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Farah

Since 1948 the territories of Palestine are a theatre of war.

Several generations are born and grown under the wraths of dispersion, humiliation and violence which never let them see the peace in their own land: for that unknown peace people fights since 55 years in the name of dignity, a concept that today can only survive in the dreams of childrens and the tales of grandparents, lost in the oblivion of war stories we are used to listen about Palestine.

This project takes birth from the need to discover and document what nowadays remains untouched by the war within the palestinian popular culture: everything in the tales of childrens and older people which still reaches to have nothing to do with the daily horror of war, which risks to pervade unreversibly the identity of a population.

It's the search for joy which interests us. For a resistance which gets organized in thousands of forms, for the human feeling that your own past and destiny has nothing to do with the present condemn; it's the search for peace into the imagination of a population, carefully ignoring a nightmare lasting half a century, to recognize the millenary Palestine in the untouchable dreams of its children.

This net-art piece is freely available (Creative Commons license) at the Internet address farah.dyne.org.

Group Exhibitions

Remembering-Repressing-Forgetting - curated by Agricola de Cologne
- (2004) National Museum of Contemporary Art Bucaresti/Romania
- (2004) Bergen Center of Electronic Arts Bergen/Norway
- (2004) New Media Art Festival Bangkok/Thailand
Netarts.org - curated by Tetsuo Kogawa
- (2003) Machida City Museum of Graphic Arts, Tokyo
WILL : Negotiations - curated by Gita Hashemi
- (2003) A Space Gallery, Toronto
RADIOTOPIA - curated by Elisabeth Zimmermann
- (2002) ORF Kunstradio, Austria
(2002) Digital is not Analog Metagallery

Critics, essays, publications

"Will" (A Space) by Naomi Binder Wall

Review on the "Fuse" magazine, volume number 26, Issue 4 (November 2003)

"Real Play" essay by Gita Hashemi

Subverting stereotypical representations of Palestinians as fanatic terrorists or people solely occupied and pre-occupied by war, in Farah, an account from a trip to Palestine following the brutal Israeli re-occupation campaign of the West Bank in 2002, software pioneer and artist Jaromil gives an account of the everlasting human search and capacity for joy in towns and refugee camps under siege (again). Farah: In Search for Joy is a brief and unpretentious traveler's search for and documentation of those aspects of the Palestinian popular culture that continue to create, offer and celebrate joy in spite of the prolonged conditions of colonial occupation and war. As an archive (in progress), the website is incubated in and reflective of the artist's interactions with his environment as it is a virtual space for our encounter with a dimension of Palestinian reality categorically forgotten or ignored in dominant representations in the West.

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