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May 19, 2020 – Review
Sharif Waked’s “Balagan”
Orit Gat
The axiom that history is always written by the victors can be rejected by observing how different versions of it meet, merge, and are retold in shifting accounts that tell us as much about the present as the past. Sharif Waked’s work mediates between such versions. It does not explain or explore the histories of his homeland—Waked, born in 1964 in Nazareth to a Palestinian family who fled their hometown in 1948, is Palestinian by nationality and Israeli by citizenship—but confronts their clashing ideas of place, reminding viewers that pressing these versions of history can be an act of resistance. When the official version fails you, tell of that failure, again and again.
Waked works in several media, but his very short videos—often just a few seconds, always less than five minutes—set the tone and pace of the exhibition. By the entrance is a one-second video, Just a Moment No. 4 (Away From You) (2011), a black-and-white moving image of Egyptian singer Umm Kulthum stomping her foot while she sings. Under her elaborate dress, her high-heel goes up, then down, in an endless loop: a symbol of Middle Eastern culture in a motion associated with anxious waiting. Just a Moment work, …