Emily Jacir: A star is as far as the eye can see and as near as my eye is to me
The exhibition’s title is a poem by Gregory Corso that he recited in front of Emily Jacir (b.1970, Ramallah) in Rome, Italy.
It includes film and video works, installations, interventions, audio works, and sculpture. From Change/Exchange (1998) to Untitled (SOLIDARIDAD) (2013), the exhibition contains key works presented together for the first time, as well as several rarely seen works. This includes two site-specific works that have not been shown since they were created in 1999, Everywhere/Nowhere, and from Amman to Bethlehem (contraband).
The non-chronological presentation dispersed over several buildings of the Darat al Funun compound echoes the complexities and tensions articulated in Jacir’s work. Since the early 1990s, Jacir has created works about transformation, questions of translation, resistance, and the logic of the archive. With restrained formal means she makes visible silenced historical narratives, with a focus on her own political, historical, and social relationships.
Her work ex libris (2010-2012), commissioned for dOCUMENTA (13), commemorates the approximately thirty thousand books from Palestinian homes, libraries, and institutions that were looted by Israeli authorities in 1948. For this exhibition, the artist will also present documentation from her 2002 installation Today, there are four million of us, which revisited the Jordanian Pavilion at the 1964/65 World’s Fair in New York. Lydda Airport (2009) is a film which takes place in the eponymous location in the mid to late 1930s. The film was inspired by Edmond Tamari, a transport company employee from Jaffa, who received word that he should take a bouquet of flowers to Lydda Airport and wait for the arrival of Amelia Earhart to welcome her to Palestine. stazione (2009), a public intervention conceived for the53rd Venice Biennale, created a bilingual transport route through the city that made visible Venice’s shared history with the Arab world. Punctuating the exhibition is a selection of the artist’s smaller-scale works, sketches, and documentations, reflecting the diversity of her practice.
