Memory Trace

By Fazal Sheikh
Address
97 Kenmare Street, New York City NY 10012 Map
Hours
Tue–Sat 11 am–6 pm

Memory Trace by Fazal Sheikh brings a site-specific installation of part of the Israeli Separation Wall to the façade of Storefront’s gallery space. Presented behind the façade are photographs of ruins and landscapes of villages that were evacuated and mostly destroyed during the 1948 and 1967 wars, as well as portraits of Arab-Israelis and Palestinians who were living in these villages and were displaced by war or forced into refugee camps.

The exhibition is presented as part of Erasures, a project by Fazal Sheikh that seeks to explore the legacies of the Arab-Israeli War of 1948, which resulted in the establishment of the State of Israel and in the reconfiguration of territorial borders across the region. The Erasures project is currently presenting a body of photographs at six institutions around the world simultaneously.

“Taken from 2010 to the present, the photographs demonstrate that the conflict cannot be restricted to any single population or any one side of the conflict. They present a past but also a present wound that, produced by the violence, trauma, and ruin that were the signature of the war, can be read in the fact that Palestinians, Bedouins, and Israelis all find themselves today in mourning. In asking us to consider the history that simultaneously divides and binds these populations, Sheikh hopes to lay the groundwork for a potentially transformative empathy. What is at stake is the possibility of exposing and countering the various processes of erasure that have sought to eliminate both the violence of this history and the acts of erasure themselves. In making these histories of dispossession visible, Erasures hopes to interrupt our historical amnesia, and to transform our understanding of this ongoing conflict.”  Eduardo Cadava, Curator

Memory Trace takes over the entire interior and exterior façade of Storefront with an image of a segment of the most iconic element of the ongoing conflict, the Israeli Separation Wall. The image, as seen from both sides of the wall, contains a series of traces that invite us to reflect upon notions of dispossession and displacement. The more than 25 images presented in the interior of the gallery space are accompanied by captions in English, Arabic, and Hebrew that enable the visitor to locate the physical and political geographies inscribed within them, reconstructing, through the traces left over time, a series of memories and histories. The landscapes of each site are accompanied by a series of information that includes: thelatitudinal and longitudinal coordinates, the population and number of houses on the site in 1948, the date when the village was evacuated, the occupying force and Israeli operation that evacuated it, a brief note about what (if anything) replaced the village in the aftermath of the war, a note about what is visible on the site today, and a statement about whether or not the village has been renamed, is now without a name, or is even registered in contemporary maps of Israel. For the accompanying portraits, each includes excerpts from Sheikh’s interviews with the subjects conducted between 2010 and the present, from their accounts of what they saw as their villages were evacuated and depopulated or what they experienced after (and as a result of) the war, andthe sorrow and loss they have endured because of their inability to return to their homes and land. Some of the persons in the portraits have died in the time since the interviews, making this documentation the last trace of a history in disappearance.