Paper short abstract:

This paper explores how artists conceive of their role in relation to the political struggles that characterise the social space in Palestine. How do they relate to attempts to either instrumentalise contemporary art as a nationalist endeavour, or to excoriate it for not contributing to the same?

Paper long abstract:

The stagnation of the Oslo process, and the thwarted independence it promised, have left Palestinians frustrated by their political representatives; meanwhile the divisions between Fatah and Hamas in the West Bank and Gaza have largely silenced calls for a unified Palestinian state. The weakening of Palestinian political factions, and the absence of a credible route to resist Israeli occupation or negotiate the establishment of a viable independent state, have led to a sense of arrested crisis in the national movement.

This paper, grounded in ethnographic fieldwork at the International Academy of Art Palestine in Ramallah, offers an analysis of art education and the politics of Palestinian cultural activity, as mediated by its aid funding context.  It relates the discourse of the artist as an oppositional figure to the notion of 'resistance' and emancipatory politics in Palestine. It analyses how artists strategically engage with constraints on their creative practice (including the liberal values agenda embodied by the art school, demands for a certain aesthetic from the international art circuit, and discourses of the nation in Palestine) in order to achieve intertwined personal and political aims.  

I explore the ways in which artists identify the particular pressures under which they work: significantly the donor economy, the Israeli occupation, the Palestinian national movement and moments of contact with the global art circuit.  How do these artists respond to the material conditions of occupation and oppression, and how do they enact resistance, in the many forms in which they come to understand it?