Nida Sinnokrot
Caravans
May 27–October 16, 2014
Darat al Funun
Jebel Weibdeh
Amman
Jordan
Caravans, the first solo show of Nida Sinnokrot in the region, features 12 new works relating to the rise of neoliberal politics, terraforming and social engineering that is sweeping the West Bank today. Drawing on past and continuing efforts to turn the Bedouins of Palestine into an urban proletariat indebted to Israel, Caravans takes a critical look at indebtedness as a form of impoverishment and the mechanisms of its promotion used by the Palestinian Authority in the West Bank. Speaking to the divine origins of debt and marking a daring contribution to the history of the ready-made, Jonah’s Whale, a shipping container once used as an Israeli settler caravan and later repurposed as a Palestinian construction site office, stands in eleven cross sections, carefully hand-sliced through layers of steel, gypsum, insulation, wires, carpets and a mattress. Ya Ghanamati -Billboard no. 2, a full-sized 6- meter long mechanical tri-louvered billboard partially surfaced with musty sheepskins pulled and squeezed between its rotating, reflective aluminum surfaces, is an emblem to the mechanisms of commercial debt. Hanging impossibly between tradition and modernity, Failing to Levant, a mirage of pulleys, steel cable, stone tile and a construction site chainlift hanging from the gallery ceiling in an impossible equilibrium, suggests the Levant’s inability to flee its debts to tradition. Precarity is nothing new to Palestinians; it's a foundational component of their modern experience. But bubble economics, consumer debt and real estate speculation are the contemporary ingredients of that experience in the West Bank. Perhaps Incense, the least assuming work in the exhibition -a piece of frankincense carved into a nondescript dwelling positioned above a coffee cupsays it all by inviting us to burn down the house. Refusal to pay is our only promise.