In and out of the box: Bashir Makhoul’s Forbidden City
Beck, J. 2012. In and out of the box: Bashir Makhoul’s Forbidden City. Theory, Culture and Society. 29 (7-8), pp. 341-357. https://doi.org/10.1177/0263276412459088
Beck, J. 2012. In and out of the box: Bashir Makhoul’s Forbidden City. Theory, Culture and Society. 29 (7-8), pp. 341-357. https://doi.org/10.1177/0263276412459088
Title | In and out of the box: Bashir Makhoul’s Forbidden City |
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Type | Journal article |
Authors | Beck, J. |
Abstract | Bashir Makhoul’s Beijing installation Enter Ghost, Exit Ghost is a maze made out of lenticular images of a Palestinian village that leads to a stack of cardboard boxes that could be a town, a military training camp, or just a heap of damaged packing con- tainers. This article reads the installation through an initial misrecognition, seeing the boxes as a version of ancient Anasazi cliff dwellings. This displacement, where one place recalls somewhere else, is pursued through a discussion of W.J.T. Mitchell’s reflections on comparative ‘promised lands’, Israeli artist Larry Abramson’s notion of abstraction as camouflage, Eyal Weizman’s analysis of simulated battle-spaces, and Mark Twain’s critical reading of desert spaces in the western US and Palestine. The article argues that Makhoul’s work calls up a series of associations between times and places that speaks not only to the specific (Israel/Palestine) but to a broader global hermeneutics of empire based on symbolic overdetermination and strategic conceal- ment and erasure. |
Journal | Theory, Culture and Society |
Journal citation | 29 (7-8), pp. 341-357 |
ISSN | 0263-2764 |
Year | 2012 |
Publisher | Sage |
Digital Object Identifier (DOI) | https://doi.org/10.1177/0263276412459088 |
Publication dates | |
Published | 16 Nov 2012 |