Archival Home Making: Reference, Remixing and Reverence in Palestinian Visual Art

Underhill, H

doi:10.1007/978-3-031-12085-5_5

Archival Home Making: Reference, Remixing and Reverence in Palestinian Visual Art

Lookup NU author(s): Dr Helen Underhill ORCiD

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This is the authors' accepted manuscript of a book chapter that has been published in its final definitive form by Palgrave Macmillan, 2023.

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Abstract

This chapter addresses recent methodological and aesthetic invocations of the archive within contemporary visual art from Palestine. It considers the role of creative self-historicization in relation to the obligation to continually remake home under protracted displacement, dispossession, and military occupation. The chapter’s central claim is that the work of art making, and to be more specific, the work of archival art making, is home making work. Centred on empirical detail from the 2014 iteration of the Ramallah-based Young Artist of the Year Award, it engages with the winning artist’s ‘remixing’ of famous images, to reflect on intergenerational identity formation through the visual archive of Palestinian art historical references. This stands as an example of the relationship between visual art, art historical references, the concept and activity of archiving, and the (re)creation of home. The archival concerns of the artworks discussed here foreground home making as a long-term project with implications for the significant Palestinian cultural value of Sumud (trans: ‘steadfastness’).