The Or Gallery is pleased to present #saltandwater: The Palestin ian-Israeli Conflict\, an exhibition of four Palestinian artists. In h is 1981 book\, The Political Unconscious\, Fredric Jameson asserts the idea of Louis Althusser’s “absent cause” within a structure. He posits that the structure itself is intrinsic to its effects\, that Jacques Lacan’s “real” and Louis Althusser’s “absent cause” can never be represented in their ent irety\, as the signifier will always take the place of the signified. In lo oking at the Palestinian-Israeli conflict\, Jameson’s argument can bring ne w light to the violence and unspeakable totality of the ongoing occupation. Seemingly innocuous substances\, salt and water\, can be viewed as materia ls which are inherently political. Palestinians now receive at most 73 litr es of water per capita\, lower than the World Health Organization’s recomme nded 100 litres for daily consumption. The seas are another space of contes tation\, as access to the Dead Sea and the Mediterranean Sea is not availab le to Palestinians without severe security restrictions.
The curator\ , Margaret Stern\, selected four Palestinian artists who w ork within this theme. They use water and salt as signifiers of the industr ialization and politicization of resources with political ramifications for the human body. Rehab Nazzal’s A Dead Sea(2010)\, Noor Abuarafeh’ s A State Closer to Death Than it is to Life (2012)\, Mais Darwaza h’s My Love Awaits Me by the Sea (2013) and Ayed Arafah’s Hori zon (2010) play with both salt and water to explore issues of boundari es and resources. Examining this conflict from the material realm of metaph or and bodily necessity allows questions to be asked of the occupation of t he Palestinian people\, their subsequent resistance\, and the issues of res ources within this area of conflict.
This exhibition is made poss ible with support from the Killy Foundation and the Audain Endowment for Cu ratorial Studies through the Department of Art History\, Visual Art and The ory in collaboration with the Morris and Helen Belkin Art Gallery at The Un iversity of British Columbia.
For further info please visit: http://www.orgallery.org/saltandwater-the-palestinian-israeli-conflict
LOCATION:Or Gallery (Old) GEO:49.281148;-123.112455 URL;VALUE=URI:https://ahva.ubc.ca/events/event/saltandwater-the-palestinian -israeli-conflict-curated-by-ccst-candidate-margaret-stern/ ATTACH;FMTTYPE=image/jpeg:https://ahva.cms.arts.ubc.ca/wp-content/uploads/sites/37/2021/05/1370.jpg END:VEVENT BEGIN:VTIMEZONE TZID:America/Vancouver BEGIN:DAYLIGHT TZOFFSETFROM:-0800 TZOFFSETTO:-0700 DTSTART:20150308T100000 TZNAME:PDT END:DAYLIGHT END:VTIMEZONE END:VCALENDAR