Emily Jacir and yasmine eid-sabbagh: In collaboration with Tabara Korka Ndiaye and Ndeye Debo Seck

Emily Jacir

Emily Jacir’s work explores both personal and collective movement in public space, examining its implications on the physical and social experience of transmediterranean geographies and temporalities. Through rigorous historical and archival research, Jacir has built a layered and resonant body of work rooted in gathering, community, and social affiliations.

Her commitment extends beyond her artistic practice. In 2014, she founded Dar Yusuf Nasri Jacir for Art and Research in Bethlehem, transforming her historic family home into a cultural space for artists, researchers, farmers, archivists, musicians and dancers. This gesture of reclaiming both space and narrative resonates in her practice: rooted, reparative, and generative.

Notes for a Cannon (2016) explores intertwined histories of British colonial rule in Palestine and Ireland. Conceived for the Irish Museum of Modern Art, reflecting on the events which took place there during the 1916 Easter Rising, the work is comprised of a site-specific sound work in the Royal Hospital Kilmainham clock tower and an installation which includes footage Jacir filmed in Acre and in Gaza (2000), drawings, photographs, an 1890 church bell from Armagh, and an Ottoman pocket watch from the same year. The work takes as a point of departure the Clock Tower once at the Jaffa Gate in Jerusalem and Dublin's loss of its own time zone, Dublin Mean Time. The Jerusalem tower was destroyed by the British in 1922 to align the city with a biblical vision shaped by colonial imagination. Its removal also erased the coexistence of two perceptions of time, replacing it with a single, standardised measure tied to Greenwich.

Delving into the slippages and the standardisation of time, Notes for a Cannon investigates how multiple temporalities are lived simultaneously. Jacir constellates the histories of Palestine and Ireland, tracing how these distant geographies are bound by historical, material, and analogical ties. Her sound intervention and installation evoke the fragmented yet systematic nature of imperial control. Rather than a linear narrative, Jacir constructs a tactile, layered, and associative field where everyday objects become markers of temporal and political violence.

yasmine eid-sabbagh: In collaboration with Tabara Korka Ndiaye and Ndeye Debo Seck

yasmine eid-sabbagh is an artist and researcher who holds a PhD in Art Theory and Cultural Studies. Her interdisciplinary practice combines research, conversational methods, and (meta)archival practices to examine the agency of photographs and to investigate notions of collectivity, power, and endurance.

Between 2006 and 2011, Eid-Sabbagh lived in Burj al-Shamali, a Palestinian refugee camp near Tyre, Lebanon, where she developed a long-term project in collaboration with the camp's inhabitants to negotiate and co-create a potential digital archive. This dialogical process highlights the challenges and limits of representation, reflecting on memory, displacement, and identity.

Her practice also embraces radical pedagogical initiatives, expanding the role of photography and archival research beyond documentation to become tools for collective agency. eid-sabbagh's work engages audiences through exhibitions, public lectures, performances, processes of institution building and residencies, including at the Palestinian Museum and international art venues, consistently inviting reflection on histories that are often marginalised or silenced.

The research project on solidarity and (the difficulties of) being in the world today is led by yasmine eid-sabbagh, Tabara Korka Ndiaye, and Ndeye Debo Seck. Tabara Korka Ndiaye is a Senegalese independent researcher, curator, artist and writer, whose work centres on African feminisms, the interplay between archives and erasure, lived experiences and sites of knowledge making. Ndeye Debo Seck is a licensed journalist and communication specialist, who also teaches English in middle and high schools located in rural areas of central and southern Senegal.

Their project investigates the historical and contemporary dimensions of Senegalese solidarity with Palestine. While Senegal has historically expressed strong support, its recent silence amid the ongoing Palestinian genocide raises critical questions about the disruption and transformation of this solidarity.

Through archival research, including the archive of the Palestinian Embassy in Dakar, and the personal archive of its late 35-year long ambassador Abou El-Fahet, alongside interviews from the solidarity movement in Senegal and fieldwork in Guinea-Bissau, the group maps past and present diplomatic ties and gestures of solidarity. This project seeks to critically examine the current possibilities and limits of solidarity in a shifting political landscape.