Emily Jacir Libri

Emily Jacir is an artist who lives in between New York and Ramallah. It's no surprise that a central motif in her work is the theme of voluntary and coerced movement between places and cultures. The projects she has undertaken over the past five years have pungently, poignantly crossed the divides between art, life, politics and culture over and over again. In “Where We Come From,” Jacir, armed with an American passport, crossed borders in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip fulfilling everyday requests for fellow Palestinians unable to move so freely. In “Sexy Semite,” she placed ads in the Village Voice , a “Hot Palestinian Semite” seeking “Jewish soul mate” and the like. And in “Memorial to 418 Palestinian Villages which were Destroyed, Depopulated and Occupied by Israel in 1948,” Jacir installed a refugee tent in her studio in Lower Manhattan and invited friends and strangers to help her embroider the village names. Belongings is the first monograph published on her work.

This notebook combines photographs by Palestinian artist Emily Jacir with a text by political philosopher Susan Buck-Morss, who teaches at the City University of New York, written in response to the images and to conversations with the artist. Jacir’s photographs depict the former Benedictine monastery of Breitenau, near Kassel. A prison camp in the Nazi era, it became a girl’s reformatory after World War II. These images as well as other photographs taken in Kassel are accompanied by selections from the artist’s diary entries, which investigate questions around the histories of the represented sites. Recalling Walter Benjamin’s reading of Paul Klee’s Angelus Novus, Buck-Morss’ textual response unravels how truth and collective memory are established and how the inextricable relation between knowledge and power leads to the selection of what is archived and remembered.

In ex libris beschäftigt sich Emily Jacir mit der Plünderung, Zerstörung und Rückerstattung von Büchern. Sie setzt mit ihrer Recherche ein Denkmal für die ca. 30.000 Bücher, die 1948 von Israel aus palästinensischen Wohnungen, Bibliotheken und Institutionen entwendet wurden. Die Titel von 600 Büchern hat sie hat sie in der Jüdischen Nationalbibliothek mit ihrem Mobiltelefon fotografiert, die sachlich den Stempel , AP’ (Abandoned Property, also herrenloses Gut) tragen.