Curated by Lara Khaldi and José A. Sanchez
Partners and venues:
- African Community Centre
- Al Mahatta Gallery
- Al Quds University
- Al Tannour Bakery
- Austrian Hospice
- Café Al Haj Ahmad Al A’araj
- Centre for Jerusalem Studies
- Collège des Frères
- Educational Bookshop
- El Hakawati Theatre
- Evangelical Lutheran Church
- Gallery Anadiel
- International Academy of Art Palestine
- Jerusalem Hotel
- Khalidi Library
- Nablus Municipal Library
- Palestinian Art Court – Al Hoash
- Sabreen Association for Artistic Development
- Spafford Children’s Centre
- Swedish Christian Study Centre
- Versavee Café
- Yabous Cultural Centre
Language is a system and means of creating community and social reality. An essential method of communication (as long as there is a common, easily shared language), it is also, however, one of the components of imposing order and control and a tool of occupation. Whether written, oral, or in another mode, language can be familiar, clear and enable understanding and the acquisition of knowledge, but it can, at the same time, be broken and alienating. A force for liberation and enlightenment,with its rules and orders facilitating ease-of-use once they are familiarised, those same rules and orders can also lead to limitation and the closing down of understanding. Language is capable of creating new realities, but it can also prevent the rethinking of new structures.
‘On Off Language’, the fifth Jerusalem Show, turned the immediate focus away from the materiality of Jerusalem and all its complexities. Artists were invited to produce new work, or show existing work, exploring language in all understandings of what it can be and do or not do. Artists were invited to “think of the relationship between language and the body, the role of orality and speech as a place of mediation, and the effectiveness of the perversion of oral discourses … and conceive of language as an action, the action of writing, speaking or reading, and not only as a frame or as the substance of the text”.
Through different languages and media, the artists in ‘On Off Language’ used the visual, the linguistic, the filmic, the gesture, the performative, the written and the spoken, in explorations and conversations about language as action, as frame, as an unfixed and slippery means of re-imagining the present, the past that led to the present, and imagining the future that is as yet unwritten.
Jshow V Artists
- Basel Abbas and Ruanne Abou-Rahme
- Noor Abed
- Beatrice Catanzaro
- Paul Chan
- Gustavo Ciríaco
- Mette Edvardsen
- Bisan Abu Eisheh
- Bartolomé
- Ferrando
- Lawrence Abu Hamdan
- Mona Hatoum
- Lan Hungh
- Rania Khalil
- Yazan Khalili
- Los Torreznos
- Maha Maamoun
- Tom Molloy
- Khalil Rabah
- Juliana Irene Smith
- Mounira Al Solh
- Andrea Sonnberger
- Sharif Waked
- Young-Hae Chang Heavy Industries
** Film programme curated by Victoria Pérez Royo