Larissa Sansour

After years in exile, the Palestinian artist returns to her native town, Bethlehem, only to find out that the town has been divided by the Israeli segregation wall. Unable to see friends and family, Sansour sets out to confront the wall in an absurd and bizarre duel exposing the political madness of the region.

Bethlehem Bandolero is a kitsch video featuring Larissa Sansour herself as a Mexican gunslinger arriving in Bethlehem for a duel with the Israeli Segregation Wall. Wearing a big, red sombrero and a scarf, she walks the streets of Bethlehem and greets the people before taking off for her final showdown. The editing is inspired by television effects from the seventies. The humor of the piece is stressed by the underlying music.

What makes Bethlehem Bandolero controversial is its bold mixture of world crises and blatant absurdity. The piece challenges the current dialogue on the Middle East by shaking its conceptual foundations.

Happy Days is a video that exposes everyday Palestinian life under Israeli occupation. In the video, a collage of footage shot on location in the occupied territories is accompanied by the theme music from the seventies sitcom “Happy Days”. The piece provides imagery different from that of news footage. The contrasting music underlines the general public’s apathy when confronted with world conflict. The idea is to subjugate international politics to a format normally associated with entertainment and thereby call attention to the blurry boundary between the two.

In her video piece Land Confiscation Order 06/24/T, Larissa Sansour explores the notion of territory as constitutive of not only national, but also personal identity. LCO 06/24/T is a requiem for a small piece of land and a house made of stone. It in turn becomes a eulogy for the dream of viable statehood and exposes Palestinian identity as a block that not only political and cultural, but also geographical factors are chopping away at on a daily basis. And as such, the video investigates the idea of the perception of the self as shaped by restrictions imposed by the other.

Though regularly appearing in her own videos, in LCO 06/24/T Sansour has chosen to step aside and tell the story of the confiscation of her own family’s land through her sister and brother. By draping the house entirely in a black cloth, the two perform a ritual not only serving as an acknowledgment of material and geographical loss, but also as a commemorative gesture to a national identity dismantled by military occupation and international politics.

The phantasmagorical imagery on the one hand and the documentary-style footage of Israeli soldiers presenting the confiscation order on the other places LCO 06/24/T in a realm between blurry, introverted nostalgia and stark reality.

Soup Over Bethlehem (2006) depicts an ordinary Palestinian family, Sansour’s own, around a dinner table on a rooftop overlooking the West Bank city of Bethlehem. What starts as a culinary discussion about the national dish mloukhieh being served from a soup bowl soon evolves into a personal and engaging conversation about politics – thereby emphasizing the symbiosis of food and politics so indicative of the Palestinian experience.

The sheer flow and integrity of the dialogue poses questions as to the staged nature of what easily passes for unedited. The handheld cameras and the intimate sounds of cutlery against china support the illusion of a one to one relation between video and reality. Yet, by being composed of multiple unrelated fragments of dialogue, Soup Over Bethlehem actually marks a break-away from the very narrative it feigns. Thus, the video addresses the fictional foundation of documentary and draws attention to the mediating faculty often overlooked in the assessment of visual reports passed off as unbiased depictions of reality – a mediating faculty to a large extent responsible for the reductive stereotyping often shaping our understanding of the other.

Rather than offering a portrait of a national identity as an invitation to renegotiate stereotypes, Soup Over Bethlehem presents a stereotype already renegotiated. The Arabic spoken around the dinner table is interrupted by English, and family members hold a variety of international passports, jobs and academic degrees. The diasporic traits present in every Palestinian family history lends a globalized quality even to life under the restraints of occupation. In turn, the mloukhieh in the soup bowl represents the shared national heritage – a single constant amid nothing but fluctuation. And the meal itself becomes a gastronomic anchoring of a Palestinian identity in eternal flux.

‘At Home, Chilling’ is a series of photographs that target cultural stereotypes. Each photograph shows the artist herself dressed in Arabic gear and superimposed on an idyllic Danish setting. The series comments on issues of belonging and cultural differences. Yet, in the contrast between the subject and its context, something else is achieved. The photographs trivialize our notions of the “other”. In the series, both sides of the equation end up being compromised exposing the banality in our preset concepts and cultural standards. The aim of the project is to reflect the political climate of our present day and bridge an ever widening gap between East and West and start a new constructive dialogue.

The photo is a contemporary digital paraphrase of P.S. Kroeyer’s painting Hip Hip Hurra (1888) – depicting a group of people from the artistic colony in Skagen. The original set-up is recreated in Kroeyer’s actual garden. The details are of the utmost importance – everything from the posture and facial expressions of the participants to the china, bottles and cutlery on the table are as true to the original painting as possible.

All seven men in the original painting are replaced by well known contemporary women artists in Denmark. The three women are played by men.

With its focus on gender and ethnicity, Hip Hip Today is a social and political art piece demographically and ethnically challenging the distribution of values in a contemporary Danish setting. The piece is a comment on a Danish cultural scene that is slowly changing in its set of values, gender and international make up contrasting sharply with the artistic community of Kroeyer’s time. The aim is to expose the idea still tacitly prevalent today of Danes being a socially, culturally, politically and ethnically homogenous people - spearheaded by an elite differing in ethnic and social composition only marginally compared to that at the time of Kroeyer.

Heavily referencing the 1980 cult classic The Shining by Stanley Kubrick, the video piece SBARA explores the castigation of Arabs in contemporary Western dialogue. By adding an audio montage combining historical and current quotes on the Middle East to footage paraphrasing scenes from the original film, SBARA seeks to expose the cyclical nature of Middle Eastern rhetoric and policies and emphasize the psychological terror inflicted upon those at the receiving end of this repetitively stagnant political discourse.