Palestinian artist Noor Abuarafeh has built a complex body of work that attests to history’s construction, documentation, and interpretation. Through the replications, repetitions, and gaps in stories, memories, and archives, she imagines alternative mythologies and materials for the future. In recent years, Abuarafeh has looked at history’s manufacture through the processes of preservation that occur in museums and exhibitions. Reflecting on what individuals, governments, or private interests choose to safeguard or endow with exceptional significance, Abuarafeh articulates the tension between what is included in the project of nation-building and what is left out. Abuarafeh’s video Am I the Ageless Object at the Museum? (2018) is part of a long-term project that draws parallels between museums, zoos, and cemeteries as repositories for preservation and display. Viewers are led through zoos in Palestine, Switzerland, and Egypt, which, much like museums, conform to a standard in which animals are collected, caged, and subjected to an uneven power dynamic. Spliced with images of stuffed animals and pinned bugs from natural history museums, live animals are similarly made to appear like objects. Recounting childhood memories about zodiac signs, the evolution of hippos, the mythical symbology of whales, the narrator imagines themselves as a large cetacean, exposed to sunlight and nature, as if that body is also their own.
Madeline Weisburg
