Palestine as "Answer Key"

Seeing events through the lens of Palestine can give you a short cut -- an answer key -- to the underlying structures.

My last piece “The Centrality of Palestine” — which effectively argues that Israel’s settler colonial project may be key to reviving some incarnation of the wider global European settler colonial project — reminded that I should share a painting I made several years ago.

It’s called “Answer Key” and it was part of a show I had at the Jerusalem Fund's Gallery Al-Quds, “Invisibly Present / Visibly Absent” in 2020.

It was named “Answer Key” in part because a portion of it showed how the rest of it was made.

Much of my art depends on layers of paint. My political work seeks to expose layers of lies; my artistic work shows layers of beauty.

Sometimes I paint over something again and again and then sand it down such that it’s not clear what’s underneath.

In the case of “Answer Key” — full piece above — I froze black paint on metal and kept the left part of it unlayered, see detail:

And then I painted the right side of it over and over and then sanded it down, revealing much of what was hidden and seeing the beauty of it in a new way:

Those are of course Palestinian colors (though slightly “off” in the case of the red/orange) giving the painting its political meaning: How seeing events through the lens of Palestine can give you a short cut -- an answer key -- to the political machinations of various states and institutions. An understanding of the underlying theme.

Things that seem frozen in time are seen in a new light as the past is excavated.

And a literal key -- a symbol of Palestinian longing to return to the homes they were driven from by colonial forces since 1948 -- is “Invisibly Present / Visibly Absent”: