carlier | gebauer is pleased to announce the first solo exhibition of Palestinian-American artist and filmmaker Nida Sinnokrot with the gallery. Sinnokrot’s work is informed by cinema, colonial history, narrative structures, and the politics of technology. Through tactical acts of technical and conceptual détournement, his work aims to subvert various technologies of control that give rise to shifting social, political, and geographic instabilities.

The exhibition Expand Extract Repent Repeat presents recent sculpture, photographs, and installation. The works in the exhibition reference flows of global capital, the writing and rewriting of history, cycles of debt, and architectures of occupation and expansion. Although Expand Extract Repent Repeat speaks to the context of contemporary Palestine, the exhibition does not focus on identity, but instead examines how social, political, environmental, economic, and political structures play out across national categories. Deriving its title from the biblical tale in which a whale devours the prophet Jonah for defaulting on his promise to god, the work Jonah’s Whale comprises a shipping container once used as an Israeli settler caravan and later repurposed as a Palestinian construction site office. Sinnokrot sliced the ready-made container into eleven cross-sections, revealing layers of steel, gypsum, insulation, wires, carpets, and a mattress. A mechanism of control and standardization, the shipping container is a form that regulates currents, whether natural, economic, or political. With Jonah’s Whale and the photo series Caravan, named for both ancient Middle Eastern trading practices and contemporary pre-fab mobile home units, Sinnokrot shows how this trans-national symbol of global trade functions as a complex palimpsest of power and commerce within a regional context. Layered with history and patina, the structure is inscribed with traces of its journey from container to caravan to construction site office.