בערבית. Palestinian Contemporary Art: Visual Narratives, and Institutional Agency

Navigating boundaries between the local and the global is an interdisciplinary course that examines the evolving landscape of Palestinian art and its entanglement within the dynamic relationship between Palestinian artists, the broader local art field and the global art world, while considering the role of curatorial agents and institutional actors in shaping artistic expression and visual narratives. It explores how Palestinian artists negotiate their local context and global artistic currents, considering questions of authenticity, cultural representation and appropriation, and the power dynamics in the art world. It also examines the role of institutions, such as galleries, museums, archives, curators, and art organizations, in supporting and shaping the Palestinian art practices.

The course seeks to probe and bring into discussion main topics and critical debates in the contemporary Palestinian art scene, addressing art as a social product informed by the dynamic and wider socio-economic and political cultural field both on the local and the global level. The course will examine and analyze works by artists, curators and institutions articulating the multifaceted dimensions of Palestinian identity, individual and collective memory, displacement, appropriation and aspirations for justice and freedom. These visual narratives can encompass personal experiences, historical events, and collective memory, highlighting the complexities of Palestinian identity and lived experiences.

The course will address key theoretical frameworks, including the notion of the local, the global, the contemporary, and global art world to establish the basic knowledge to understand, analyse and critique the entanglement of art practices with socio-political and economic contexts. It will do so through focusing on several topics:

1. Understand the historical, social, and political contexts that shape Palestinian art.
2. Investigate the rise of the contemporary art field in Palestine in the 1990s,
3. Explore exhibition politics and the agency of curatorial practices;
4. Collections and archival practices;