Visual art, exhibition, and musical performance : performing Palestinian identities in exile

• Main Author: Marshy, Mona C.
• Published: University of Edinburgh 2004
• Subjects: 708
• Online Access: http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.657352

Both art and identity are constituted through institutional, transnational, transcultural, aesthetic, bodily, discursive and social processes. Individual subjectivities are given language, bodily expression, validation, and social force through artistic expression. Understanding aesthetic 'languages' and processes of art provides insight into the dislocation of Palestinians in the context of contested collective narratives and disrupted languages of signification. This thesis examines how works of visual art, musical performances, and exhibition contexts shape discourses of identity and experiences of belonging for artists and audiences. Dispossessed of their ancestral homes and land, and dispersed throughout the world, Palestinians are removed from the historical places of memory that are central to the Palestinian national narrative. This dissertation examines works of art and performances by selected Palestinian artists living in the West (five in Canada, one in the United States, and one in England). The artists reflect a wide range of diaspora experiences and negotiations, and the study provides insight into ways in which individuals and communities regenerate, recreate, and re-member themselves out-ofplace. I argue that the seven artists' works of visual art and musical performance enact memory, Palestinian national narratives, cultural politics, postmemory, and belongings. I also examine processes of exhibition, media representation, and cultural politics of a national museum exhibit in Canada, entitled The Lands Within Me: Artistic Expressions by Canadian Artists ofArab Origin, as a means of better understanding ways that institutional and representational contexts signify identities of art, artists, and audiences. The study demonstrates that art articulates as much with aesthetic styles and vocabularies as with transnational, transcultural, and historical forces. I argue that the works, performances, and exhibition processes enact identities and relations of power, and that at stake are boundaries of identity, as well as the geopolitics of multiculturalism and international relations.