Independence | Nakba

Independence | Nakba is the final project in The Erasure Trilogy

Independence | Nakba consists of a series of 65 diptychs—one for each year between 1948 and 2013—which place together portraits of people from both sides of the Israeli–Palestinian conflict, tracing the generations back to the pivotal year of 1948. For Israelis, May 14, 1948, marks the founding of the independent State of Israel. For Palestinians, it is commemorated each year as “Al Nakba” or “the Catastrophe,” a reference to the enforced mass exodus of at least 750,000 Arabs from Palestine, the loss of their homeland and the displacement of their people. Each portrait depicts someone who lived in Palestine before the founding of the State of Israel, or whose ancestors did. Thus, these pairings ask us to consider not only the relations that existed between Israelis and Palestinians before the war but also the politics of separation that maintains a distinction between Israeli liberation and Palestinian catastrophe today. By staging a relation across a line of division, the portraits invite us to register the bonds that tie the past, the present, and the future together: a past that preceded the division between Independence and the Nakba; a present that remains haunted and defined by this division; and, taking these bonds as a point of departure, the possibility of a different and more forgiving future.