Ghost Dance (2017)

Group exhibition: Aya Abu Roken, Nour Ibrahem, Ruba Salameh, Nardeen Srouji, Lamis Ammar, Hanna Qubty

“Our friends when they die are buried in us...Their bodies go to the graveyard but their personalities stay with us. We Palestinian artists are an orchestra. We are one choir...We have many friends and many died. We are a walking graveyard of these personalities who left”
—Mustafa Al-Hallaj

Project Ghost Dance brings together several local artists from inside the Green Line who are forced to cope with the lack of available resources of cultural knowledge from a Palestinian perspective. Each artist was asked to focus his or her research on one Palestinian personality and to establish their creation upon in-depth research and profound vision. The assignment of choosing a name from Palestinian history was not meant to produce a retrospective work, but rather to serve as a point of departure from which the artists would continue their individual research in the framework of their field of work and autonomous practice. Researching others in such a conflicted region, where people are strongly politically and culturally contextualized, resembles the Native American “Ghost Dance” in which people metaphorically dance out their exorcised culture and way of life by referring and appealing to their cultural spirits for help and reassurance.

The preliminary concept seeks to encourage artists to study and question the history of their homeland. Project Ghost Dance gives artists an opportunity to form personal reflections based upon an intensive research process which required collecting pieces of knowledge and discoursing them with others.

This exhibition strives to offer a small archive of reflections. Each artwork is an outcome of an individual process of research, dialogue, and encounters. Together these works function as a mosaic of different visions, connecting the present to the past in a time machine of sorts.