Qalandiya International 2016: This Sea is Mine
Qalandiya International (QI), now in its third edition, is sometimes referred to as the ‘Palestine Biennale’, and as a biennial event of international scope, it has many of the characteristics of such recurrent, city-based shows. However it is the combined initiative of sixteen separate organisations centred on East Jerusalem (the Old City and adjacent northern areas), the West Bank and further afield. As such it does not have one overarching director or structure, and each component organisation mounts its own projects, developed by a variety of in-house and guest curators.
These prosaic observations would be unremarkable almost anywhere else in the developed world, but QI takes place across one of the planet’s most contested territories—a geopolitical fracture-zone of hair-trigger sensitivities and bitter hatreds, hemmed and intersected by ubiquitous separation walls, fortified Israeli settlements1 and Palestinian refugee camps. Its very title is heavily loaded—Qalandiya is Israel’s most infamous checkpoint, the hellish military bottleneck through which all traffic between Jerusalem and nearby Ramallah must pass, of which more below. The name derives from a nearby historic village (dating back to the pre-Ottoman era) now divided by the separation wall, and a large refugee camp run by UNRWA2 since 1949. Qalandiya is also the name of Palestine’s original and a now-defunct airport (sometimes called Jerusalem or Atarot Airport) established under the British Mandate, which operated commercial flights between 1936 and the second Intifada in 2001. I mention this because airspace is no less contested than land, and Palestinians are unable to use the high-tech fortress of Tel Aviv’s international airport (they must go by road to Amman in Jordan to catch a flight). Tens of thousands of visitors, Holy Land or... The rest of this article is available to subscribers of Eyeline
Muhammad Zakariya, (Rawiya Collective), Untitled, 2016. Photomedia, approx. 40 x 30cm. Courtesy Qalandiya International.
Untitled, 2014-ongoing. Detail. From Before the Wall series. Photomedia, approx. 80 x 60cm. Courtesy Qalandiya International.
