Occupied Land, Occupied Body, we invite a conversation in thinking about re/presentations of landscape and the body.
Rana Barakat, Director, BZU Museum
Among a constellation of shadows, Reem allows us to see beyond, through light and dark and a play between them, the fixed borders of self and people no longer stand. Palestine is bigger than a landscape, Reem invites us to not only see, but experience this. Bold and beyond daring, Reem takes us with her on a healing journey, the pain and the promise of life in Palestine. A landscape ravaged by settler colonialism and a body by cancer, Reem shares how survival is pain, how continuing is courage, and how our bodies and our land are archives of the past that embody hope for the future. Reem shows us how to explore the intimate as she blurs the boundaries between body and land. Her installation asks us to literally walk with body and land – through hers and with our own. This revelation of the intimate teaches us the courageous act of blending personal with collective. She is not confined by the notion of remembering so as to not forget a “lost” landscape, rather, Reem invites us to think otherwise – beyond, but also through, loss and pain. Reem defies both temporality and place as she opens up time and space – we walk with her and through her as we walk with ourselves in our landscapes. Neither static nor whole, through this intimate act –she invites to walk through emotions.
Reem Masri is a visual artist, born in Jerusalem 1991. She earned her Bachelor’s degree in Visual Arts from Al Quds University, Palestine in 2014 and her Master’s degree in Contemporary Art from ENSA Bourges, France 2018. Currently, she works as an Instructor at the Faculty of Art, Music and Design, Birzeit University, Palestine. Her work explores the relationship between land, memory, and self-identity by deconstructing and reconstructing the relationship with the natural landscape and examining its connotations between the visible and the invisible, the constant and the variable. She uses various materials and techniques in her work such as painting, collage and installation.
