Speakers: Bilal Shalash, Tareq Bakri, Hafez Abu Sabra, Amer Shomali
Moderator: Samar Ozrail

Wednesday, June 18, 17:00–19:00
Location: the Palestinian Museum
Language: Arabic

Join us for a talk that explores the role of individual experience and live testimony in shaping collective narratives through art, through questions such as: How is reality reconstructed when it is presented "with the one’s own eye" and through subjective lenses? What is the difference between seeing, being seen, and showing what has been seen? Where do the boundaries lie between documentation, interpretation, and imagination? How can the archive bring us back to life? How do our lives become archives? And how can art encompass all of that?

Tareq Bakri, from the "We Were and Still Are" initiative, will present a contribution on the journey of bringing life back to images by tracking down the locations of refugee homes and villages—or what remains of either.

From a different perspective, Hafez Abu Sabra will reflect on how current events on the ground turn into a rapid, overlapping archive: how do we witness events? How do we become their witnesses? And what are the limits of our individual and collective agency—between being active agents and passive subjects?

Bilal Shalash will offer a reflection on archives and history; on how we read archival documents through the lens and context of the present, and on the question of when and why such documents are regarded as “history”.

Meanwhile, Amer Shomali will take us to the thresholds between documentation, interpretation, and imagination, through an artistic practice that grapples with the existential questions of past, present, and future—all through the language of art.

_{*Photo: Jenin Palestinian Refugee Camp, 2003. Joss Dray Collection, PMDA.}