Between Here & Somewhere Else

The third in a series of exhibitions of new work by Helen de Main and Maj Hasager

Khalil Sakakini Cultural Centre, Ramallah: 10 - 24 June

For more information please visit Between Here & Somewhere Else

Between Here and Somewhere Else is a project that has been initiated by artist’s Helen de Main (UK) and Maj Hasager (DK) and has developed out of a number of research periods spent in the 1948 land of Palestine and the Occupied Palestinian Territories between 2007 and 2010. Selected areas were visited relating to the destroyed Palestinian villages of the 1948 war these included the districts of Jaffa, al-Ramlah, Gaza and Hebron as well Ramallah and Silwan. The exhibition will travel from Jerusalem, to Bethlehem, then Ramallah, and the artists will present different works in each of the locations, connecting to their experiences of spending time in each of the sites.

Between For the final exhibition in the series Between Here & Somewhere Else at Khalil Sakakini Cultural Centre, de Main and Hasager present sculptural, photographic, print and video works, both inside the gallery and outside in the garden of Sakakini.

These works focuses on the state of in between or becoming within an urban context, and play on the location of the gallery, situated within the house and gardens of a traditional Palestinian villa, yet located in the West Bank’s fastest developing commercial, institutional and cultural centre; the site itself describing a point placed upon the cusp of history and development. With its location in Ramallah, Sakakini Cultural Centre signifies the layered realities of modernity and heritage in a city under constant change – from a small town to the administrative centre of the West Bank. These changes, a product of restrictions in movement across the territories and the influx of international investment, amongst other things, are reflected physically in the city, as old buildings are erased and replaced by new high-risers, leaving a fading memory of a recent past.

Inside the gallery space the works presented deal with domesticities, dispossession and inherited memory. By taking their point of departure in the notion home, belonging and collective memory the works relate to the domestic architecture of the building – a mansion with tiled floors and walls cut in local stone - far from the traditional modernist exhibition space of the white cube. The works sculptural works installed in the grounds of the centre draw upon the potentiality contained within the idea of transformation and normalisation, whilst reflecting upon more tangible realities of commercialisation and fragmentation.

The exhibition is accompanied by a new text from Ramallah based artist and writer Khaled Hourani.

Exhibition will tour to:

Overgaden Institute of Contemporary Art: 13 November 2010 – 17 January 2011