Artist Talk at the Westminster Photography Forum

Description of Activity

Presentation of the photographic work entitled 'Punctuated Land' to students and staff from the University of Westminster. This was a hybrid event.

Punctuated Land explores the quiet and enduring legacies of conflict and the historical and political forces that enable and perpetuate its normalisation. This is not to say that conflict takes place quietly, but rather that my focus lies in questioning the way we see and perceive conflict by exploring how it infiltrates silently and violently into daily lives and minds. This is done photographically by visiting the West Bank, the occupied territories of Palestine, and tracing Israel’s de facto borders with its neighbouring countries.

The landscape and its photographic representation become the means to encounter and record the impact of maintaining dominance over the land. Practices of control and discrimination in the landscape operate in the use of language, the interpretation of local laws and the exercise of power over access and restrictions. Daily routines of Israeli military forces and the state’s designation of land for security purposes intentionally clash and disrupt attempts of Palestinians to build homes, and to inhabit and cultivate the land, leaving sites that are caught in a cycle of construction and destruction in the desert landscape.

While the mechanisms of violence and occupation promote a vision of the land as desolate and barren, this project explores poetic and subtle visual methods to capture and highlight the traces of human presence. Signs of erasure, displacement and political violence are indicative of ongoing conflict, however, it can appear also in the overlooked and incidental - in what is found on the verges.

Period	18 Oct 2022
Held at	University of Westminster, United Kingdom
Degree of Recognition	International