IMAGINING THE ARAB WORLD The Fashioning of the War on Terror through Art

by Maymanah Farhat

Not since the popularity of European Orientalist paintings in the nineteenth century has there been such vast interest in the Arab world in Western art scenes. In the United States this is evident in the increased number of exhibitions held in museums, commercial galleries, and nonprofit art spaces over the last decade. A noticeable trend in the organization of these events is the representation of the region via themes that can be likened to ethnographic studies or political debates rather than serious examinations of formalistic or conceptual elements in art. More often than not, the exhibition format is used as a platform for exploring topics that have become synonymous with the Arab world and Islam through a Western political lens. This of course points to the late Edward Saids seminal work Orientalism (1978), which outlined the formation of a multidisciplinary discourse that was shaped by European Imperialism and subsequently informed Western perceptions. And while the effects of these exploits have remained in academia, as well as the arts and popular culture, it is virtually impossible for contemporary curators and cultural workers to shake off the paranoia and xenophobia of twenty-first century America. This sharpening focus on the arts has emerged alongside a shift in global affairs, namely the events of September 11, 2001, and the United States-led War on Terror and its campaign for a New Middle East. Extending further into Asia with the invasion of Afghanistan and the recent military operations executed in Pakistan, American foreign policy is thoroughly entrenched in the so-called Islamic world. That is not to say that what we are witnessing is a new-found phenomenon in American political affairs, but that it has been greatly intensified and is all the more audacious. And while the United States has been involved in such operations in the region for decades, its cultural sector has only recently begun to take notice. To understand these changes, one must first examine the history of Arab art within the context of the American art world. This narrative can be divided into two distinct periods, before and after 2001. A look at the American cultural atmosphere prior to the United States recent launch of military strikes in the Middle East and Central and South Asia reveals a different, albeit equally discriminatory, experience for artists. Although active in the United States for decades, Arab artists have been consistently shut out from the mainstream. Attempting to work within a notoriously exclusionary art scene, many have sought to carve out their own paths, often through independent initiatives and nonprofit cultural organizations. An example of this is prominent Palestinian painter Samia Halaby, who has been based in the United States since the 1950s and is known in artistic and academic circles alike. Although Halabys abstract canvases are housed in the
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collections of some of the countrys leading institutions, such as the Guggenheim Musuem of Art and the Chicago Institute of Art, she has frequently turned to alternative spaces to exhibit her work exploring the Palestinian situation. In the rare instances that museum shows focusing on Arab art were held prior to 2001, censorship and politics inevitably factored in. In 1994, Halaby was part of a volunteer committee that assembled a stellar lineup of Arab female artists living in the United States and abroad. The show, titled Forces of Change: Artists of the Arab World, included established artists such as Palestinian conceptualist Mona Hatoum, Palestinian painter Laila al Shawa, and Bahraini painter Balqees Fakhro, and was held at the National Museum of Women in the Arts in Washington DC. According to one of the women that served on the organizing committee, the idea of presenting an all-Arab show to an American audience was initially deemed too controversial. Efforts were made to subdue the overall image of the exhibition by the museum, and a struggle to keep the word Arab out of the title ensued. Eventually the committee held its ground and the title remained. Other instances demonstrated that even when a museum and organization seemed to be working on an affirmative plan, the practical outcome reflected the intrinsic prejudices of the American art world. In 1994, the Detroit Institute of Arts exhibition Fann Wa Tarab: Five Contemporary Arab American Artists, highlighted the work of several local Arab artists, including that of the late Palestinian painter Sari Khoury and Iraqi painter Athir Shayota. Initiated by the Arab Community Center for Economic and Social Services (ACCESS), a Michigan-based nonprofit, the exhibition was accompanied by a first-rate cultural program that drew an impressive number of viewers. Reflecting a common attitude of the mainstream art scene, however, one that deems modern and contemporary Arab art as secondary, the museum mounted Fann Wa Tarab in a hallway connecting galleries and hosted the exhibition for only two weeks. The interplay between art and politics was again evident in 1999, when the Metropolitan Museum of Art held the exhibition Farouk Hosni and Adam Henein: Contemporary Egyptian Artists and Heirs to an Ancient Tradition. Hosni, an abstract painter, is also Egypts longtime Minister of Culture. His two-person exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum came as a surprise to many, and it was rumored in the Arab art scene that the event was part of the institutions negotiations for a loan of Pharaonic art from the Arab republic. This was the first and last time an exhibition of modern Arab art was held at the museum. If Arab artists have experienced a state of exclusion or less than optimal consideration in the past, today they are working in a cultural atmosphere that, although perhaps more inclusive, is far more hostile. This paradox has come to characterize the very nature of the American art milieu as it is nursed by politics. While contemporary artists such as Ghada Amer, Emily Jacir, and Walid Raad are highly sought after and represented by prominent New York galleries, their work is often received with glaring stereotypes by critics and historians and in some cases attacked for its bold political content. Yet Amer, Jacir, and Raad are among several Arab artists who have recently received widespread acclaim and are actively contributing to international trends. In the end their cutting-edge art cannot be ignored. Amers sexually provocative paintings are frequently evaluated as an implicit rejection of her strict Muslim upbringing in Egypt. Employing images of women from pornographic magazines, the artist embroiders her subjects on canvases, juxtaposing an 1224

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overt sexuality with a medium that is associated with the docile, subservient woman. Yet for the artist, this rebellion is more akin to a larger feminist dismissal of prescribed roles that extends to women worldwide. As she has been working in Europe and the United States for the entire span of her career, which extends over two decades, Amers work is the result of her experiences both in the West and in the Arab world. Once more, the artist is also committed to exploring topics outside of her feminist work, namely issues of war and violence. Since much of this work is directed at Americas War on Terror and its sociopolitical implications, it is rarely included in exhibitions and hardly considered in scholarly or critical readings. Jacirs art manifests a different type of threat, as her photographs, installations, and videos stress the reality of Palestinians living under the Israeli occupation or in subsequent exile. Since she first began to exhibit her work in the late 1990s, Jacir has been unceasingly inundated with censorship and has acquired a long list of detractors. Arguably one of the most taboo subjects in the American political realm, the subject of Palestines modern historynamely the creation of the Israeli state, its destructive policies, and the continued mass expulsion of Palestinians from their homeland since 1948is kept far from public discourse. Jacir not only thrusts the Palestinian experience into the international arena, she does so through persistent creative reiteration that, according to New York Times art critic Roberta Smith, renews and extends classic Conceptual art. As a result she has received some of the biggest accolades in contemporary art, most recently the Golden Lion Award for an artist under forty at the 52nd Venice Biennale in 2007, and the Hugo Boss Prize, given by the Solomon Guggenheim Foundation in 2008. One of her latest projects, Material for a Film (2005-present), which was exhibited at the Guggenheim Museum in New York as part of the Hugo Boss Prize, drew some of its most malicious reviews for its forthright documentation of the 1972 assassination of Palestinian intellectual Wael Zuaiter by Israeli Mossad agents in Rome. The exhibition consisted of two works, Material for a Film (2004-present) and Material for a Film (performance). In the first portion, the artist retraced Zuaiters life and death in Rome through research she conducted and archival material gathered from his friends, family, and colleagues, installing the documents, photographs, and sound bites as an intimate and haunting portrait of one of several Palestinian cultural figures assassinated by the state of Israel. Jacir then built an imposing memorial to Zuaiter consisting of 1000 blank white books into which she had previously fired a single shota powerful metaphor for his literary life and sudden death. Confronted with this nuanced and moving account of a Palestinians life, Time Out New Yorks Howard Halle charges that Jacir pursues revenge over intellectual honesty. Considerably more of a political tirade than an objective art review, his critique focuses entirely on the artists pro-Palestinian leanings. Other critics, such as Ken Johnson of the New York Times, attempt to evaluate the formalistic aspects of her work while undercutting its political content and masking an obvious contention with the artists subject matter. Although desperately trying to leave out his political objections, Johnson is unable to control himself, and in the end his review stands as a belligerent condemnation of Jacir. A more shocking attack, however, appeared in ArtAsiaPacific magazine, a New Yorkbased publication that includes coverage of fourteen national art scenes in West Asia. In its annual Almanac edition, the magazine praised Jacir as one of the top Asian artists of 1225

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2007, and had already featured an in-depth interview with her shortly after Material for a Film was presented at the 52nd Venice Biennale. The assault came in the form of a book review comparing three recent publications on Arab art: the exhibition catalogue Emily Jacir (Verlag fr moderne Kunst, Nrnberg), Kamal Boullatas Palestinian Art from 1850 to the Present (Saqi Books, London), and Wafaa Bilals Shoot an Iraqi: Art, Life and Resistance Under the Gun (City Lights Publishers, San Francisco). From the onset of his review, ArtAsiaPacifics senior editor Don J. Cohn reflects a political slant that is all too common in American chauvinism towards the Arab world. Cohn argues that much of the contemporary art that addresses recent conflicts in the Middle East could not have been created if the subjects (or authors) werent American citizens, and if their work hadnt found ready audiences and publishers in Europe and the United States (16061). To position American culture as some sort of savior to such artists is a regular strategy in the United States, where curators, critics, and scholars often leap at the opportunity to juxtapose the West as open, liberating, and progressive against the closed, repressive, and backward Middle East. This has been a classic American approach to the region and to Muslim communities in general. Popular exhibition topics include the status of women in Arab societies. There is a prevailing notion that when female artists are given the opportunity to exhibit in the United States and Europe, they are instantly freed of inherent social, psychological, and religious veils. In fact, Western academia seems to be so obsessed with the concept of veiling with regard to the Middle East that references to it abound in everything from exhibition titles to scholarly writings on Arab art and culture. Violent political conflicts in the Arab world, preferably when they involve civil strife, also seem to be a fixation in the West. In the case of Lebanon, for example, the majority of artists who have shown their work in the United States often explore the contested history and collective trauma of the nations internal strife (197590). Contemporary art focusing on the Lebanese Civil War has been widely in fashion, as virtually every major exhibition of Arab art in the United States and Europe over the past ten years has included a work that references the conflict. With Arabs fighting each other, the issue is far removed from Western audiences; still, while American and European governments and corporations are directly and indirectly implicated in such conflicts, there appears to be a strong desire to control the dissemination of this information in the art world. Cohns review is a prime example of this as it attempts to influence public opinion by reducing Jacirs recent success to a combination of [art world] navet, ignorance and plain old political correctness, at the lengthy, insoluble conflict in the Middle East as it is abstracted and neatly packaged by Jacir for museum and corporate consumption (16061). Although the task at hand was to review a publication on Jacir, Cohn reverts to discussing her project Material for a Film for most of his critique. Nowhere is the reader informed of the other works that are featured in the book or of the essays that appear alongside them. In essence, this section was used as a full-fledged attack on the artist and was almost certainly fueled by her winning one of the top awards for contemporary art in the world. Her exhibition at the Guggenheim Museum shook international art, as it not only solidified the mainstreaming of the Palestinian cause, but also honored an artist who refuses to waver in her political commitment. In an art scene that demands complacency and abhors opposition, Jacirs work has managed to break through. 1226

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Cohn goes on to reproach leading Palestinian painter and scholar Kamal Boullata for his text on modern and contemporary Palestinian art. Arguing that grafting nationalist roots onto the art of a displaced people is problematic, Cohns analysis is primarily aimed at the authors placing of Palestinian art within the political context of the Israeli occupation. Dismissing the extensive text as political sermonizing, his affront extends further into the heart of Palestinian visual culture, marking its art as mediocre and bland. Again, art historical analysis or any sort of literary discussion is omitted from the reviewers critiqueinstead the reader is offered stout political opinion and plenty of ethnic stereotypes. Cohn even goes as far as to question Boullatas omission of a reference to suicide bombers and Yasser Arafat, as though such topics must have informed Palestinian art. Conversely, Cohn praises Iraqi new media artist Wafaa Bilals creative memoir Shoot An Iraqi, which weaves together his life in Iraq prior to leaving in the 1990s and his experience of executing the month-long performance piece Domestic Tension (2007). For thirty days the artist lived out of a small room in a Chicago gallery outfitted with a bed, minimal food, and a computer that was hooked up to a remote controlled paint ball gun. The gun was part of an interactive website that allowed viewers to log on and shoot at the artist as he went about his daily life in the gallery. The intention of the piece was to test the limits of a viewers conscience. Patterned after the weapons used by the American military, which allow soldiers stationed in command centers in the United States to aim at human targets in Iraq via cyber technology, the installation received a variety of responses. For Cohn, the triumph of the artists book was the candid, unsentimental, and non-martyr-making way in which he and his co-author Kari Lydersen chronicled his life in the Arab world. What influenced Cohns opinion, and was conveniently left out, however, was that much of Bilals life in Iraq was under Saddam Husseins brutal regime. For an American audience, it is much easier to consider Iraqi suffering when it is at the hands of local leaders, and not the current United States occupation. Although tragic and harrowing, in many ways Bilals story is also very marketable. The United States is a secondary villain in a cast of Arab dictators whose policies nearly killed the artist on several occasions. In the end Americans are redeemedafter escaping Iraq for refugee camps in Kuwait and Saudi Arabia, Bilal sought political asylum in the United States and currently teaches at New York University. Cohns assessment of these three publications on Arab art is overly simplistic in its analysis, as it conforms to an unfortunate tendency of the American art world, one in which serious criticism and objectivity collapse in the face of politically-charged work. This reverting to institutionalized racism stems from the shaping of American culture as it intermingles with the current political landscape and enlists the exaggerated patriotism of the day. As a strong sense of nationalism continues to run through the collective consciousness of the American art world (one that was ignited by the progressive programs of the WPA period but quickly tainted by the CIA-led anti-socialist promotion of Abstract Expressionism in the 1950s), it remains frowned upon for artists to criticize United States foreign policy. And as aspects of the Arab world stand as direct challenges to American geopolitical exploits, it can be argued that its art and culture have become virtual enemies of the state.

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Whether United States officials and operatives are directly involved in the fashioning of the American art world as they were in the 1950s has yet to be publicly determined. One example that provides compelling evidence of such cooperative measures, however, is the Metropolitan Museum of Arts 2007 exhibition Venice and the Islamic World. Examining the influence of Islamic empires on Venetian art and culture from the ninth to the eighteenth centuries, the exhibition featured paintings, drawings, manuscripts, and decorative artworks. Italian examples were placed alongside the works of Turkish, Persian, and Arab artisans, offering viewers a visual comparison of Venetian and Islamic art. A major theme of the show was the economic and cultural benefits of longstanding trade between Venice and various Muslim populations. Reading as a chronological display of this history, each room charted the developments in art and political affairs as witnessed over nearly a thousand years. Reflecting the mutual benefit of these early relations, the art work shown in the first rooms alluded to the amicable exchanges between the two parties. In the exhibition catalogue, curator Stefano Carboni stresses that although the Italian public was at first skeptical of initiating diplomatic efforts with Islamic empires, Venice vowed to prove its capability of maintaining the upper hand in these dealings. A wooden stern hanging in the final gallery of the exhibition encapsulated this message. The carved tailpiece, belonging to a seventeenth century Venetian warship, portrays a Turk in shackles, his body contorted in torment and enslavement. Described in the exhibition catalog as belonging to the ship of Francesco Morosini, the Venetian Commander-in-Chief during the battle of Candia, Carboni equates the piece with the confrontational or derisive ways in which early Orientalist portrayals of Muslims and Arabs were adopted by Venetian society once economic relations with the Ottoman Empire soured (2832). While the Orientalist nature of the stern is quite disturbing in itself, what is most problematic is that it was displayed as the final image viewers encountered before leaving the exhibition space, with little explanation as to its serving as an example of negative portrayals of the other. Wall text at the entrance of the gallery in which it hung glossed over Orientalism as a nineteenth-century pan-European phenomenon that stereotyped Muslims, portraying them in less sympathetic ways. Nothing was said of the political and historical implications of such imagery, as the late Edward Said so astutely observed. Without this context the representation of a Muslim man in chains reinforces the common imagery found in popular culture and the mass media, which often suggests an aggressive, offensive handling of Arab/Muslim cultures. In short, the exhibition provided a clear example of how a Western political entity could benefit from economic relations with the Islamic world without jeopardizing its identity and values. More importantly, the Metropolitan Museums exhibition served as a means of winning over American viewers at a time when such propositions would seem to betray their political sensibilities. Just a year prior to the opening of the exhibition, the United States and a number of European nations eagerly pursued trade agreements with several wealthy Arab Gulf States. These economic dealings came a bit too close to home for Americans when a number of United States ports were sold to the United Arab Emirates state-owned Dubai Ports World company. Although the transaction was approved by the Bush administration and the Committee on Foreign Investments, several politicians, afraid of the ports falling into Arab hands, spoke out against the transaction, spearheading a

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strong legislative opposition that eventually caused the Emirati corporation to transfer control of the ports to a United States entity. If Venice and the Islamic World displayed the ways in which art can be used to support a broader political agenda, other recent exhibitions demonstrate how institutions and curators may approach work with good intentions but remain incapable of escaping a polarizing post 9/11 environment. This was evident in the 2008 exhibition Zones of Conflict, which was held at the Pratt Institute of Art in Manhattan and featured fifteen artists, nearly half of whom were from the Arab world. With artists such as Emily Jacir and Walid Raad represented, the American occupation of Iraq, the Israeli occupation of Palestine, and the decades-long political turmoil in Lebanon accordingly featured prominently in the exhibition. Relying heavily on video art and photography, curator T. J. Demos placed the artwork of Zones of Conflict within a theoretical framework, seeking to emphasize the subjective elements of documentation which result in fictional scenarios. For Demos and the countless Western intellectuals he cites, documentary forms present the very impossibility of truth and objectivity(7). This idea that documentary forms are essentially subjective is logical, especially in the case of artistic practice, which is fundamentally based on individual understandings of time, space, and subject. The notion of the impossibility of truth, however, becomes trickier when examining artistscreating art in times of conflictwho heavily identify with documenting firsthand the experiences of war, be it through direct imagery or conceptual inferences. Take for example Emily Jacirs Invasion Series photographs (2002), which chronicle an Israeli incursion into the West Bank. In the image A Classroom, the viewer finds the shattered windows of a school. Hollowed and dark, the rooms cavernous presence is ridden with evidence of daily life. Desks remain in the shadows of the rubble and debris of an explosion, while light from the blasted windows shines on an instructors desk. The abandoned room, with its familiar objects, signifies a human presence, one interrupted and seized under the viciousness of the occupation. Correspondingly, the image Bank Mirror, Ramallah, April 22, 2002, shows the destroyed interior of a bank in the reflection of a mirror dominating the composition. One can faintly make out the front door in the reflection, as the space is illuminated by broad daylight. The destruction of the bank, as it lies pierced with bullet holes, suggests an endless barrage of catastrophic scenarios, testifying to the impossibility of normalcy under conditions in which the outcome of each day can quickly turn deadly. Images of Israeli forces in Israeli Soldiers, Checkpoint, Bethlehem, April 20, 2002 and Man at Bethlehem checkpoint during the siege on April 20, 2002 are juxtaposed with these scenes of ruin, providing important photographic documentation while investigating the psychological undercurrents of the occupation. Similarly, two photographic series by Palestinian photographer Ahlam Shibli, Goter (20022003) and Arab al-Sbaih (2007), capture a stark and unyielding reality. Images of the barren landscapes of Bedouin villages in Israel and the empty streets of a Palestinian refugee camp in Jordan resonate with a ghostly sense of isolation. An interior sitting area of a Bedouin home in Untitled (Goter no. 26) al-Qurein, al-Naqab, Palestine is clear of inhabitants, while a shot of a neighborhood street in Irbid Refugee Camp in Jordan shows the outlines of two male figures obscured in the distance amidst bleak cement edifices. Echo-

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ing Israeli policies of attempting to erase the Palestinian narrative and the abandonment of millions of refugees by neighboring Arab countries, Shiblis photographs capture the lingering desolation of mass expulsion. For decades, visual artists have greatly contributed to the documentation of the collective Palestinian experience. That is not to say that the lives of Palestinians can be easily placed within a homogenous account that speaks for a population of millions, but there are common experiences such as exile and occupation that many identify with, resulting from their political history. Consequently, these works are crucial to the articulation of the Palestinian perspective, particularly in the West. While it can be argued that such work is subjective, it must first be acknowledged that these artists are presenting their work in an environment that is a virtual battleground of imagery, particularly when it comes to representations of the Middle East. To combat subjective images, such as those of the mass mediawhat Demos describes as tapping directly into the pre-conscious arena of emotions and neurophysiological systems of its audiencessubjectivity is perhaps the only way to uncover the truths that are buried beneath a barrage of visual propaganda (7). And while artists do not necessarily create with this point of reference in mind, if we are to look at exhibitions such as Zones of Conflict that are curated for a specific audience, one residing in a particular sociopolitical environment outside of the zones presented to them, these subjective works must be shown and placed within their proper historical and cultural contexts so that they do not merely become absorbed without critical thought. While Demos acknowledges the political settings in which such art is created, mentioning briefly for example the Israeli occupation of Palestine, his emphasis on the problems one can find in documentary forms makes the act of properly engaging with the work difficult. To overstress the subjective aspect of such works is to take away from their importance. Jacirs Invasion Series, for example, is not merely about recording one day in Palestinian history; the power of her images lies in what she extracts from her subjectsthe immediate and weighing effects of living under a perpetual state of war as seen in the positioning of her lens. The curators insistence eventually results in the conclusion that in the exhibition, truth figures as a practice forged in contingency and driven by political commitment and subjective process (Demos 10). Ironically, Demoss own subjective curatorial view proposes to locate the work within a framework that is vastly different from that in which it was created. He begins his analysis in the exhibition catalogue by outlining a larger geopolitical environment, one that has supposedly engulfed the international community. Pointing to the World Trade Center attacks of 2001 as the initiator of an unprecedented situation of transitory and mobile zones of conflict that possess no geographical boundaries, temporal limits, or discrete enemies, Demos claims that conflicts are now fought via military campaigns and mass media (3). This is most evident for the curator in what he described as a clash of fundamentalismsbetween a crusading imperialism, on the one hand, and a transnational Islamic militancy on the other, proposing worldwide civil war between right-wing forces driven by an infuriating mimetic rivalry defying resolution (4). It is within this allencompassing fatalistic view of the worlds current state that the artwork of Zones of Conflict is placed. For Demos, the exhibition emphasizes artistic responses that defy this current double bind, neither surrendering to the patriotic defense of freedom . . . nor capitulat1230

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ing to the zealotry of the religious warriors (4). This exceedingly one-dimensional view of conflict, in which the agendas of various armed factions somehow fit in one category of extremists or the other, is deeply misguided in its understanding of the zones it attempts to represent. Ultimately, Demoss contextualization of the exhibition feeds directly into the exact agenda he has sought to offset, one obsessed with the War on Terror and gripped by a sensationalist view of the Middle East. Unfortunately with the rise of the United Arab Emirates as a contemporary art hub and its reliance on foreign institutions and advisors, this American model is now being exported to the Arab art world. With it have come cultural practitioners that are known for their skewed views of Arab societies and utter lack of knowledge of the regions cultural history. As a result, notions of cultural hierarchy that remained after the end of colonization in the twentieth century appear stronger than before. Over the past five years, the Emirates have poured millions of dollars into initiatives that seek to replicate the market-driven, politically influenced art scenes found in New York and London, and by doing so have been able to install a vast system of censorship under the guise of art patronage. And while artists continue to struggle with the ever-present boundaries of the Western art world, they are now facing similar obstacles closer to home in Abu Dhabi and Dubai.
WORKS CITED Carboni, Stefano. Moments of Vision: Venice and the Islamic World, 8281797. Venice and the Islamic World 8281797. New Haven: Yale UP, 2007. 2832. Cohen, Don J. Protest and Resist: The Art of War, Far from the Battlefield. ArtAsiaPacific Magazine 63 (2009): 16061. Demos, T. J. Image Wars. Zones of Conflict. New York: Pratt Institute, 2008. 15. Halle, Howard. The Hugo Boss Prize 2008: Emily Jacir. Time Out New York. 701 (2009). Web. <http:// newyork.timeout.com/articles/art/72042/the-hugo-boss-prize-2008-emily-jacir> Johnson, Ken. Material for a Palestinians Life and Death. New York Times 13 Feb. 2009, late ed.: C:29. Maerkle, Andrew. ArtAsiaPacific Almanac 2008 v.3. New York: Elaine NG, 2008. 105. Smith, Roberta. Emily Jacir: Accumulations. New York Times 25 Mar. 2005: E:31. Vali, Murtaza. All That Remains. ArtAsiaPacific Magazine 54 (2007): 99103.

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