Printscapes of Solidarity: Palestine, Art and Revolution from Beirut

Description

In the aftermath of the devastating 1967 Arab-Israeli war, and with the rise of the Palestinian Resistance from Lebanon, Beirut’s imagined political geography was being redefined as the revolutionary ‘Arab Hanoi’: a base and springboard for the liberation of Palestine, just as Hanoi was for South Vietnam. Beirut’s important infrastructures of art and publishing were radicalized in this context, summoning a network of artists and intellectuals—from across the Arab world and beyond—into solidarity with Palestine. In the revolutionary geography of the global sixties, Beirut acted as a nodal city in and through which an aesthetic of solidarity with the Palestinian liberation movement converged and circulated along transnational circuits. The politicization of the role of the artist in society at this particular global historical juncture was productive of new aesthetic sensibilities that were carried in and through the reproducibility of printed media, such as posters, cards, stamps, leaflets, periodicals and artists’ books.
While the history of the Palestinian struggle and its geopolitical configurations have received ample attention, the archives of visual culture and print ephemera of this revolutionary moment remain relatively understudied. Reproducible and mobile print media lent visibility to the Palestinian cause across borders and visually articulated the cultural politics of revolution and solidarity. These neglected archives offer yet another important lens through which to explore a radical moment of revolutionary transformation. Crucially, these represented key sites of imaginative identification that bear witness to an aesthetics of hope and to radical horizons of possibility and affective sensibilities that capture the intensity of a radical moment in the history of the Palestinian liberation struggle in its regional and global unfolding.

Period	15 Apr 2021 → 16 Apr 2021
Event title	Archival Methods and Global Palestine in the 1960s and 1970
Event type	Workshop
Location	DenmarkShow on map
Degree of Recognition	International