ABSTRACT
The possibility of questioning institutional, historical and cultural borders of property, heritage and belonging is the challenge posed by the Palestinian artist Emily Jacir. The idea of decomposition of borders as an effect of movement is also what seems to emerge from the installation Continental Drift. The culture and geopolitics of closure, confinement and the building of walls is impiously questioned by Hatoum’s aesthetics of border-crossing. This is particularly evident in the different maps the artist has produced, of both Palestine and the world, blurring any distinction between closeness and distance, familiarity and strangeness. Born and raised in Haifa, then living and working between Palestine, the US and Europe, Jacir rearticulates the experience of diaspora. Attia’s work shows a series of different objects and images from some ex-colonised African countries and Europe, mainly tracing back to the colonial era and the interwar period.
