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Museum of Contemporary Art – Palestine (CAMP):
The Museum of Contemporary Art (CAMP) was established to relate to one of the core Palestinian experiences – displacement; as well as to account for the growing collection of visual art that has been safeguarded by Al-Ma’mal over the past ten years. There was/is a need to create a lever for new opportunities, innovative thought, and dynamic multi-cultural activity within, and surrounding Palestinian art, culture, and environment. Our goal is to utilize CAMP to relate to Palestine and its rich and multifaceted textures (traditional/ historical backdrop embedded within contemporary ambitions), while encouraging and strengthening international communications as well. We believe that a contemporary art museum must be a flexible, living organism; an expanding space that will facilitate the realization of cultural projects, empower creative individuals of all nationalities, and avoid stagnation that might otherwise act negatively in like developments. For this reason, we envision CAMP’s essence not solely as a physical place (for that would undermine our working philosophy and limit creative potential), but as an authentic, accessible, and fluid entity, a nomadic site where dialogue, growth, and resourceful experimentation are encouraged.
Our project involves the biennial 'nomadic' movement of CAMP, its cumulative art collection and 'portable' structure. Every year, CAMP will find a temporary 'home' under the auspices of a 'host museum.' The 'host museums' – located across the globe – will be invited to interact with CAMP's presence and to initiate projects and exhibitions.
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Emily Jacir
Where We Come From
2003
Born 1970. Lives and works in Ramallah and New York.
Jacir’s solo exhibitions include, The O-K Center for Contemporary Art in Linz, Austria in 2003, and at the University Gallery in Sewanee Tenasee in 2000. Jacir has participated in several group exhibitions that include, Veil, The New Art Gallery Walsall, England; The Museum of Modern Art Oxford (2003). Unjustified, Apex Art, New York; Submerged, Kunstbunker Nuremberg, Germany (2002). Made in Transit, Vacancy Gallery in New York (2001). Ekbatana, Nikolaj Contemporary Art Center, Copenhagen, Denmark (2000).
Living in Ramallah and New York, Jacir’s residency time in Jerusalem in 2002 was utilized to create an artwork inspired by the very personal idea of displacement that so many Palestinians endure. Where We Come From/(Im)mobility is based on the artist’s “freedom of movement” as a Palestinian with an American passport. Jacir utilized her passport to access Palestine for Palestinians who are denied the freedom to go to their own homeland and/or to move freely within it. She asked them to send her their requests of what they wanted her to do for them, and with her “golden ticket” (her U.S. passport), Jacir was able to move freely, circumventing barriers and connecting people to their homeland, their wishes, their dreams. In the very act of connecting people to their homeland by fulfilling their requests, Jacir’s work ascertains and documents their disconnection as well.
Jacir’s desire is to shed light on the absurdity of displacement by showing the adversities exiles suffer over things that most of us take for granted, and in so doing, the artist reassembles the fragments of diaspora. Jacir identifies with the subjects by acting out their wishes (gestures), thus becoming an extension of their will: becoming them even, and it is in this way that her work reflects on the mobility of exile itself as a shifting form of identification, drifting from geographical displacements to psychic splits to moral contradictions. (Jack Persekian)
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