Details

Object type

installation

Title

Sorry, Your Search For Palestine Produced No Results

Artist/Maker

Bisan Abu Eisheh maker

Place Associated

Palestine (place made)

Date

2012

Materials

mixed media including time-based media, wood, blackboard paint, white paint, chalk and digital prints

Description

Sorry, Your Search For Palestine Produced No Results is by artist Bisan Abu Eisheh. It is an installation for a room with walls and includes four annotated pages from the DK Eyewitness Travel Guide Jerusalem, Israel, Petra and Sinai 2012, four single-channel video works mounted on a wall next to the pages, and a table top/ blackboard with a drawn map of Jerusalem in white painting with cut pieces that can be removed to reveal areas in the map with Arabic histories. This is placed in the centre of the room in front of the wall-based videos and digital prints.

In Sorry, Your Search For Palestine Produced No Results 2012, Bisan Abu Eisheh explores perceptions and understandings around the geography or territory of Palestine. This work was created after Abu Eisheh undertook a year-long residency at the Delfina Foundation in London and the ArtSchool Palestine in Ramallah, in collaboration with the British Council for the Points of Departure project. It was first shown in the exhibition Points of Departure at ICA, London.

Taking as starting point the complexities around the existence and recognition of Palestine and its fluid borders subject to claims from both Palestinians and Israel, Abu Eisheh’s installation looks at memories, personal experiences, and a collective approach through the interaction of visitors with the work to inform a future territory of Palestine. It is centred on the 2012 Eyewitness Travel guide: Jerusalem, Israel, Petra and Sinai that makes no reference to Palestinian life in Jerusalem or other areas of Palestine. Pages from this book were first exhibited by the artist in Ramallah as interactive artwork, inviting the Palestinian public to interject their own stories, sites of importance and history.

Sorry, Your Search For Palestine Produced No Results expands on this initial guidebook research by showing pages from it describing certain places of interest foregrounding Jewish history alongside films by the artist showing the reality of the area and highlighting visible Palestinian daily lives and Arabic histories absent from the book. The centre of the work is an interactive wooden map painted black on which a militaristic map of Jerusalem is traced in white paint and removable cut pieces – which when lifted reveal the names of depopulated Palestinian areas and villages absent from the guidebook. On this interactive map Abu Eisheh invites audiences to contribute with their own chalked memories and understanding of boundaries to how Palestine is represented. With the audience adding their own annotations and personal observations to the ‘map’, they recreate the symbolic and mythical characteristics comprising Palestine, and in turn, participate in the construction of a new national identity.

In addition to the more obvious chalk military boundaries an ultra-violet torch reveals further lines to create a deeper second dimension in the installation. The military ‘planning’ suggested by the invisible lines, which are not conspicuous as they required the use of ultraviolet torches to be seen, constitute the basis for the territory of this new national identity. Thus in Sorry, Your Search For Palestine Produced No Results the landscape of Palestine becomes a process of socialisation and a radical use of the imagination to understand past and present territories.

Credit Line/Donor

Gifted by Bisan Abu Eisheh, 2023

ID Number

ICE.2023.1

Location

In storage