Artist Spotlight: Yazan Khalili from Palestine
Born in 1981, Yazan Khalili lives and works in Palestine. Khalili received a degree in architecture from Birzeit University and graduated with a Masters degree from the Centre for Research Architecture at Goldsmiths College, London.
He has participated in numerous shows internationally, including Sandi Hilal and Alessandro Petti’s project Ramallah Syndrome in the Palestine c/o Venice Pavilion at the 53rd Venice Biennale (2009). In 2009, alongside Lara Khaldi, Khalili co-curated We Were Never Heroes as part of the Jerusalem Show, and Independent Film in Palestine, at the Arab Shorts Festival presented by the Goethe Institute, in Cairo.
“The Colour Correction Series explores the idea of losing lifestyle, mobility, freedom of choice and even the ability to dream of a brighter tomorrow. According to Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Žižek, these losses lead to a permanent state of emergency, where the possibility of thinking and living in the present becomes impossible.
“This specific image shows Al-Amari Refugee Camp, located inside/beside/outside Ramallah City. The form of the camp does not represent its economic status, but rather its loss and trauma as a political manifestation that persists due to the continuous emergence of ephemeral homes, contradictory ways of living and unbearably unstable relationships between Palestinians and their surrounding landscape. Altering the refugee camp’s colours is a symbolic act. It aims to fill the loss – in the way a child fills the blanks in colouring books – and thus reignite the possibility of hope. Here Yazan Khalili attempts to appropriate an urban landscape that reminds us of the tragedy – of their existence and our disappearance – in order to subvert memory into a desired future.”
“When the woman in Bounty chocolate advert (the Arabic version) eats a bit of the chocolate, the time goes backwards, and she goes from the city to a Caribbean look island with all coconut trees around. While her lover is jumping in the blue sea water, the slogan comes out: The taste will take you there. The producers of this advert aim to create a direct relation between the taste and the place through the image; Bounty becomes a taste of an image, of blue seas and clear skies; the taste of paradise as in the English version. We ”the consumers” know that it won’t take us there, to the island, but we consume it so that it takes us there, to the image. It creates an experience of an image through tasting it.
“Heidegger noted that photographic images appear to abolish distance in their presence yet they do not bring nearness; “despite all conquest of distances the nearness of things remains absent”, they do not imply a shift in proximity.
The picture of the Dome of the Rock -the one that is found hanging on every wall and the background of every poster- is for the post second-Intifada generation -who grew up without the possibility of visiting the city- is the image of Jerusalem, the whole city has been reduced to that picture, it contains in its two dimensionality the erasure of the city from our space of three dimensional experiences, the image becomes a documentation of the distance, or the disappeared distance.”
First produced for Jerusalem Show, curated by Lara Khaldi & José A. Sanchez. This book is a film made in a format of a book, it doesn’t exist as a film, the book is its original and only format.
The film/book follows a narrative of a failed love story, involving a woman who had recently abandoned the narrator and left him with the landscape photographs lacking his presence and the presence of the notorious Israeli built Wall in the West Bank, an absence which echoes the atmosphere conjured by these images.
This series emerged out of questions relating to the representation of the Wall. Depictions of this Wall have been used and consumed within the palestinian and global shared visual economy to such an extent that it lost its power as an image.
Source: www.aquila-style.com