The Unmarked Body
2018 running till end of January 2019
Jerusalem
The artists of The Unmarked Body act with agency, using the human body as a principle medium or metaphor, to resist boundaries imposed on it. Exploring themes of sacrifice, homelessness and metamorphosis, they complicate notions of a static, “authentic” Israeli or Palestinian heritage. The Unmarked Body challenges binary constructs, revealing multifaceted, autonomous identities, through feminist and queer methodology. Adon, Abu-Hussein, Aboud and Hattab interrogate notions of purity in their wider socio-political environment, by disobeying patriarchal moulds of femininity and heteronormativity. Palestine is imagined as a woman to expose geopolitical economies of negation and models of dominance / subservience. Gender ambiguity is a prism for viewing the liminal Palestinian Israeli experience – of trespassing or falling short of both sides by being neither / nor completely.
Through embodied narrative and traces of forms, the artists situate themselves both in the here and now and in the historical context of Palestine, referencing the dispossessed present-absentees of 1948 and their descendants. Invoking dialectics of presence and absence, hybridity and syncretism, they raise questions of alterity and represent exile in its many forms, carving out a space of solidarity with parallel communities around the world.
