Liverpool Biennial – City States: Jerusalem at CUC

via ArtSchool Palestine.

One of the several City States exhibitions at the Contemporary Urban Centre during the Biennial.

Future Movements
City States: Jerusalem
(City States is a strand of the 2010 Liverpool Biennial’s international exhibition)

Future Movements draws inspiration from the city of Jerusalem and its changing urban structure.  The exhibition takes the viewer to places outside the spiritual Old City to locations that, despite their importance in shaping the contemporary metropolis, have rarely been referenced or addressed in literature and the visual arts.  The exhibition exposes Jerusalem as a contemporary city in all its physical, social, economic and political complexities – demonstrating how the urban space is divided, conquered, abandoned and re-occupied.

Future Movements is a culmination of work by artists who have taken part in ArtSchool Palestine’s 2009 residency programme, as well as newly commissioned art works by Palestinian artists, living in Palestine, also on show ongoing projects by other international artists and collectives.  The programme offered visiting international artists and Palestinian artists the opportunity to interact and respond to areas in the city, rarely touched upon in tourist literature. It gave them the chance to explore and reflect on the actuality of Jerusalem today, a place that has changed a great deal during the last decade due to extensive Israeli settlement activity, road building, and the erection of many barriers; policies that have resulted in fragmented Palestinian realities and an urban fabric that is distorted and truncated by political, social and cultural divisions.  The city – once a commercial, cultural and administrative centre of the West Bank and Gaza – has been transformed into an isolated city that is barely surviving. The art works in the exhibition depict these realities, but at the same time, give space for self-reflection, dignity, hope and the possibility of looking forward into the future.

The featured artists explore the sharper edges of Jerusalem through personal experience while others, due to their inability to access the city itself, have managed to imagine and reinvent it. By offering diverse perspectives and examining the relationship between the individual and the place, the exhibition creates a setting where personal confessions and stories of the everyday are recounted.  Whether from Palestine or elsewhere, the artists often use memory and a sense of absence as a means through which to reveal engagements and confrontations within the city. Depicting Jerusalem as a place overshadowed by the weight of history and scarred by divisions, they mark its fraught legacy of conflict and violence.  Moving between locations they look at how cultures of remembering are constructed in the contemporary city, through architecture, memories and stories.

Participating artists are: Basel Abbas and Ruanne Abou Rahme – Palestine; Jawad Al Malhi – Palestine; Sarah Beddington – UK; Anna Boggon – UK; CAMP Group – India; Raouf Haj Yihya – Palestine; Alexandra Handal – Palestine/UK; Shuruq Harb – Palestine; Maj Hasager – Denmark; Jakob Jakobsen – Denmark; Bouchra Khalili – Morocco/France; Larissa Sansour – Palestine/Denmark; Oraib Toukan – Jordan.

Supported by Sawsan Asfari, the Barjeel Art Foundation, the Danish Arts Council, Ford Foundation, The International Arab Charity, Zina Jardaneh, PADICO HOLDING, and the Palestinian Ministry of Culture.

In partnership with Al Hoash Gallery and Visiting Arts.
ArtSchool Palestine is supported by the Foundation for Arts Initiatives.