In 2023, BZU Museum first presented Reem Masri’s “Occupied Land, Occupied Body.” This was intended to begin to share publicly the generative processes of art and culture and art as culture.
The installation and the programming it generated then lead to our collective attempt to formally connect this work within pedagogical experiments. On this path, we introduced a course taught by Reem Masri and Rana Barakat within BZU Museum in coordination with the Department of Visual Arts (in the Faulty of Art, Music and Design) under our title” Landscape Wanderings: Contemporary Debates in Art Practice.” We decided to focus on the concept and practice of “landscape” in this course and connect various mediums of cultural production with a workshop component. Towards this intention, we re-installed this piece in a new formation in the center of BZUM’s gallery space and we planned on teaching and working in the gallery space, around the piece, in what we imagined to help transform the gallery into a classroom and not only as a space of exhibition.
We approached the completion of the re-installation in the gallery and began course meetings between BZUM’s Reading/Research Room and the gallery space in the beginning of October 2023. Reem re-constructed this installation playing with the very themes that guided our conversations for months. A new kind and of intimacy emerged, but one that was quite literally breath-taking with all of its contradictions. The sense of enclosure and its inherent safety collided with the trapped sense of breathlessness and isolation.
Then the world changed, again. In real time, we all understood that October 7th was and will forever be a watershed moment. What we did not see at first, however, was the mind-blowing extend of genocidal violence that subsequently overtook our lives, our landscapes and our minds. Our course was “interrupted.”
In the afterlife of this course, and in an attempt to stay committed to the concept of process and practice, BZU Museum shall now re-present this piece. In the midst of incomprehensible genocidal violence — as we witness the complete devastation of the near entirety of the landscape in Gaza and the ongoing invasions on the body and land of Palestine — Reem has offered us an opportunity to investigate the impossibles. How can we see again, the intimacy in the connections between land and body as both are being destroyed? How can we conceive of house and home again as we witness the attempt at annihilation of any and all life? This re-presentation in a landscape of the somber reality of devastation and mass murder offers us — yet again — how Palestine and Palestinians teach the world. Settler colonial genocide has targeted everything, but we still re-consider ways of life and ways of being, again.
This piece is now complemented by other artistic and intellectual offerings at BZU Museum where we shall try now to think anew and again about the endless questions we face in Palestine and the ongoing opportunities to offer new ways of thinking and being to our world.
