Material for a film (performance), 2006, 1000 blank books shot by the artist with a .22 caliber gun (material from 2006 performance), shelving, and 67 photographs, Dimensions variable. Courtesy the artist and Alexander and Bonin, New York Installation view, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, 2009 Photo by David Heald
Material for a film (performance), 2005-06 (detail), Installation and performance, 1000 blank books shot by the artist with a 22 caliber gun, mixed media, and photographs, dimensions variable, Documentary photograph, Zones of Contact: 2006 Biennale of Sydney. Photo courtesy the artist and Alexander and Bonin, New York
Inbox, 2004?05 (detail), Oil on wood, 45 parts, 11 x 8 1/2 inches (28 x 21.5 cm) each, Installation view, Kunstmuseum St. Gallen, 2007. Photo courtesy the artist and Alexander and Bonin, New York
Artistic Treat for All Senses
Raj S. Rangarajan
From multi-media installations and painstaking presentations to colorful prints and video, artist Emily Jacir has done it all. Her redoubtable passion for her subject (Palestine poet Wael Zuaiter) which becomes an obsession in her two installations - Material for a film (performance) (2006) and In Material for a film (2004~) is the theme of a new exhibition at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum that opened on February 6 and runs through April 15, 2009 in New York. Emily Jacir, who lives and works in New York and Ramallah, Palestine was awarded on November 13, 2008 the seventh biennial Hugo Boss Prize. Established in 1996 by Hugo Boss and the Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation to recognize significant achievement in contemporary art, the prize carries an award of $100,000. At the 52nd Venice Biennale in 2007, Jacir received the Golden Lion Award for an artist under 40. As an archivist, Jacir creates arresting works of art that are at intensely personal and deeply political.
Born in Bethlehem, Palestine, 38-year-old Jacir’s work embraces closely the Palestinian situation while highlighting the mundane and the intellectual in that mid-eastern trouble spot. Jacir physically practised to shoot a .22 caliber pistol to personally feel the pain that Zuaiter felt when he was gunned down in 1972 in Rome by Israeli secret service agents. On display is a list of Mossad agents shown in works derived from a chapter by filmmakers-Elio Petri and Ugo Pirro - of the 1979 collection of essays, poems, and memoirs For a Palestinian: A Memory of Wael Zuaiter, edited by Janet Venn-Brown.
The creation also includes old telegrams (alas, we don’t see them any more in real life!), taped conversations by Italian police during October-December 1972, photos at a Rome bar, original manuscripts ? grayed but well-preserved - and even a unique coin in a white envelope - perhaps a lucky charm that Zuaiter constantly carried.
Two Memorable Creations
This exhibition brings together, for the first time, two installations that address the assassination of Wael Zuaiter by Israeli secret service agents following the kidnapping of the Israeli delegation of athletes and trainers to the 1972 Munich Summer Olympics by the Palestinian militant group Black September (to which Zuaiter was reportedly never conclusively linked). He was assassinated by Mossad agents on October 16, 1972, who shot him 12-18 times (accounts vary) in the lobby of his apartment building in Rome. The Israeli government, under Golda Meir, had issued his death warrant on the claim that he was involved in “PLO terrorism.”
Material for a film (performance) (2006) presents a memorial to one of Zuaiter’s thwarted aspirations: the translation of the centuries-old collection of Arabic stories One Thousand and One Nights into Italian. A bullet pierced a copy of volume two of the ancient classic that Zuaiter was carrying when he was gunned down. For this installation, first shown at the 2006 Biennale of Sydney, Jacir photographed each page that showed vestiges of the bullet from a .22 caliber pistol ? the same model used in the murder ? and fired bullets into 1000 blank books, creating a haunting mausoleum in graphic detail that, in the artist’s words, “is a memorial to untold stories. To that which has not been translated. To stories that will never be written.”
In Material for a film (2004~), which was first exhibited at the 2007 Venice Biennale, Jacir culled items from Zuaiter’s personal effects, including photographs, books, correspondence, and music, to create an intimate portrait. Jacir sought out his friends and family (documented in pictures), as well as the places Zuaiter lived and frequented, in order to present a chronicle of his life, work, and passions. As a child, Jacir has lived in Saudi Arabia and attended high school in Italy. After her undergraduate degree from the University of Dallas she did her MFA from Memphis College of Art in the U.S. She is currently a full-time instructor at the International Academy of Art in Ramallah and has been active in building Ramallah’s art scene since 1999 and has been involved in various organizations including the Qattan Foundation, al-Ma’mal Foundation and the Sakakini Cultural Center.
While the Hugo Boss Prize sets no restrictions in terms of age, gender, race, nationality or media, it is interesting that in the past 12 years, since its inception in 1996, it has been won by a different nationality every time: American artist Matthew Barney (1996), Scottish artist Douglas Gordon (1998), Slovenian artist Marjetica Potr? (2000), French artist Pierre Huyghe (2002), Argentina-born Thai artist Rirkrit Tiravanija (2004) and British artist Tacita Dean (2006). In 2008 it was the turn of Emily Jacir - an artist born in Bethlehem, Palestine.
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