Solidarity evening: Palestine
Film screening and workshops
The “Sunflower” Solidary Community Center invites everyone to the evening of solidarity with Palestine, during which we will host Palestinian-Ukrainian artist Alina El Assadi.
First we will watch and discuss the film Foragers by Jumana Manna, and then Alina will conduct a workshop on painting with watermelon juice – a fruit that is a symbol of anticolonial resistance and liberation in Palestine and Ukraine.
Foragers (64 min, 2022) depicts the dramas around the practice of foraging for wild edible plants in Palestine/Israel with wry humor and a meditative pace. Shot in the Golan Heights, the Galilee and Jerusalem, it employs fiction, documentary and archival footage to portray the impact of Israeli nature protection laws on these customs. The restrictions prohibit the collection of the artichoke-like ’akkoub and za’atar (thyme), and have resulted in fines and trials for hundreds caught collecting these native plants. By reframing the terms and constraints of preservation, the film raises questions around the politics of extinction, namely who determines what is made extinct and what gets to live on.
Alina El Assadi is a Palestinian-Ukrainian artist based between the United Arab Emirates and the United Kingdom. She holds BFA from University of Sharjah and is currently pursuing the advanced MFA at Kingston University London. Her interdisciplinary practice ranges from moving image to installation, printmaking, photography, and sculpture. Formerly, her practice focused at the intersection of fiction and non-fiction narratives, and the history of the abandoned places in the Emirates. More recently this has developed into investigation of topics of multinational identity and belonging. Her work has been exhibited at the Thirty-Seventh Annual Emirates Fine Arts Society in Sharjah Art Museum (Sharjah, 2021), Dior Young Talent Photography (Arles, 2021), Stanley Picker Gallery (London, 2022), Dorich Museum (London, 2022), Xposure International Photography Festival (Sharjah, 2023), FuseBox (London, 2023) and lastly has attended Salzburg International Summer Academy of Fine Arts 2023.
Jumana Manna (born in Princeton, USA; lives in Berlin, Germany) is a Palestinian artist whose work shifts between sculpture and film, body and land, narrative and form. Her practice explores how power is articulated through relationships, often focusing on the body and materiality in relation to narratives of nationalism and histories of place. Jumana is a graduate of CalArts, Valencia and the Oslo National Academy of the Arts.
