Conversation with Freda Guttman, artist & activist in support of Palestine: May 23, 2021 @ 16:00 EDT

5/18/2021

Freda Guttman, The Earth is Closing in on Us, 2005, this work was included in the March 8, 2021, ECH International Women's Day exhibit: Go; Rise and Strike. From her artist statement: This work fuses archival images of the Nakba with lines of text in red from the poetry of Mahmoud Darwish, the great Palestinian poet (1941- 2008). The Nakba of 1948, (‘catastrophe’ in Arabic), created three quarters of a million Palestinian refugees who fled to Jordan, Syria, Lebanon, the West Bank and the Gaza Strip. The haunting, iconic photographic images of the Nakba evoke the suffering they experienced and still do – imprinted forever are the forlorn lines of forsaken people moving over the horizon into the unknown, at the beginning of their long journey into dispossession and statelessness. Mahmoud Darwish himself shared that journey, having experienced imprisonment, statelessness and exile himself.

Freda Guttman, The Right of Return

Freda Guttman

Salah D. Hassan

The ECH is appalled by the ongoing violence, rising tensions, and the devastating loss of life in Palestine and Israel. The toll —particularly on civilians, including women and children — has already been far too great.

Please join us for a conversation with Freda Guttman, Montreal-based artist/activist and Professor Salah D. Hassan, Director of Global Studies in the Arts and Humanities, Michigan State University, Lansing, Michigan on Sunday, May 23 at 4 pm EDT.

Freda has been a constant voice of solidarity to Palestinian people over a lifetime of activism. She lives in Montreal and has worked as a printmaker, photographer and laterally, as an installation artist.

She has been a longtime supporter of the Embassy Cultural House, participating in the 1984 International Women's Day exhibit, as well as our most recent online IWD exhibit: Go; Rise and Strike in March 2021.

Her work has been featured in numerous solo and group exhibitions in Canada, the United States and internationally. Guttman has made her art practice and her political activism come together in a series of installations.

Among her installations that focus on Palestine/Israel are Diminish Your Cup and Two Family Albums: Canada Park, from 1994 to 2004.

Join us in solidarity with all those who support a just peace in the Middle East. We are calling for an immediate ceasefire.

As an artist-run project, the ECH condemns the May 15th unjustified ransacking and raid by Israeli Defense Force soldiers on Dar Yusuf Nasri Jacir for Art & Research, an independent art centre in Bethlehem. The raid, which destroyed computers and other office equipment, follows the burning of their urban farm earlier in the week. Attacks against cultural centres and other civil society organizations, including the media, are against international law.

The Dar Jacir urban farm burnt to the ground. Photo: Aline Khoury, credit: Dar Jacir newsletter, May 17,2021

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