Paper short abstract:

This paper explores the lessons artistic imaginings of a non-Euclidean city offer the exhibition participants. Co-curating an exhibition of Jerusalem made fieldwork a process of puzzling things out and responding to the material forms and audience configurations that emerged.

Paper long abstract:

This paper explores the lessons artistic imaginings of a non-Euclidean city, a possible Jerusalem, one not confined to space-time coordinates we use to understand realpolitik, offer the exhibition’s participants and audiences. Following Alfred Gell’s call to study art “as a system of action,” I examine the actions that made an exhibition of Jerusalem at a Palestinian art foundation into a part of the Fourth Palestinian Biennale. This exhibition provided a critical space where actors could analyze the bundling of their lives into incomplete concepts, such as “Palestinian” or “Israeli Arab,” or artificially exclusive ideologies, such as “binationalist coexistence” or “nationalist resistance.” When I was asked by “informants” to co-curate the exhibition, fieldwork became a process of puzzling things out and responding to the material forms and audience configurations that emerged. My involvement as an anthropologist of art forced me to reflect on what I was asking art (and my informants) to do: description can quickly become conscription (getting observations to serve an argument) and prescription (proffering a way to be based on a way of being). Using my curatorial challenges, interviews and walks with participant artists, and intermittent fieldwork since 1992 with Palestinians audiences and cultural activists, I aim to learn from the artistic imaginings a model for contributing to an anthropology of the political imagination.