
Collective Forgetting: Permission to Forget
The editorial tracks the dual axis on which the issue rests: remembrance and forgetting. When erasure will never be complete, and forgiveness is not possible, what can collective forgetting offer?
The editorial tracks the dual axis on which the issue rests: remembrance and forgetting. When erasure will never be complete, and forgiveness is not possible, what can collective forgetting offer?
For Palestinians living in historic Palestine and for those referred to as "Palestinian refugees," the Nakba (Catastrophe) of 1948 never ended. This memory shapes Palestinian identity, but is it a lack of narrative that has existed for decades? Nour Saed analyzes factors inhibiting Palestinian society from investing in the arts while emphasizing the importance of storytelling and documenting a national experience versus forgetfulness.
In A Place of Our Own, Iris Hassid's new photography project, she reveals the lives, the questions, and the old/new dilemmas of Arab identity within the state of Israel. This time, it is from a woman's point of view. She documents the divided lives and the search for a "third space" that would reconcile those identities.
How is Palestine represented in contemporary art, and how do Palestinian artists deal with the notions of memory and the past? Larissa Sansour raises in her work many questions concerning ideas of sanctity, homeland, and memory, in a manner that helps turning them into an illusion. In an analytical review and an in-depth critical gaze, scholar Housni Alkhateeb Shehada presents a broad picture of the place, the dialogue, the memory, and the conflict the figures are experiencing in the work recently presented by Sansour, in the Danish Pavilion, at the 58th Venice Biennale.
Writing a review of a recent publication on Afrofuturism for Tohu Magazine has led Lama Suleiman to explore the still-nascent concept of Arabfuturism and its potential relevance to the discourse on Arab and Palestinian cultural production.