Return, recollect, imagine : decolonizing images, reclaiming Palestine

Abstract

This article engages with Recollection, a film by Palestinian filmmaker Kamal Aljafari, and And yet my mask is powerful (Part 1), a video by Palestinian artists Basel Abbas and Ruanne Abou-Rahme, as visual articulations of Palestinian resistance against Israeli practices of settler-colonial erasure. The paper explores how these works both activate, and are activated by, the Palestinian decolonial struggle. These works visually materialize a radical politics of decolonization that problematizes and subverts colonial practices and narratives. Engaging with (material, visual, discursive) sites of colonial violence and destruction as generative sites, these works recover and recenter Palestinian existence. They expose the colonial project’s failure to fully erase and representationally evacuate traces of Palestinian presence. From the artists’ decolonial creative processes and practices, new countervisual languages emerge that imagine/image an alternative reality, unbound from colonial time, space and narrative.