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Museum of Contemporary Art – Palestine (CAMP):
The Museum of Contemporary Art (CAMP) was established to relate to one of the core Palestinian experiences – displacement; as well as to account for the growing collection of visual art that has been safeguarded by Al-Ma’mal over the past ten years. There was/is a need to create a lever for new opportunities, innovative thought, and dynamic multi-cultural activity within, and surrounding Palestinian art, culture, and environment. Our goal is to utilize CAMP to relate to Palestine and its rich and multifaceted textures (traditional/ historical backdrop embedded within contemporary ambitions), while encouraging and strengthening international communications as well. We believe that a contemporary art museum must be a flexible, living organism; an expanding space that will facilitate the realization of cultural projects, empower creative individuals of all nationalities, and avoid stagnation that might otherwise act negatively in like developments. For this reason, we envision CAMP’s essence not solely as a physical place (for that would undermine our working philosophy and limit creative potential), but as an authentic, accessible, and fluid entity, a nomadic site where dialogue, growth, and resourceful experimentation are encouraged.
Our project involves the biennial 'nomadic' movement of CAMP, its cumulative art collection and 'portable' structure. Every year, CAMP will find a temporary 'home' under the auspices of a 'host museum.' The 'host museums' – located across the globe – will be invited to interact with CAMP's presence and to initiate projects and exhibitions.
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Zoe Leonard
Untitled-Images from Palestine
1999
Born in 1961 in Liberty, NY.
In 1992 she had her first solo exhibition with her New York gallery Paula Cooper and was included in that year’s Documenta IX. Since then she has had solo exhibitions of her work at Jennifer Flay Gallery, Paris; The Renaissance Society at the University of Chicago, the Vienna Secession, Gallery Anadiel, Jerusalem; the Kunsthalle Basel, and the Philadelphia Museum of Art, to name a few.
Zoe’s visit to Jerusalem was initiated by her interest in capturing the many layers of social, economic, and historical information visible in humble, everyday objects. She visited Jerusalem on several occasions, wishing to focus on the inescapable features of the multi-textured fabric of the city’s substance. In Images from Palestine, she set about taking photographs of the assembled display of objects throughout the old city market streets of Jerusalem. Steering away from deliberate calculation, Zoe’s images taken in Jerusalem explore the visual language on the streets, capturing incidental details, which might be systematic of a greater cultural whole. For Zoe, the East Jerusalem photographs are seen as a kind of ‘found’ still life where the objects and their arrangements seem to be portraits of a specific time and place, as well as revealing the beauty and tenacity of human expression in the midst of a larger drift towards corporate monopolies and a global economy.
Aside from the more directly socio-political implications, there is also a sense of the rhythm of our lives – from the stacks of shoes to the piles of eggs. Her photographs relate to our endless production and consumption, while displaying an intrigue situated on how information and ideas are exchanged and travel through the world in objects and their packaging and presentation.
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