Busy Doing My Taxes
Archiving an Unseen Genocide Through a Timeline of Occupation
Site: The Wurks Gallery
City/State: Providence
Country: USA
Year: 2024
Co-curated with: Qais Assali
Art is political and politics is not an ornament. Artists are political witnesses to the questioning of reality and in this process of inquiry intentionality is irrelevant. Everything we call art is a conscious or unconscious response to both the context of history at its moment of stall and the identity of the individual, the inextricable product of that context. In investigating the content of reality, art is an act of care. Care for the unseen stories, personal and collective; care for the silenced injustices and the unceasing violence; care for the invisible; care for the disempowered; care for the uncared. It is a call to attentiveness, a demand for consciousness, an invitation to speaking the truth that deserves to be spoken by carefully weighing the alternatives, picking the right one, and then intelligently representing it where it can do the most good and cause the right change (E.Said).
Busy doing my Taxes is not an exhibition, it is a demand for care. It is a test of our blindness to the enduring, gradual, deliberate, premeditated erasure of Palestine. A question to our daily personal and financial complicity that rendered us numb to the dehumanization of war.
Busy doing my Taxes is an archive of intercorporeality and temporal evidence of senses in time of urgency when making art may seem an inconceivable and unbearable task. It is a collection of paintings, texts, posters, flyers, films, photos, documents, newspapers, books, poems as acts of care through key moments of Palestinian resistance.
Busy doing my Taxes is a timeline where time shrinks in the stages of genocide and all art becomes contemporary as every date belongs to each other, every instant of care merges into each other, and all art becomes a timeless witness to destruction while repeating itself. Time is a land in the context of Palestine and all parcels of it are sites of resistance and sumud (steadfastness).
This is not complicated. This is not an unsafe space. Those across the gallery’s walls are not weapons. This is not political art. This is just Art.
Busy Doing my Taxes was a fundraising effort put together to help a family leave Gaza. All art on display was on sale. A series of lectures and workshops were organized to raise funds, awareness, and encourage activism in all our visitors.
Some of the work exhibited where produced just for this show by Palestinian artist whose family was/is currently in Gaza or the occupied Palestinian Territories.
Special thanks to Hillel O'Leary for allowing us to use the gallery space and supporting our project.
The exhibit includes work of several Palestinian and Pro-Palestinian artists as well as words, texts, poems from intellectuals and writers that are spread around the gallery or available to visitors or used for calligraphy workshops. All artworks in the gallery are selected as representative of different key moments of struggle for Palestine. Dates are spread across the gallery to accompany those artworks but the font, designed by artist Sara Elbashir is in pseudo-arabic number to make those dates less obvious and reinforce the idea that the chronology does not make sense in the case of Palestine as every moment of resistance remans contemporary to the other and almost exchangeable.
The gallery includes original work of Qais Assali, Saher Nassar, Sarah Elbashir, Wael Abu Yabes, Or Zubalsky, as well as reproduction of text and books of Amir Nizar Zuabi, Samir Halabi, Adania Shibli, Mahmoud Darwish, Mohammed El-Kurd, Hassan Kanafani, and others.
Top: gallery entrance staircase covered with reprinted news headlines of pro-Palestine events held in museums, galleries and universities or episodes of silencing of intellectuals and artists.
left/bottom: 32 posters are part of the exhibition Down with the Occupation held in 1987 by the Association of Artists for Freedom of Expression in the El-Hakawati Theatre in Jerusalem to mark 20 years since the 1967 occupation of the West Bank. The exhibition included posters by Palestinian and Israeli artists.
Left: Introductory documents on Palestine and Gaza produced by the Birzeit Museum. Displayed at the beginning close to introductory panel.
Bottom: Sudanese-Egyptian artist Sara Elbashir, calligraphic artwork based on Gazan poet Yahya Ashour text, What the World’s Silence Says
Left: protest banner donated by Neda Moridpour.
Bottom: M.Ahmed, poster titled The Key of Our Home was issued by the Unified Information of the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) in 1982.
Amir Nizar Zuabi, The Underground Ghetto of Gaza (reprinted from Haaretz, 2014)
Top: Saher Nassar, Untitled, 2024. The autobiographical artwork was produced for this show. It is composed by a suspended strip with printed images of flyers dropped on Gaza by the IDF in October 2023 and a map representing how Nassar's family was asked to move from Northers Gaza to Rafah after their house was destroyed. On the floor reproduction of Israeli IDF flyers with US tax forms on the back side to signify US complicity.
Top: Or Zubalsky, Time Travels: Building a State in the Middle East (Custom software, high school history textbooks, 2016-2018)
Left and bottom: RISD SJP artworks and poster rpoduced in the gallery and for fundraising
Bottom: Qais Assali, Odd Billboard on Post and 52, 2020
Images of Palestine before 1948, copies of collection donated by Ariella Aisha Azoulay.
