Microreview: Historical materials unfit for museumization

The Earth Doesnt Tell Its Secrects His Fahter Once Said Novel1
The Earth Doesnt Tell Its Secrects His Fahter Once Said Novel2
Date
2021 October
Subtitle
Mohamed Abdelkarim reviews Noor Abuarafeh, 'The Earth Doesn’t Tell its Secrets' — His father once said, paperback: 255 pages, Sharjah Art Foundation, 2017
Type
microreview
Author / Publisher
Mohamed Abdelkarim for NewsLibrary
Author Info

Abdelkarim is an artist and researcher. He considers performance as a research method and a practice through which he produces texts and images that embody the forms of poetry, scripts, sound, and video. His work is concerned with the performances of renegades in times of crisis, and how they complicate the relationship between geography and the fugitive. https://mohamedabdelkarim.com

Language

English

Also published here

Newsletter No. 39

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Reviewed Publication

Noor Abuarafeh, 'The Earth Doesn’t Tell Its Secrets' — His father once said, paperback: 255 pages, Sharjah Art Foundation, 2017

Links

Publisher website,

View a video documentation of the publication.

Image Credits

All images copyright Noor Abuarafeh

The book is presented as a novel that creates a meta rumor: the artist creates rumors of rumors. The narrative depicts events through dramatic components, redefining the notion of a museum from personal experience, and questioning the role of historical materials within the collective memory of real/unreal occurrences, and of political context as a catalyst for most events.

The artist problematizes the relationship between museums and history in a time of crisis. The novel focuses on history in the context of Palestine. By framing the Nakba, 1948, as an ongoing crisis unfit to be museumized, it ​demonstrates that history is not located behind us, but is a movement forward that is still going on.

"Visual artist writing a novel" is the approach, a formative spine that bolsters the whole book. The complexity of visual narrative is made strongly apparent by the visual materials, which include architectural plans, floor tiles, paintings, B/W photos with notations, samples of wedding invitations, collections of museum dust, and expired negative photography.