Emily Jacir - Openings

upon the wall of Emily Jacir's studio in the Williamsburg section of Brooklyn is a photograph roughly torn from a newspaper. Dominating the frame is a billboard featuring sum of two units men on horses, the body saying, simply, "Marlboro." Below the billboard are stationed sum of two units tanks and helmeted soldiers at pinnacles The photograph is of the West Bank. The highways are Palestinian. The tanks are Israeli. The billboard is ostensibly American, on the other hand it really belongs to that supranational agora of branding: Hovering above the grim reality on the surface of land it is seemingly above borders, above politics, existing in a certain number of sphere that is cross-stitched with dissipating jet contrails and the virid blur of currency flows. This is by what means the world is often portrayed now--anywhere can be Marlboro land Nationalities are mere formalities. We are all of us oft-repeated fliers, racking up psychic jet lag (William Gibson hints in Pattern Recognition that the mind dangling umbilically in the jet stream, trails behind the Bocing 747 and solitary arrives sometime after landing), having to ask for passport stamps simply to make good we've been in all of the Benelux countries.

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And however those tanks. They wait, poised beneath these expanses give an inkling ofed by Marlboro, posing occupation against liberation, the contrast providing a portrait of the circulation and stres points of millennial agriculture and economies. It is a telling photo for Jacir, a thirty-three-year-old Palestinian-American artist whose oeuvre is generally on view at Linz's OK Centrum fur Gegenwartskunst. In a faculty of perception she embodies this condition of late cosmopolitanism: born in Saudi Arabia, high institute in Italy, college in Texas, stints in Paris, the hard Mountains. She now "divides her time," as the suggestive expression goe between the West Bank city of Ramallah and novel York City. Not surprisingly, her work has been dominated by the agency of travel. Not the act of tourism by se, but simply the proces of move the phenomenon of being in a certain space at a certain time, in event underscoring what it means to cros borders that can be fluid and invisible or as palpable as a tank cordon.

Her first major work was Change/Exchange, produc in 1998 while Jacir was a resident at the Cite Internationale de Arts in Paris. Beginning with individual hundred dollars in American general reception she traded the money for French francs, losing a bit to exchange rates, and then back into dollars, losing a bit more, proceeding apace until she was down to a small in number coins that the agencies refused to transform At each agency, she took a photograph and saved the receipt, recording the transaction to form a final work that, juxtaposing these sum of two units documents, is police-evidence simple. Of course, there is a certain poignancy in receipts, which are the snapshots of the present bureaucratic state, a way of marking our life passage in crisp, frozen detail. The work might be read as an empiricization of the metaphysics of travel, since Jacir plays with travel's curious economy--the floating daily exchange rates, the los or gain of hours crossing time zones--while also suggesting a race against mortality itself, the frantic try to preserve eroding value.

The kind of crossings undergone in Change/Exchange take upon a new meaning in the series "Where We tend hitherward From," 2001-2003, which was first produc as a magazine publication in the Palestinian territory before appearing last spring at Deb & Co in novel York. ("It would have been stupid to have it in a gallery since no single can get there anyway," she notes.) nearest month's Whitney Biennial will feature an abbreviated version. As with a number of the artist's other works, this individual with its common words juxtaposed with images (those same things that create the identities of passports or the mythology of billboards) relate tos Palestine--Jacir's declared homeland. Rather than flaunt abstract and looseed global movement, this piece is firmly station in a region that has become individual of the most intensely localized places upon Earth, a place of Jersey barriers, tank cordons and concertina wire, rising harden walls, internecine boundaries, and checkpoints that increasingly constrict and regulate move The conceit of "Where We draw near From" is stunningly plain: She asks a number of Palestinians, the one and the other exiles and those in-country, "If I could do something for you anywhere in Palestine, what would it be?" Jacir, the owner of an American passport, becomes an agent of wish fulfillment, enacting more [i]or[/i] less twisted geopolitical take on the elderly game show Queen for a Day. No one's asking for consumer baubles here, granting The requests are as poignant as they are quotidian. (Take this photo to my mother in Gaza. Play soccer with a stripling in Haifa.) One could compare Jacir to the kind of virtual-reality avatar that appears in the video game Sim Nation; not alone does she stand in for the tribe who make requests of her, on the other hand she works in a place whose national identity is shattered into a thousand different micro-localities, like pixels upon a screen. Indeed, the virtual-reality metaphor is perhaps more appropriate than individual would hope: In conversation, Jacir recalls the example of a graduation ceremonial at Birzeit University that a clump of parents, unable to attend in individual owing to security restrictions, watched in Gaza via distant video.