Emily Jacir: Europa, Whitechapel Gallery

The Whitechapel Gallery’s major autumn show presents the first ever UK survey of Palestinian artist Emily Jacir, known for poignant multi-media works which possess a political dimension but are above all personal expressions of hybrid cultural memory.

Whitechapel exhibition 2015

A highlight of the show will be the UK premiere of Jacir’s Material for a Film (2004-ongoing), which won a Golden Lion at the 2007 Venice Biennale. The piece gathers together photographs, books, letters, interviews and other documents relating to the life of Palestinian intellectual Wael Zuaiter who was mistakenly assassinated by Israeli agents in 1972.

Another work not to miss is the striking short film Lydda Airport (2009), which captures the story of aviatrix Amelia Earhart’s final voyage and that famous missing plane, Hannibal, which disappeared without a trace over the Gulf of Oman in 1940. It combines animation and actual footage of Jacir herself, who interweaves her own story with the lives of her protagonists to question whether we can ever really separate the worlds of fact and fiction.

Emily Jacir art & cultural collision

The current political landscape in the Middle East makes this a compelling moment for the Whitechapel Gallery to exhibit work by a Palestinian artist which explores inter-cultural relations and differences. Emily Jacir’s own life inspired her preoccupation with cultural collision: born in Bethlehem, she spent her childhood in Saudi Arabia and then attended high school in Italy and university in Memphis, Tennessee. Her work often reflects on her complex relationship to the Middle East and the Mediterranean. The sensitive and discursive approach to questions of nationality and cultural legacy in Emily Jacir work led her to be named 2010 Young Artist of the Year by the A.M. Qattan Foundation in 2010.

Jacir's diverse experiments in photography, social interventions, installation, performance, video, writing and sound make for a potent reminder of the ambiguity of the lessons of history.