Life in Occupied Palestine
Works on paper including found images, photos and drawings from Occupied Palestine. The International Solidarity Movement is a Palestinian-led movement of Palestinian and International activists who utilize nonviolent direct action to support the Palestinian struggle for freedom and an end to Israeli occupation. Carel Moiseiwitch produced these new works while in Palestine with ISM in February and March 2003.
Moiseiwich determined to produce a visual record, through drawings, photographs, journals, and found images and objects, of everyday life in Occupied Palestine, and it is this record of which her exhibit is composed. Although she has been strongly identified with an aggressive and confrontational graphic style, worked in black-and-white on scraper board, she counter-intuitively resolved to execute her Palestinian images in the more muted and painterly medium of chalk pastel. Initially, she also chose to represent covert or symbolic rather than over or explicit violence: destroyed fields of vegetables and uprooted olive trees, etc. The ruined landscape and the scores of people and vehicles waiting for hours and days at Israeli army checkpoints struck Moiseiwitsch as essential metaphors for what she witnessed of the Occupation. Moiseiwitch also resolved to create, within the context of her installation, a variation on R.B. Kitaj's painting, Eclipse of God. Kitaj's work is itself an homage to Paolo Uccello's Breaking Down the Jew's Door, an investigation of his own identity. In Moiseiwitch's quartet of drawings - as she witnessed repeatedly - the door and home under assault are Palestinian.