As a social historian of photography, Issam Nassar has published several books reflecting on questions of modernity and urban life of Jerusalem specifically and Palestine more generally. In this recent project, he medidates critically his own works and the trappings of nostalgia.

 Issam Nassar is Professor of Middle East History at Illinois State and Modern History at Qatar University. He is the co-editor of Jerusalem Quarterly and author and editor of several books, the most recent being, The Storyteller of Jerusalem: The Life and Times of Wasif Jawharriyeh, 1904-1948, co-edited with Salim Tamari and published in 2014.

The White Elephant is an experimental video loosely based on the adventures of a Palestinian teenager coming to grips with her angst within the political climate of the Oslo Accords in Palestine in the 1990s. Narrating a story of lies amongst thieves, the confessional and at times darkly humorous video, projects a confrontational gaze onto the landscape through acts that transgress political boundaries and explore personal desires.

Shuruq Harb is a visual artist, curator and writer based in Ramallah, Palestine. She is the co-founder of a number of independent art initiatives such as of ArtTerritories and The River Has two Banks. 

For centuries, the city of Jerusalem has been the site of sanctification, religious and ideological projections. It is like a repository of irrational attachments, fetishizing and over-zealous religious observance. Since 1948 it became an icon of the Arab-Israeli war. In this cinematic essay that straddles fiction and documentary, Sivan references the different psychoses that the symbolic over-valuation of the city has inspired, namely he ‘Jerusalem Syndrome’, diagnosed in the 19^th century, that afflicted pilgrims and tourists to the Holy City, and a similar psycho-pathology known as the ‘Jerusalem Fever’, diagnosed in the 20^th century. Sivan’s camera travels the everyday life of the city, and follows, in parallel, a young boy who wanders the streets at night and discovers a prostitute with golden breasts. He, like the camera, fall victim to a violently effeminized Jerusalem.

Suad Amiry presents an illustrated reading of excerpts from her books, Sharon and My Mother-in-Law and Nothing to Lose but Your Life: An 18-Hour Trip with Murad, as well as showing images.

Suad Amiry is a Palestinian writer and architect. Born in Damascus to a Syrian mother and a Palestinian father, she now lives between Ramallah and New York City. She is a founder of Riwaq: Center for Architectural Conservation in Ramallah. She is also the author of acclaimed memoirs, inlcuding Sharon and My Mother-in-Law (2005), Menopausal Palestine: Women at the Edge (2011), Nothing to Lose but Your Life: An 18-Hour Trip with Murad (2011), and Golda Slept Here (2014) and My “Damascus” (2016). Amiry is the recipient of Italy’s renowned literary awards: Viareggio-Versilia (2004) and Nonino Risit D’Aur (2014). She and her organization, Riwaq, also won the presitigious Aga Khan Award for Architecture in 2013.

çu le prestigieux prix Aga Khan pour l’architecture en 2013.

In this conversation, Anton Shammas and Fawwaz Traboulsi, two major intellectuals from the Arab world, will discuss the questions of translation in the Palestinian context of conflict, violence and the experience of mediating across languages.

Anton Shammas is a Palestinian writer and translator of Arabic, Hebrew and English. He has been teaching Arabic and Comparative Literature at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, since 1997. He is the author of three books of poetry (in Hebrew and Arabic): Poems (Arabic. Jerusalem, 1974), Hardcover (Hebrew. Tel-Aviv, 1974), No Man's Land (Hebrew. Tel-Aviv, 1979); three plays: Ta'ah bil-hayt (A Hole in the Wall), a bilingual play for young adults, in Arabic and Hebrew, "Haifa Theater," 1978-79; Ghassil Wijjak ya Qamar (Wash your Face, Moon - Arabic), for "The Arab Theater," Haifa, 1997; Stuffed Ducks, a play in progress (Hebrew and English), for River Arts, Woodstock, 1989; many essays in English, Hebrew and Arabic; and a novel, Arabesques, originally published in Hebrew (1986) and translated into 8 languages. Upon its American publication in 1988, Arabesques was chosen by The New York Times Book Review as one of the best seven fiction works of 1988.

His essays, on the current cultural and political scene in the Middle East, and on his linguistic autobiography in between three languages, have been published in Harper’s Magazine, The New York Review of Books, and The New York Times Magazine. He has translated from and into Arabic, Hebrew and English, playwrights, writers and poets such as: Samuel Beckett, Harold Pinter, Edward Albee, Athol Fugard, Dario Fo, Emile Habiby, Mahmoud Darwish, and Taha Muhammad Ali.

Fawwaz Traboulsi is visiting professor of Political Science and History at the American University of Beirut. He has been a visiting professor at New York University, the University of Michigan, Columbia University, New York University, and Vienna University. He is a fellow of St. Antony’s College, Oxford, and the Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin. His twenty books and numerous lectures, papers and articles have dealt with history, politics, liberation and social movements, political philosophy, memoirs, folklore and art in the Arab World. Traboulsi’s latest translations include Edward Said’s Out of Place (2003) Humanism and Democratic Critique (2005) and On Late Style (2015). He has also published with Aziz al-Azmeh an anthology of Ahmad Fares Shidyaq’a writings (1995). His most recent books are A History of Modern Lebanon (Pluto Press, London 2007, 2012) Hareer wa Hadeed (Silk and Iron, From Mount Lebanon to the Suez Canal, Beirut 2013) and Damm al-Akhawayn, al-‘Unf fi al-Huroob al-Ahliyyah (The Blood of Brothers, On Violence in Civil Wars, 2016). Traboulsi, a long-time journalist, is the editor of the quarterly cultural journal Bidayat, founded in the spring 2012.

In drawing a filmic portrait of Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwich, Simone Bitton and Elias Sanbar considered two elements, namely, as Darwich reminds them, that the Arabic word for home, bayt, is also the word for verse. In other words, poems inhabit their listeners and forge belonging. The second element was Darwich’s inimitable rhythm, the cadence of his words and metaphors. The film is more than a biographical portrait, it is an invitation to a travel inside the poet’s universe, the modern, allegorical Andalusia he imagined, humanistic, irreverent and erotic.

Simone Bitton was born in Morocco in 1955, she lives between Paris, Rabat and Jerusalem. She has directed more than twenty films and documentary series for cinema and television. Bitton’s practice has been very versatile, ranging from archival montage, poetic essay films, intimate portraits of artists, or investigative documentary, but her political engagement with the history, culture and present-day reality of the Middle East and North African regions is salient. The series she directed, Les grandes vois de la Chanson Arabe (1990), and the two-episode films Palestine, the story of a Land (1993) are reference works that have been broadcast several times and distributed in several countries, more than 20 years after their release. The Wall (2004) and Rachel (2009) received several awards and were released in theaters in several countries. Bitton teaches at the University Paris 8, and is a member of the Ateliers Varan.

For her recent project, Jumana Manna researched the Post Herbarium at the American University of Beirut, which archives the biodiversity of Syria, Palestine and Sinai, and was established by the American missionary, botanist and surgeon George E. Post (1838–1909) in the late 19th century. Post, along with scores of European and American scholars and scientists travelled to the Levant with the belief that scientific study of the so-called Bible Land would unlock Christian theology. Bible Dictionaries were quite popular at that time. Some of the specimen in the collection are extinct today due to climate change, real estate development and war, making the herbarium a cemetery of dead and living eco-systems of Lebanon and the region. Manna’s presentation will reflect on the research, and tease out the historical and contemporary repercussions of a gaze lodged between religious imagination and the seemingly rational endeavor of botany.

Robert Lachmann was a German-Jewish ethnomusicologist who traveled to Palestine in the 1930s and started a radio show titled "Oriental Music", that explored the musical traditions of Palestine and included regular live performances by musicians from different ethnic and religious groups. Inspired by Lachmann’s musicological studies, Palestinian artist Jumana Manna travels through Israel and the Palestinian territories of today with recordings from the program. What do these songs sound like now when performed by Moroccan, Kurdish, or Yemenite Jews, by Samaritans, members of the urban and rural Palestinian communities, Bedouins and Coptic Christians? When a true fascination for history meets the sounds of the rababa, saz, oud and tin cans, a cultural diversity emerges that subverts the distinction between "Arab" and "Jewish". There are no national borders here, only different kitchens where people make music together – with their guests, while cooking, or making the coffee.

Jumana Manna is a Palestinian visual artist living in Berlin. Weaving together the methods of historian, anthropologist and performer, Manna creates films and sculptures that explore how power is articulated through relationships, focusing on the body and materiality in relation to historical narratives and nationalism. Recent solo exhibitions include venues such as Chisenhale Gallery, London, UK, Beirut Art Center, Beirut, Lebanon and Sculpture Center, New York, USA. Manna has participated in group exhibitions at Kunsthalle Wien, Liverpool Biennial, 20th Biennale of Sydney, Marrakech Biennale 6, The Jerusalem Show VII, Al Ma’mal Foundation, and Henie Onstad Kunstsenter, Bærum. Her films has been screened at festivals and institutions such as M+, Hong Kong, 54th Viennale International Film Festival, 66th Berlinale Forum, Tate Modern, London, Performa13 Biennial, New York, and the 42nd IFFR Rotterdam. Manna was awarded the A.M. Qattan Foundation’s Young Palestinian Artist Award in 2012, and she is the Ars Viva Prize for Visual Arts laureate in 2017.  In 2017 she is developing new commissions for The Nordic Pavillion, Venice Biennale, Satellite Program 10 at Jeu de Paume Paris and CAPC Bordeaux, and The HighLine, New York.

Blending his family portrait with the chronicles of return, Fleifel’s first feature records the daily survival of three generations of Palestinian refugees living in the Ain el-Helweh camp, just south of Sidon, Lebanon’s second largest city. Drawing on family archives (photos and videos), as well as historical footage, the film is a reflection on belonging, friendship and family. It is not only the story of a family, but an attempt to record what is fleeting, on the brink of falling into forgetting because of collective indifference to the despair of refugees. Fleifel, who had the privilege of leaving the bleak living conditions in the camp, returns to find his friends, with whom he still shares a passion for soccer and Palestinian politics. In the unmediated, yet tender foray into the universe of the camp, A World Not Ours intimates to the viewer the poignant lived experience of being deprived of the most basic of civic rights, over the span of generations.

Born in Dubai, raised in the Palestinian refugee camp of Ain el-Helweh in south Lebanon, Mahdi Fleifel studied film at the British National Film and Television School. His short films have screened at several international film festivals and earned awards. A World not Ours is his first feature film.

The entry of British army general Allenby in Jerusalem marks a turning point in the history of Jerusalem. The end of Ottoman rule, and the arrival of colonial mandate rule. A moment of rupture, but also charged with hope, and the desire of a homogenous and vital social fabric for change. Referring to several diaries and memoirs (most notably those of Wasif Jawhariyyeh), that date to the end of the Ottoman era, Salim Tamari wil examine narratives of daily life in Jerusalem’s old city, and present images to suggest how the urban-scape, dress codes, and religious ritual were transformed drastically in the years 1880-1920. Using new media tools (3D modeling and facial recognition software), Mohanad Yaqubi will present a short film, constructed from photographic archives that will explore a historic time, ways of living, and public spaces of a Jerusalem far-fetched from imagination.

Salim Tamari is professor of sociology at Birzeit University and adjunct professor at the Center for Contemporary Arab Studies at Georgetown University in Washington DC.  He has authored several works on urban culture, political sociology, biography and social history, and the social history of the Eastern Mediterranean. Recent publications include: Year of the Locust: Palestine and Syria during WWI (UC Press, 2010) Ihsan's War: The Intimate Life of an Ottoman Soldier (IPS, Beirut, 2008); The Mountain Against the Sea (University of California Press, 2008); Biography and Social History of Bilad al Sham (edited with I. Nassar, 2007, Beirut Institute for Palestine Studies); Pilgrims, Lepers, and Stuffed Cabbage: Essays on Jerusalem's Cultural History (edited, with I. Nassar, Institute for Jerusalem Studies, 2005) and Essays on the Cultural History of Ottoman and Mandate Jerusalem (editor, Institute for Jerusalem Studies, 2005). Tamari has served as visiting professor at the University of California at Berkeley (2005, 2007, 2008), Cambridge University (2008) and lecturer in Mediterranean Studies Venice University (2002-present). He is senior fellow at the Institute for Palestine Studies (IPS), and former director of the IPS-affiliated Institute for Jerusalem Studies.

Mohanad Yaqubi is a filmmaker, producer, and one of the founders of the Ramallah-based production outfit, Idioms Film. He also teaches Film Studies at the International Art Academy in Palestine. Yaqubi is also one of the founders of the research and curatorial collective Subversive Films, that focuses on militant film practices. Yaqubi’s filmography as a producer includes the narrative short Pink Bullet (directed by Ramzi Hazboun), and as co-producer the narrative feature Habibi (directed by Susan Youssef, 2010) and the short narrative Though I Know the River is Dry (directed by Omar R. Hamilton, 2012) and the documentary feature Infiltrators (directed by Khaled Jarrar, 2013). In 2013, Yaqubi initiated and produced Suspended Time, an anthology that reflects on 20 years after the signing of the Oslo Peace Accords, and includes nine filmmakers. His latest film No Exit, (written with Omar Kheiry), premiered at the Dubai International Film Festival in 2015. The feature film Off Frame AKA Revolution Until Victory made its world premiere at the Toronto International Film Festival in the fall of 2016.