Emily Jacir

Day 3: Learning from the Community: Collective Actions in the Face of Emergency

Keynote
Emily Jacir, Founder/Director, Dar Jacir for Art and Research, Bethlehem, Palestinian Territories

Our street in the middle of our house.
Transversal Methodologies and Decolonial Practices at Dar Jacir

Emily Jacir will share strategies and insights from the multi-faceted project Dar Jacir for Art and Research – a place devoted to educational, cultural, and agricultural exchanges in Bethlehem, Palestine. A process and practice-oriented platform, it is an experimental learning hub for the Bethlehem community and beyond.

Founded in 2014, Dar Jacir houses multiple programs grounded in shared encounters and hospitality. Through a participatory approach, collective knowledge is created, new works are produced, and structures for care and repair are fostered. Dar Jacir is valued by a broad public and deeply involved in community activity and collaboration in a particularly shattered territory. Intimacy is at the heart of the project. Artist-led, it facilitates and gives agency to artists and participants to lead, ask questions, and encounter international and local artists, thinkers, and cultural leaders.

Originally built in the late 1880s by al Mukhtar Yusuf Jacir, the site serves as a place in which the history and contemporary conditions of Bethlehem meet. The architecture of the home has enabled the development of innovative curatorial approaches offering opportunities for engagement that challenge the onset of the new ubiquitous neo-liberal structures throughout the area as the environment for art.

This paper will address the challenges of creating and sustaining access to culture in a community under siege and dispossession while subverting and transforming oppressive structures and social injustices, looking at forms of self-determination and autonomy.

BIOGRAPHY:

Emily Jacir is an artist, filmmaker, and educator who lives and works between Bethlehem and Rome. Her artistic practice spans a range of strategies including film, photography, sculpture, interventions, archiving, performance, video, writing, and sound. She investigates silenced histories, exchange, translation, transformation, resistance, and movement. Her works have been widely exhibited all over the world since 1994, and she has been honored for her achievements with several awards including a Golden Lion at the 52nd Venice Biennale (2007); a Prince Claus Award (2007); the Hugo Boss Prize at the Guggenheim Museum (2008); the Alpert Award (2011) from the Herb Alpert Foundation; and the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation Rome Prize Fellow at the American Academy in Rome (2015); among others. She is the founder and Executive Director of Dar Yusuf Nasri Jacir for Art and Research in Bethlehem.