Homeland Lost
A Photography Exhibition by Alan Gignoux
18 April - 2 May 2008
Barbican, Cinema 1 foyer
Admission is Free
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Sanah Bkhet – her mother is originally from Kawkaba, lives in Gaza city
With 121 houses and an exclusively Arab population of 680 in 1948, Kawkaba has been completely destroyed.
All the inhabitants were forcibly expelled and were not permitted to return.
Homeland Lost is a photographic essay by Alan Gignoux that juxtaposes portraits of Palestinian exiles with present day images of the places they were compelled to leave in 1948, as a result of the creation of Israel.
Homeland Lost presents portraits of stateless Palestinians living in refugee camps, Palestinian exiles settled in Jordan and Lebanon and Palestinians living in the Israeli state. Gignoux provides a portrait of Palestinian refugees, displaced conditions or locations of exile. In this sense his work deconstructs the stereotypes created by the western media of exiled Palestinians as either extremists or victims, instead his work shows them as individuals trying to build a life for themselves in and extremely harsh reality they face. The subjects reflect the diversity of the diaspora population in gender, class, age and religion and the photographs as a group portray a society in exile.
In a gesture that transcends political borders, the portraits in Homeland Lost are paired with landscapes showing the sites of the homes and villages from which the subjects originated. These images record the transformation of the former Palestinian landscape. Many of the houses, villages and agricultural lands have been destroyed or allowed to fall into ruin, replaced by development, converted to new uses, and old names of places have been erased.
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Rima Mulhim, her family is originally from al-Manshiyya neighbourhood in Jaffa.
Al-Manshiyya was a neighbourhood of Jaffa, located to the north of the city centre. A large portion of the Palestinian section of Jaffa was demolished in 1948, including most of al-Manshiyya. Inhabitants of Jaffa were forcibly expelled and found refuge in Gaza,‘Areash (Egypt) and Beirut and Amman. Some were internally displaced to Ramla and al-Lydd and Jerusalem. Of the 70,000 Palestinians who lived in Jaffa in 1948, only 3,650 remained.
Homeland Lost records the disappearance of a particular historical landscape, thereby provoking discussion about the meaning of ‘homeland’ and ‘return’ for the Palestinian diaspora today. The project speaks of the heartbreaking difficulty of facing up to the impossibility of restoring a past that has ceased to exist and raises the question of imagining an alternative future.
According to the Gignoux, the project took two years to complete and has entailed extensive work in Lebanon, Jordan, the West Bank and Gaza, along with painstaking research inside the Green Line to accurately identify the exact geographical location of the subjects’ homes or villages in 1948.
Alan Gignoux has been working as a professional reportage photographer since 2000 and as a journalist for the previous five years. Since graduating from the London School of Printing in 2000 he has worked in Africa, Kosovo, Serbia and throughout the Middle East photographing people displaced by the effects of natural disasters, war and racial segregation. Much of his work has been with development agencies such as the World Bank and CARE and through his experiences he has developed an approach that seeks to understand the personal experience of the individual in unfamiliar, often temporary, sometimes threatening environments. He is based in London, England.
Homeland Lost is organised by Nakba60 in conjunction with the Palestine Film Foundation, and will coincide with the Palestine Film Festival 2008 at the Barbican
Venue:
Barbican Centre
Silk St
London EC2Y 8DS
Nearest tubes: Barbican, Moorgate, Liverpool St.