Wednesday October 7, 2020 at 4 p.m. CEST
Artist, Tanya Habjouqa with Dr. Nadera Shalhoub-Kevorkian, Professor at the Law-Institute of Criminology and the School of Social Work and Public Welfare at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem
Moderated by Associate Curator for Breda Photofestival, Mohamed Samji
The trio will explore Habjouqa's series
"A Sacred Space Oddity"
on exhibition at the photo festival until 25 October.
The Sacred Space Oddity is an elegiac meditation on the interaction of the physical and psychological space encompassed in the loaded phrase “Holy Land”. Habjouqa engages a diverse cast of characters, modulating between realist and surrealist aesthetics deployed against the backdrop of daily events in the lives of Palestinians and Israelis. She challenges the simplifying mythologies that emerge in regions of conflict; both about “the other side” and which populations tell themselves about who they are and who they seek to be. The characters featured are metaphorical co-authors; their understandings of the land embedded within the imagery in a participatory excavation of their experience and socio-political imaginaries.
Prof. Nadera Shalhoub-Kevorkian– a Palestinian feminist, is the Lawrence D. Biele Chair in Law at the Faculty of Law-Institute of Criminology and the School of Social Work and Public Welfare at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and the Global Chair in Law- Queen Mary University of London. Her research focuses on trauma, state crimes and criminology, surveillance, gender violence, law and society and genocide studies. She studies the crime of femicide and other forms of gendered based violence, violence against children in conflict ridden areas, crimes of abuse of power in settler colonial contexts, surveillance, securitization and social control. As a resident of the old city of Jerusalem, Shalhoub-Kevorkian is a prominent local activist. She engages in direct actions and critical dialogue to end the inscription of power over children’s lives, spaces of death, and women’s birthing bodies and lives.
Tanya Habjouqa is a Jordanian-Texan visual artist, educator, and a member of NOOR Images. Habjouqa’s approach to visual storytelling fuses a mordant sense of irony with unstinting, forensic interrogations of the implications of geopolitical conflict on human lives. Trained in anthropology and journalism (MA: Global Media, SOAS, London), Her work on Palestine-Israel has been cited as a powerful investigation of the cross-currents of politics, economics, religion, and cultural production.
Tanya is a mentor in the acclaimed Arab Photography Documentary Programme, a co-editor of the Jadaliyya Photography Page and cofounder of Ruwa. Habjouqa is in the permanent collections of the MFA Boston, Institut du Monde Arabe, and Carnegie Museum of Art.
