Emily Jacir, belongings

Emily Jacir is an artist who lives in between New York and Ramallah. It's no surprise that a central motif in her work is the theme of voluntary and coerced movement between places and cultures. The projects she has undertaken over the past five years have pungently, poignantly crossed the divides between art, life, politics and culture over and over again. In “Where We Come From,” Jacir, armed with an American passport, crossed borders in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip fulfilling everyday requests for fellow Palestinians unable to move so freely. In “Sexy Semite,” she placed ads in the Village Voice , a “Hot Palestinian Semite” seeking “Jewish soul mate” and the like. And in “Memorial to 418 Palestinian Villages which were Destroyed, Depopulated and Occupied by Israel in 1948,” Jacir installed a refugee tent in her studio in Lower Manhattan and invited friends and strangers to help her embroider the village names. Belongings is the first monograph published on her work.