Emily Jacir

Developed during her residency at P.S.1's National Studio Program, Jacir opened her studio to Palestinians, Israelis, Americans, Egyptians, Syrians, Yemenis, Spaniards and others to embroider a refugee tent with the names of Palestinian villages impacted by Israeli expansion.[18]

"Memorial to 418 Palestinian Villages is mobile and vulnerable—resisting any false appeals to closure. It is not a didactic monument, but a sensitive, painful testament to a desperate tragedy that needs to be addressed and aches to be mourned."[19]

Jacir, holder of an American passport, asked more than 30 Palestinians living both abroad and within the occupied territories: “If I could do anything for you, anywhere in Palestine, what would it be?” She collected responses and carried out tasks in an extended performance of wish-fulfilment by proxy, using her American passport to travel between territories, a privilege most Palestinians do not hold.[4] Some of the tasks included playing football, eating local foods, paying bills, visiting a grave, meeting relatives or loved ones, etc. The details of the series's display were deliberate: within a simple, black frame, parallel text in Arabic and English listed the exact request, described the requestor's current location and situation in regards to movement, their name, and finally, notes on the completion of the task. Adjacent to this frame were the accompanying photographs of the artist carrying out the task, unframed, and printed larger than the text panels.

This curatorial decision is explained through the idea that "viewers face a project that is first of all divided between text panels and photographs. But how to get from one to the other? The visual transition from language to image seems simple enough. A mere shift of the eyes will do... Yet it is just this translation, written out in clear language and then realized photographically, that for many is insurmountable... [it] represents an unbridgeable chasm, an impossibility on which a complex of desire is built."[20]

The documented result was shown in New York[21] to great critical acclaim; "Where We Come From is [Jacir's] best so far. 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."[22][23] Other reactions expressed "that her efforts resonated with the aspects of desire, fear and restricted movement."[24]

The work was acquired by San Francisco Museum of Modern Art,[25] which added an extra text to Jacirs work.[26]

"“Crossing Surda” (a record of going to and from work), exists because an Israeli soldier threatened me and put an M-16 into my temple. [Ms. Jacir says she was filming her feet with a video camera at a checkpoint that day.] If I had not had this direct threatening experience this piece would not exist."[27]

• Tom Vanderbilt Emily Jacir - Openings,[28] February 2004, ArtForum.

"Ms. Jacir's deft extrapolation of the issues of identity from the specifics of experience, like her renewal and extension of what might be called classic Conceptual Art, is enormously impressive."[29]

"In Material for a Film (2005–ongoing) the displacement is total, as Jacir’s own identity is substituted for that of her subject, Wael Zuaiter, a Palestinian intellectual living in Rome who was assassinated in 1972 by Israeli agents, having been mistakenly identified as one of those responsible for the murder of Israeli athletes at the 1972 Olympics in Munich. The installation gathers together photographs, books, music, letters, interviews, telegrams, copies of the Italian magazine Rivoluzione Palestinese to which Zuaiter contributed, even a clip from a Pink Panther film in which he had a small part, to flesh out a life no longer there."[25]

"Jacir is a quiet and mercurial art-world figure, less than a decade deep into her career, and her Boss show rejects the obvious opportunity presented for leverage, debutante-style, as a headliner on the New York art stage and in the media that starts here. In fact, the only character in sharp focus for this exhibition is Wael Zuaiter, a Palestinian intellectual killed by Israeli secret service agents following the murder of eleven Israeli athletes and a German police officer by the militant group Black September at the 1972 Munich Olympics."[30]

Howard Halle criticized the pieces in an article in Time Out New York, writing, "That such a crude, self-indulgent exercise has been given one of contemporary art’s most prestigious awards is unfortunate, though not, sadly, entirely unexpected."[31] Another critique by Ken Johnson of The New York Times said that, "If the ultimate point is to arouse humane concern for Palestinians in general, Ms. Jacir's work falls short."[32]

• Emily Jacir: "Material for a film": Retracing Wael Zuaiter (Part 1),[33] installation in the 2007 La Biennale di Venezia
• Emily Jacir: "Material for a film": A performance (Part 2),[34] 16 July 2007, The Electronic Intifada
  • Najwan Darwis: Emily Jacir’s Material for a Film: Ongoing homage and artistic revenge for Wa’el Zuaiter[35]

• Emily Jacir, Photostory: Retracing bus no. 23 on the historic Jerusalem-Hebron Road,[36] 15 December 2006, The Electronic Intifada[37]

In 2009, Jacir participated in the Venice Biennale in the Palestinian Pavilion. She created a site-specific public project to take place in Venice during the Biennale. The Venice City Authorities shut down Jacir's project and refused to allow it to take place.

"Significant by its absence at the Venice Biennale was Emily Jacir's contribution to the official off-site exhibition, 'Palestine c/o Venice'. Jacir's artwork, Stazione, would have seen all of the piers for the Route 1 water bus (the vaporetto that runs up and down the Grand Canal) display the stop location names in Arabic as well as the usual Italian. Mockups were made, the Biennale approved, the council approved and the vaporetto company that runs Route 1 approved. Then suddenly it didn't. Apparently the vaporetto company stopped the project, and all the artist could find out, second-hand, was that they had 'received pressure from an outside source to shut it down for political reasons'."[38]

"Emily Jacir’s stazione (2008 - 2009) is an unrealised intervention on the number 1 vaporetto (water bus) line, a main transport route along the Grand Canal beginning at Lido winding its way to Piazzale Roma, ferrying audiences from one Biennale exhibition to another, by inserting Arabic text supplementing the existing Italian names at vaporetti stops and thus making the route bilingual. In the artist’s explanation, the work references the numerous Arab influences and exchanges in the history of Venice, its architecture, manufacturing, shipping, and of course in the process of these activities, language - that Arabic words too have filtered into the Venetian dialect - ‘divan’, ‘damasco’, ‘gabella’, amongst others."[39]

Museums where her work has been shown:

• CCS Hessel Museum of Contemporary Art at Bard College
• Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art at Cornell University
• Palazzo delle Papesse in Siena, Italy, nella mostra 'System Error: war is a force that gives us meanings'
• Khalil Sakakini Cultural Center in Ramallah[40]
• Modern Art Oxford
• Museum of Modern Art in New York
• Museum of Modern Art in San Francisco
• Whitechapel Gallery
• Whitney Museum of American Art

The main gallery in the US that shows her work is Alexander and Bonin in NYC (212.367.7474)

International biennales which have featured her work:

• 2013 Venice Biennale in Venice, Italy
• dOCUMENTA (13) (2012) in Kassel, Germany
• 2011 Venice Biennale in Venice, Italy
• 2011 Sharjah Biennial in Sharjah, United Arab Emirates
• 2009 Venice Biennale in Venice, Italy
• 2007 Venice Biennale in Venice, Italy, where she was awarded the 'Leone d'Oro a un artista under 40'
• 2006 Sydney Biennale in Sydney, Australia
• 2005 Venice Biennale in Venice, Italy
• 2005 Sharjah Biennial in Sharjah, United Arab Emirates
• 2004 Whitney Biennial at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York City, United States
• The 2004 Gwangju Biennale in Gwangju, Korea.
• 2003 Istanbul Biennial in Istanbul, Turkey