Abstract

After the Last Frontiers, my thesis exhibition, aims to raise questions about forms of oppression and violence practiced by the oppressive colonial powers in Palestine and, by extension, the world. The thesis explores the possibilities of artists’ contributions to social and political change by shedding light on my motives, narratives, and art practice, and by comparing my artworks to those by artists who have tackled similar issues. The art produced for this thesis exhibition is intended to act as an anticolonial form of resistance and activism. The exhibition consists of installations of objects that represent sites of memory, reviving the collective memory of people and land. In my case, I wish to commemorate the places that were stolen, the over 750,000 displaced Palestinians and their descendants, amounting to millions, the thousands of Palestinians killed since 1948, the hundreds of thousands of acres of olive trees uprooted, and the over 500 Palestinian villages and towns obliterated. Based on relevant historical and archival artifacts, this practice-based thesis exhibition underscores the significance of documentation and archival material in memory tracing/maintaining, and its relevance to the Palestinian case, and, in turn, the Israeli hegemonic narrative in the West.