Emily Jacir
إميلي جاسر
Artist
Artist who used her American passport to carry out the errands Palestinians were not permitted to make themselves, and who sewed the names of 418 destroyed villages into a refugee tent.
Emily Jacir was born in 1970 in Bethlehem, grew up in Saudi Arabia, went to high school in Italy, and studied art in the United States — a BA at the University of Dallas, an MFA at Memphis College of Art, and the Whitney Independent Study Program in 1998. The condition her work keeps circling is the one that formed her: who may move, and who may not.
Where We Come From (2001–2003) made that condition into a procedure. Jacir asked Palestinians who could not travel freely what she could do for them in a place they were barred from, and then, holding an American passport, did it — playing football, eating a particular food, paying a bill, visiting a grave, seeing a relative. The work exists as their requests, in their own words, beside her photographic evidence of having carried them out. Memorial to 418 Palestinian Villages Destroyed, Depopulated, and Occupied by Israel in 1948 (2001) was made during her residency in P.S.1’s National Studio Program: she opened the studio to Palestinians, Israelis, Americans, Egyptians, Syrians, Yemenis, Spaniards and others, who embroidered the names of the villages onto a refugee tent. The labour of the memorial, distributed across all those hands, is the memorial. Material for a Film (2005–) reconstructs the life of Wael Zuaiter, the Palestinian intellectual and translator assassinated in Rome in 1972.
She received the Golden Lion for an artist under forty at the 2007 Venice Biennale, the Hugo Boss Prize in 2008, a Herb Alpert Award in the Arts in 2011, and a Rome Prize fellowship from the Mellon Foundation in 2015. She is the founding director of Dar Yusuf Nasri Jacir for Art and Research, established in her family’s home in Bethlehem, which works as a contemporary art space and a community centre at once.
Selected works
- Memorial to 418 Palestinian Villages Destroyed, Depopulated, and Occupied by Israel in 1948 (2001)
- Where We Come From (2001–2003)
- Material for a Film (2005–)
- Dar Yusuf Nasri Jacir for Art and Research, Bethlehem
Sources
Further reading
An external biography or archive holding more on this life than the entry above.