, anywhere in Palestine, what would it be?” This is the question that photographer Emily Jacir asked Palestinians from around the world. Holland Cotter has this to say about Jacir’s exhibition of photographs: “An art of cool Conceptual surfaces and ardent, intimate gestures, intensely political and beyond polemic, it adds up to one of the most moving gallery exhibitions I’ve encountered this season.” I’m drawn also to the simplicity of the idea that Jacir uses like a key to unlock the world–my students are working on their final papers right now, and having finished reading Robert S. Boynton’s The New New Journalism, we’ve been talking a lot about how writers and others arrive at their subject, the questions they ask of themselves and others.

The artist used her American passport and its accompanying “freedom of movement” status in an attempt to realize desires of people who have limited or no access to their own nation. The exhibition documents in text, photography and video the artist’s fulfillment of these requests across artificial and dangerous borders. The presentation is simple and straightforward: photographs record a vista denied, a family separated, a bill paid, a historic district obliterated. A text in Arabic and English records each request and its outcome (some requests have been impossible to fulfill).

The requests made of the artist range from the seemingly everyday to the more obviously harrowing. Her charges vary from “play soccer with the first Palestinian child you meet in Haifa” to “go to my mother’s grave in Jerusalem on her birthday and put flowers and pray.” This latter charge was impossible for him to do himself, as he is required to ask permission of the Israeli authorities when he wishes to enter Jerusalem. On the last anniversary of his mother’s death, he was denied access to her grave. When Jacir went there in his stead, she was surprised to see tourists surrounding the neighboring grave of Oscar Schindler. This hero of resistance to the Nazis is buried next to a woman whose son lives a few kilometers away in Bethlehem and who is forbidden from paying his respects. The irony of the situation sheds light on the calculated division and dispersal of the people, history and culture of Palestine.

Hat-tip, Mizue Aizeki

emily-jacir-photos-palestine