Emily Jacir

In 2009, Jacir participated in the Venice Biennale in the Palestinian Pavilion. She created a site-specific public project to take place in Venice during the Biennale. The Venice City Authorities shut down Jacir's project and refused to allow it to take place.

"Emily Jacir’s stazione (2008 - 2009) is an unrealised intervention on the number 1 vaporetto (water bus) line, a main transport route along the Grand Canal beginning at Lido winding its way to Piazzale Roma, ferrying audiences from one Biennale exhibition to another, by inserting Arabic text supplementing the existing Italian names at vaporetti stops and thus making the route bilingual. In the artist’s explanation, the work references the numerous Arab influences and exchanges in the history of Venice, its architecture, manufacturing, shipping, and of course in the process of these activities, language - that Arabic words too have filtered into the Venetian dialect - ‘divan’, ‘damasco’, ‘gabella’, amongst others."

"In Material for a Film (2005–ongoing) the displacement is total, as Jacir’s own identity is substituted for that of her subject, Wael Zuaiter, a Palestinian intellectual living in Rome who was assassinated in 1972 by Israeli agents, having been mistakenly identified as one of those responsible for the murder of Israeli athletes at the 1972 Olympics in Munich. The installation gathers together photographs, books, music, letters, interviews, telegrams, copies of the Italian magazine Rivoluzione Palestinese to which Zuaiter contributed, even a clip from a Pink Panther film in which he had a small part, to flesh out a life no longer there."

Active in the building of Ramallah's art scene since 1999, Jacir has also worked with various organizations including the A. M. Qattan Foundation, Al Ma'mal Foundation for Contemporary Art and the Sakakini Cultural Center. She has been involved in creating numerous projects and events such as Birzeit's Virtual Art Gallery. She also founded and curated the first International Video Festival in Ramallah in 2002. She curated a selection of shorts; Palestinian Revolution Cinema (1968 – 1982) which went on tour in 2007. Between 2000 - 2002 she curated several Arab Film programs in NYC with Alwan for the Arts including the first Palestinian Film Festival in 2002. She works as a full-time professor at the vanguard International Academy of Art Palestine since it opened its doors in 2006 and she also served on its Academic Board from 2006 through 2012. Jacir led the first year of the Ashkal Alwan Home Workspace Program in Beirut (2011-2012) and created the curriculum and programming after serving on the founding year of the Curricular Committee from 2010-2011.

She has exhibited extensively throughout the Americas, Europe, and the Middle East since 1994, holding solo exhibitions in places including New York City, Los Angeles, Ramallah, Beirut, London and Linz.

Jacir was born in Bethlehem in 1973, Jacir spent her childhood in Saudi Arabia, attending high school in Italy. She attended the University of Dallas, Memphis College of Art and graduated with an art degree. She divides her time between New York and Ramallah. She is the older sister of the filmmaker and artist Annemarie Jacir.

"Jacir is a quiet and mercurial art-world figure, less than a decade deep into her career, and her Boss show rejects the obvious opportunity presented for leverage, debutante-style, as a headliner on the New York art stage and in the media that starts here. In fact, the only character in sharp focus for this exhibition is Wael Zuaiter, a Palestinian intellectual killed by Israeli secret service agents following the murder of eleven Israeli athletes and a German police officer by the militant group Black September at the 1972 Munich Olympics."