Christian Palestinian Archive: A Project by Dor Guez Exhibition and Programs Christian Palestinian Archive: The James Gallery A Project by Dor Guez The Graduate Center, CUNY 365 Fifth Avenue at 35th Street The Graduate Center centerforthehumanities.org/james-gallery Apr 8–Jun 4, 2016 Exhibition and Programs Introduction landscape into a sea of shadows. While Guez fixes his camera to produce a static “post- A golden sunset against a beach in present- card” image of the beach as a site of day Jaffa serves as a deceptively idyllic recreation and leisure, this image is simulta- backdrop for Dor Guez’s film Sabir (2010). neously reframed by Samira’s story, not For about twenty minutes, we see shadows only as a site from her past but from where of individuals partaking in everyday acti- she is estranged in the present. vities against the slowly setting sun: children The story of Samira Monayer is central run home for dinner, couples hold hands to this presentation in the James Gallery, on a romantic stroll, and joggers venture out where it serves as an entry point to Guez’s for evening exercise while surfers ride the artistic practice and the inspiration for the last waves before the sun’s rays drop below Christian Palestinian Archive. This digital the horizon. These shadows are more archive was founded by Guez in 2009 after significant than the charming vignettes they he discovered a suitcase under his grand- appear to be at first glance. Their peace- parents’ bed filled with old photographs ful appearances belie a turbulent history and other personal documents. Organizing and precarious reality of contemporary life these materials into albums proved insuf- in Israel—a discrepancy revealed by the ficient, as the photographs’ personal, film’s narrator, a Palestinian woman named historical, and material significance was Samira Monayer. We never see Samira in the hampered by the rigidly linear book format. film, but we hear her story: her childhood Following this failed experiment, Guez’s in Jaffa and her family’s expulsion in 1948 grandmother, Samira, gave him permission during the Palestinian exodus from land to scan and upload the documents. Guez’s claimed by Israel (known as al-Nakba, “the solution marked the beginning of the catastrophe”),1 their global dispersal to CPA and a turning point in his artistic prac- Lydd (Lod), Amman, Cyprus, Cairo, and tice. Much more than a digitized family London, and eventually, Samira’s life in the album, today the CPA contains thousands new Israeli society. of images from Christian Palestinian com- The title of the film, Sabir, which derives munities across the world. Unlike other from the Latin to know, is a Mediterranean archives, the CPA is not invested in material pidgin language combining elements of conservation, and all photographs are French, Italian, Portuguese, Spanish, Arabic, returned to their owners after being Hebrew, Turkish, and Greek. Widely spoken scanned. Open calls have been held since among seafarers and travelers between 2009 from Berlin to London to São Paulo, the eleventh and nineteenth centuries, it with a new open call to be held in New York refers to a time in which the linguistic and over the course of Guez’s project at The cultural borders of the region were fluid, Graduate Center. informed by personal experiences and con- Christian Palestinians make up a very nections. Guez appropriates this term small percentage of the population in Israel- to refer to many displaced Palestinians who Palestine today: less than 2% of Israel, 1% have learned multiple languages while adap- of the West Bank, and .5% of the Gaza Strip.2 ting to life in the post-1948 diaspora. Over Despite their small numbers in those terri- the crash of waves against the shore, tories, they represent hundreds of thousands Samira—in her native Arabic—recalls her in a diaspora stretched across the Middle childhood, when she could walk just one East, Europe, and the Americas.3 The CPA is hundred steps from her home to the Medi- at its heart a participatory project, explor- terranean, and contemplates the 1948 ing stories of the community members who war and its aftermath in Hebrew. Guez, wish to participate. Christian Palestinians however, visually and metaphorically com- have frequently been marginalized in plicates this binary between memory and historical accounts of the region, and Guez’s history as the setting sun over the Jaffa initiative addresses this omission. Yet this beach transforms the contemporary Israeli process of writing history against the grain 3 The James Gallery is not exclusively on the level of content for scanograms based on photographs includ- Guez. His constant but subtle refusal to fall ed in the CPA. The original photographs, into the easy traps of predetermined nar- dating from 1938–1958, portray important ratives and reductive identity politics is best events in the lives of Samira and her family understood through the formal tensions of before and after the declaration of the his artwork, which self-reflexively push state of Israel. After Jaffa was taken by mil- the limits of representation and authorship. itary force in 1948, the family fled about “Scanogram” is the term Guez uses for seventeen miles southeast to Lydd, a city re- the works that result from his digital ma- vered in Christianity as the burial site of nipulation of scans from previously existing Saint George. The Israeli military conquered visual materials. Loose historical prece- Lydd just a few months later and marched dents for this process are the early twenti- most of the Palestinian occupants to the eth century photogram experiments of Jordanian border. Only 1,030 out of more than László Moholy-Nagy, Man Ray, and Christian 20,000 Palestinians stayed in the city, Schad, who placed existing, often mundane, including Samira.5 Jewish immigrants quickly objects on photosensitive paper and ex- filled the abandoned houses, and the city was posed them to light, in the process creating given the Hebrew name Lod. The remaining abstracted and frequently surreal compo- Palestinian population was restricted to sitions visually akin to x-rays. By producing an area, which became known as the “Lod a photograph without a camera, these Ghetto.” Several of Guez’s scanograms doc- artists circumvented the supposedly “nat- ument Samira’s wedding in the Lod Ghetto ural” relationship between referent and on July 13, 1949, exactly one year after image, forcing the viewer to question the the invasion of the city. veracity of mimetic representation. Rather Accounts of the events in Lydd in 1948 than photosensitive paper, Guez uses scan- vary widely among historians as the Israeli ning machines as his medium. Since most government continues to downplay its scanners are automatically designed to role in the violent Palestinian exodus from smooth aberrations and imperfections, Guez Lydd and its neighboring city of Ramla.6 relies on scanners of different commercial By recovering the visual and material traces qualities for different layers: each layer is of this time and place, and making them selected to highlight a different aspect of the publicly available, it can be argued that Guez original document, such as composition, enters his scanograms as evidence in this color, and physical condition. The layers are ongoing debate over the historical record. combined into one high-resolution digital This testimonial potential of the scanogram, image that is often printed on a large hinted at in Scanogram #1, is more evident scale, magnifying the details of the original in 40 Days (2012), a series documenting composition. Guez’s new digital image vandalism of the Christian cemetery in Lydd, paradoxically emphasizes the original pho- where Samira’s family is buried. Samira’s tograph’s material history as an object of husband, Jacob, snapped the original historical evidence. The original document’s photographs to initiate a police investigation tears, creases, and evidence of handling into the desecration of the graves. Failing over time meld with the composition to pro- to find those responsible for the vandalism, duce a work that sits on the cusp between police returned the photographs, after which digital and material, image and object. they were kept in a kitchen drawer and In this project Guez’s focus on Christian exposed to heat and condensation, causing Palestinians within Israel hones in on a the photographs to congeal to each other unique and complex experience difficult over time. Separating the photographs later to represent and therefore ripe for his self- caused them to tear at the edges, leaving reflexive aesthetic strategy: the uncanny ghostly streaks. The resulting scanograms condition of being a “present-absentee” ex- document both the desecration of the iled on one’s own land.4 Scanogram #1 Christian graves and the human remains (2010) is a series of fifteen black and white contained therein, and the destruction 4 Christian Palestinian Archive: A Project by Dor Guez of the photographs themselves as an object 1. Whereas most of Israel’s Jewish citizens refer to the of discarded evidence. Their large format, 1948 war as the War of Independence, Palestinians which emphasizes the physical damage refer to the war and its aftermath as the Nakba, or “catastrophe.” With the establishment of the State of of the photograph, simultaneously abstracts Israel, nearly three-quarters of a million Palestinians the original composition and draws atten- were exiled. tion to the multiple levels of real and meta- 2. “FACTBOX - Christians in Israel, West Bank and phorical violence the image represents. Gaza,” Reuters UK, May 10, 2009 (accessed February Guez is astutely aware that evidence can 16, 2016). never be self-evident, but, like history, is 3. William Safran, “Diasporas in Modern Societies: Myths of Homeland and Return,” Diaspora, Volume 1, always constructed.