Tales of a City by the Sea

Originally published in Middle East Monitor

Four days before the ‘Refraction: Moving images of Palestine’ exhibition is set to open in London, curator Shaheen Merali is describing a video from the show by artist Khaled Jarrar. “He’s walking through where he lives, in the occupied territory, wearing a wet suit, flippers and a snorkel, hailing a taxi,” he explains. “For Jarrar, that is maybe an act of trying to escape a landlocked society. The surrealism of living under occupation.”

The exhibition is made up of pieces of work which are the artists’ individual reflections on Palestine, how they view and challenge chaos, war and massacre in the region. “This notion of refraction is that, for me, when light goes through something, it kind of changes direction, it takes on another set of values. Those values are to do with the artists, and how they see their world,” says Merali.

The…