1-2 pm, 5 February 2024, Arts Seminar room 5
Leena Nammari, Artist Printmaker,
Duncan of Jordanstone College of Art & Design, University of Dundee
‘I have as an artist been drawn to the ordinary spaces, in the extraordinary land of Palestine. The everyday stories of what Mahmoud Darwish called: ordinary grief. Artists have always been collaborators with wordsmiths, whether that is a conscious or unconscious collaboration. The power of words is immense, especially in times of war, want and grief. Poets and writers have the ability to uplift or overload the world with their creations. As an artist, I feel I have the same responsibility to document, to witness and to narrate the stories I have observed.
A quiet story, a gentle prod, an illustration of legacy, a touch of humanity is what I try to present.
As a Palestinian living in the diaspora, my research explores the role Haneen plays in cultural collective consciousness, its nostalgia and mythmaking, where tensions of longing/belonging function as catalysts in artistic and cultural dialogue for displaced communities. Using predominantly photographic and printmaking techniques, I create artworks exploring the lived, remembered and mythologised experiences as visual responses to contemporary Palestinian literature reflecting the search for home and longing.’