Occupied Palestinian Territories, West Bank, August 2013. After grueling traffic at the Qalandia checkpoint, a young man enjoys a cigarette in his car as traffic finally clears on the last evening of Ramadan. A sheep, this year's sacrificial lamb for Eid, fills the entire passenger seat. Tanya Habjouqa/NOOR from the series «Occupied Pleasures» 2013.

Tanya Habjouqa: Birds Unaccustomed to Gravity + Picture of the Year: Exhibition & Seminar

 
Award-winning photographer, filmmaker and anthropologist Tanja Habjouqa (Jordan/US) opens Fotografihuset’s 2024 programme with a joint exhibition and seminar organised in collaboration with Preus Museum and OsloMet, based on her ongoing work from Palestine; Birds Unaccustomed to Gravity.
 
Alongside Habjouqa’s outdoor exhibition, the Project Space will screen all winning entries to Årets Bilde 2023 (Picture of the Year); the Press Photographers’ Club’s annual prize for the best in Norwegian photo and video journalism.  
 
Having spent 13 years in East Jerusalem with a husband and two Palestinian children, Tanya Habjouqa’s photographic eye has much in common with the Palestinian proverb “A distress makes you laugh, and a distress makes you cry,”  which was recited in her book “Occupied Pleasures”, which TIME Magazine mentioned as one of the best photo books in 2015.
 
With her unique perspective, she has mapped the physical and psychological boundaries that have defined Palestinian life during the occupation and up until the watershed on October 7. last year, when Gaza was hermetically closed to outside journalists. Habjouqa’s first solo exhibition in Norway, which is titled “Birds Unaccustomed to Gravity”, also includes photos taken on the West Bank in late November 2023 and includes excerpts from both “Occupied Pleasures” and the ongoing series “Birds Unaccustomed to Gravity”.  Both series trace the losses and victories that define Palestinian life; shattering confrontations, microscopic liberations, and the forging, holding, and remembering of space. She explores the tensions within and around landscapes and characters etched into the lives of the land’s occupied and occupying populations.
 

In connection with the opening weekend, Fotografihuset – in collaboration with Preus museum and OsloMet – organise the seminar “Images from Gaza: The Politics of Representation”.

In addition to contributions from Tanya Habjouqa and philosopher Arne Johan Vetlesen, there will be a dialogue between these two and, among others, political scientist Sylo Taraku; head of the research group MEKK (Media in War and Conflict) at OsloMet Kristin Skare Orgeret; social anthropologist, researcher, journalist, editor and author Anne Hege Simonsen; head of the Palestine Committee Line Khateeb and photo editor in the paper VG Espen Rasmussen.

March 13 – SEMINAR in collaboration with Preus Museum and OsloMet: «Images from Gaza: The Politics of Representation»,  17–19.30 in OsloMet’s auditorium Athene 1, Pilestredet 46, Clara Holst hus. Free entry.
 
EXHIBITION OPENING in collaboration with Preus Museum: Birds Unaccustomed to Gravity Årets Bilde, 16 March, at 15.00 at Fotografihuset at Sukkerbiten.
 
ABOUT THE ARTIST
Born in Jordan and raised between Texas and the Middle East, award-winning journalist, artist, filmmaker and anthropologist Tanya Habjouqa (b. 1975) has become a leading advocate for innovation in photojournalism and documentary practice. With a mordant sense of irony fused with unstinting, forensic interrogations of the implications of geopolitical conflict on human lives, Habjouqa weaves narratives infused with folklore and dark humor. Trained in anthropology and journalism, with an MA in Global Media and emphasis on Middle Eastern politics, her work focuses on identity politics, occupation, dispossession, human rights and subcultures of the Levant.
 
She is the co-founder of Rawiya, the first female photography collective from the Middle East, and is a mentor in the Arab Documentary Program, providing marginalized narratives and narrative-creators with the space and skills to tell their stories. Her work is in the collections of the MFA Boston, the Institut du Monde Arab, and the Carnegie Museum of Art. She is a Nikon Europe Ambassador and advisor and teacher for the NOOR Foundation and the Nikon NOOR academy. Habjouqa is represented by the East Wing Gallery.

New exhibition: All the whisperings of the world: 22.9 – 22.10.2023

Photo: Siri Ekker Svendsen

The group exhibition All the Whisperings of the World opens 22.9.23 at 18pm

With artisits Siri Ekker Svendsen, Emanuel Cederqvist, Nicolai Howalt, Ori Gersht

The group exhibition All the Whisperings of the World features four artists who each in their own way address the relationship between nature and human identity, how we explain ourselves through nature, how we seek refuge in it, and how we relate to what is about to disappear before us.

Inspired by her own deadly allergy to Brazil nuts and the accelerating loss of nature worldwide, Oslo-based Siri Ekker Svendsen explores the connections between the complexity of nature and the vulnerability of the body in the seriesAll the Whisperings of the World, from which this exhibition lends its title. Ekker Svendsen employs various tools in her artistic work: analogue and digital photography, mobile phones, binoculars, telescopes, microscopes, magnifying glasses, and electronic micro-scanning, each functioning as different pairs of eyes representing different perspectives on reality. The exhibited images are an excerpt from the book with the same title, which was published in 2022 by Multipress.

The spruce tree “Gamla Tjikko” stands in a deserted landscape on a mountainside in Dalarna, Sweden, and is considered the oldest tree in the world with its impressive 9,600 years. A single photographic negative of this exceptional spruce has become 97 unique images in Danish artist Nicolai Howalts latest installation, Old Tjikko, collectively forming a portrait series of one of the world’s oldest organisms. Howalt’s practice encompasses documentary photography, installation, and conceptual art, often rooted in chemical processes, science, and artistic exploration.

Emanuel Cederqvists artistic practice explores how we interpret and read the forms of the landscape in the light of our own memories, experiences and our common cultural heritage. In his series Observatören he presents photographs of an abandoned weather station in Sarek National Park, which was inhabited by two weather observers between 1914 and 1918 until one of them disappeared in a snowstorm. The mystery remained unsolved, and the weather station remained untouched until Cederqvist’s photographic documentation over a century later. Cederqvist lives and works as an artist and photographer in Gothenburg and is a member of the artist collective Blackbook Publications.

Throughout Ori Gershts career, his work has been concerned with the relationship between history, memory, and landscape. In the video work The Forest, he traces his wife’s family history to the prehistoric forest around Kosiv in Ukraine, where the camera glides through a wooded landscape as one tree after another begins to fall to the ground. Gersht finds not only a backdrop in this landscape of trees and hills, but also a player: a participant in personal, national, global, and geological history. Gersht was born in Israel in 1967 but has lived in London for over 30 years.

Welcome to the opening on Friday 22.9.23 at 6pm at Fotografihuset at Sukkerbiten in Bjørvika!

Ori Gehrst / The Forest

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