Darat al Funun fellow Alessandra Amin’s talk will consider two drawings from the 1970s, one by Mustafa Hallaj and one by Samira Badran, that deviate from the norms of landscape as a celebratory or commemorative genre in Palestinian artistic production.

Landscape as a genre has held pride of place in Palestinian artistic production since the first half of the twentieth century. Artists such as Sophie Halaby, Ismail Shammout, Tamam al-Akhal, Nabil Anani and many others dedicated – and continue to dedicate – much time and energy to immortalizing the Palestinian countryside, paying homage to its terraced hills and magnificent olive groves. Not all Palestinian landscapes portray the homeland in a bucolic light, however.

This talk will consider two drawings from the 1970s that deviate from the established norms of landscape as a celebratory or commemorative genre, trading nostalgic reverie for a sense of chaotic absurdity. An untitled 1970 print by Mustafa Hallaj fuses human, animal, and vegetal forms with each other, creating a landscape that, through simultaneous engagement with birth and death, collapses the past, present, and future into two dimensions. Samira Badran’s 21 Barrels (1977) evokes cartography in order to carve a landscape from a dense fabric of hybrid forms, transgressing the boundaries between the mechanical and the organic to create a world in which machines and everyday materials seem to take on lives of their own. Seen together, these works prompt reflection on the place of the landscape in the post-1967 Palestinian imaginary, suggesting that fantasy offered a unique vocabulary for renegotiating relationships between Palestinians and their rapidly changing reality.