إملي جاسر
Biography
Emily Jacir (1972) is a writer, artist and filmmaker. She directs and founded the Dar Yusuf Nasri Jacir research centre for Art and Research in Bethlehem. Her work, transdisciplinary and difficult to catalogue, focuses on the present moment even though she also immerses herself in the past and memory in a multidirectional type of effort, trying to make her oeuvre fluctuate in time. She uses different audiovisual supports, sculpture and performances to explore stories about colonisation, silenced narratives, exchange, translation and resistance in trans-Mediterranean space and time.
Material for a Film, a documentary in the form of an installation in which viewers move between audiovisual material, tells the story of Wael Zuaiter, one of 13 Palestinian artists and intellectuals killed by the Israeli army in Europe between 1972 and 1973. Her latest film, Letter to a Friend, is constructed as a letter that Emily sends to a friend with images, filmed from her home, of the crackdown on the protests at the gate of checkpoint 300 that separates the road from Bethlehem to Jerusalem. The objective of this letter, fictitious or not, is to find out whether this evidence could be useful for carrying out an official investigation. Based on this anecdote, the documentary also condenses the last 100 years of the history of Palestine.
Emily Jacir was born in Bethlehem and lives between Ramallah and Rome. Her work has been exhibited around the world, in museums such as the Whitney Museum, the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation and the Venice Biennale.