Artists:

Aissa Deebi and Bashir Makhoul

Curators:

Bruce Ferguson with Rawan Sharaf

Description:

 Only “legitimate,” “recognized,” and “independent” nations are permitted a pavilion at the Venice Biennale, a status that Palestine, long under occupation, cannot fulfil.  “Otherwise Occupied" is a mutable and transitory spacio-temporal entity produced in the absence of the legitimacy conferred by statehood.

These artists were originally born inside the 1948 borders, in the margins of another state in their homeland and outside the centres of contemporary Palestinian culture, and left to live elsewhere. In order to engage in new ways of thinking or imagining the nation, it is perhaps necessary to live at a distance from it. Art is capable of occupying cultural spaces otherwise inaccessible or invisible, producing new kinds of cultural space or knowledge and offering ways of thinking otherwise. Thus, Otherwise Occupied examines scenarios that imagine the nation outside and beyond the conflict, refusing to define the idea of Palestine purely in terms of the occupation. Otherwise Occupied is therefore a means of artistic and critical thinking through the de-territorialisation of Palestine.