(Palestine)
Alexandra Handal works at the intersection of different disciplines, breaking the boundaries between them in search of new creative expressions and narrative possibilities to explore the human condition in lingering times of war and other man-made disasters. Through her practice she attempts to make palpable what is disappearing or has been destroyed, engaging with modern day ruins from conflict zones to areas of urban decay. She uses performance-based strategies to experiment with modes of storytelling and mapping that are non-linear, multi-layered, and cross-genre.
Handal uncovers the real and imagined geographies of exiles, refugees and those seen as ‘outsiders’. Through historical research and urban fieldwork, she excavates what has been hidden, erased, omitted and forgotten. Handal combines personal experience, research and imagination to redress absence - blurring the line between written and oral history, fact and fiction, subjectivity and objectivity, past and present. She thereby challenges conventional notions of place and disrupts national narratives. Handal’s personal history is marked by intergenerational movements across disparate geographies-namely Bethlehem, Port-au-Prince, NYC, Santo Domingo, London, Jerusalem, Amsterdam, Berlin - all of which link historically to Palestine. It is precisely the new connections that are formed by disciplinary and geographical crossings that shape her
creative context.