My article on Jerusalem-born Jaffa-based artist Dor Guez

 

Dor Guez frames intimate portrait of Palestinian pluralities 

The New Arab 

Culture 

Melissa Chemam 

01 February, 2023

Dor Guez seeks to challenge our perception of his homeland. Over the course of 50 solo exhibitions worldwide, Dor's personal gaze into Palestinian culture, history, and geography through photography, film and archive has been received with acclaim.

Dor Guez, Knowing the Land, London 2022 [photo credit: Dor Guez/Goodman Gallery]

“At the heart of my practice as an artist, I am a storyteller, so it felt natural to be interested in parallel and even conflicting narratives,” Dor Guez tells The New Arab, as his exhibition Knowing The Land at the Goodman Gallery in London concludes.

As we spoke, Dor's next exhibition had already opened at the Princeton University Art Museum in Princeton, New Jersey, USA, entitled Colony, with another exhibition reaching Germany in February at the Felix Nussbaum Museum from 11 February 2023.

All exhibits include photographs and three-screen film installations, elaborated from a collection of photos by Guez and fascinating colonial archives he’s been digging out of Palestinian and Israeli institutions for over a decade.

Dor's work intensively reflects on the visual representation of Palestine over the centuries, but also its topography and geography, its borders and its botanical identity.

“My new body of work, Knowing the Land focuses on varied mechanisms of producing knowledge by colonial structures,” he adds.

“The invasion of colonial power is relevant to my homeland, in particular, as well as the ‘Levant’ as a region. Photographers, archaeologists, topographers, and geographers came to 'The East' with measuring tools to map the area and to classify and arranged it according to ‘scientific’ definitions, terminologies, and categories. This information has been organised, by generals, priests, historians, and artists alike. Knowing the Land explores some of these methods.”

For all these reasons, Dor is hyper-aware of the importance of language, and visual representations of the region, which leads him to be naturally precautious while naming the sites, cities and nations themselves.

"The conversation about the biases built into our language extends from the field of gender to the field of geography,” Dor says. “Many use the term ‘Middle East’, which is Eurocentric in essence. The title I chose for the sculptural works in the exhibition is 90 Degrees From the Sun, which refers to the direction in which maps were facing in the past – east and not north, therefore, to this day we use the term ‘oriented' which derives from turning east and not north. When you say you're ‘oriented’, it implies that you have found the north.”

With photographs of maps deprived of their borderlines and plants plunged into colours, the exhibition offers the viewer to follow different types of lines: some indicate borders between countries and empires, some are the contour lines of plants and thus define their species, others show ways to map mountains and valleys, and some signal the oldest way to mark a straight line using a weight stretched on a string.

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Read the entire story on The New Arab's website here.