ABSTRACT
In this chapter, the authors analyses selected artworks by Mona Hatoum and Khalil Rabah, two Palestinian artists who radically reconfigure the relationship between their own body, the real or symbolic body of the mother and the native place. The title of the work, Strip, alludes to two separate meanings: to the act of undressing, referring to the nakedness of the shoes that appear as bare feet; and to the narrow ‘strip’, that is, the skin-like path upon which the shoes tread. Rabah's 8-minute video piece, ironically titled My Body and Sole, links body and shoe even more explicitly, as it shows the artist interacting in various ways with a shoe. Often, as in the case of contemporary Palestinian art, it is precisely at the painful juncture where bruised skins, dislocated bodies and lost homes intersect that works of Art come into being.
