Palestine Revisisted
Tirtza Even & Toby Millman

Tirtza Even and Toby Millman each translate their experiences of personal encounters in Palestine in their collaborative exhibition, Palestine Revisited. The two projects, Once a Wall or Ripple Remains by Tirtza Even and Access and Closure by Toby Millman each result from extensive stays in Palestine – on both sides of the borders dividing the occupied territories and Israel – during several periods spanning 1998 to 2008. These stays were translated into a body of visual and written material that include paper cutout maps, drawings, photographs, 3-D animations and video loops, as well as two individual book renderings of expanded material.

The two records, in very distinct ways, aim to incorporate the images’ passage through media and through the history impacting their perception. Thus they utilize everyday experience and history to address signs of forceful partitioning and containment beginning with the 1948 war and leading to the current construction of the wall, and most recently, the continued violent assaults in Lebanon and Gaza.

Using text that reflects on and questions the coherence and perception of the visual material, incorporating both humor and nuanced prose, the exhibition attempts to address the characteristics and consequences of the ongoing Israeli occupation on life in Palestine.

About the Artists

Trained as a photographer, Toby Millman also works with printmaking, audio, drawing and paper-construction to explore issues of mapping, borders, identity, and movement as they relate to geopolitics and civil society in and around Palestine. She recently completed an artist book at the Oregon College of Art and Craft titled, Access and Closure: stories from, in and out of an occupied Palestine, which is in numerous collections nationwide including the Getty Research Institute, Yale University and the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Her work has been exhibited throughout the US and internationally. She received a BA from Hampshire College and a MFA from the University of Michigan.  // tobymillman.com

A practicing video artist and documentary maker for the past ten years, Tirtza Even has produced both linear and interactive video work representing the less overt manifestations of complex and sometimes extreme social/political dynamics in specific locations (e.g. Palestine, Turkey, Spain, the U.S. and Germany, among others). Her work has appeared at the Modern Art Museum, NY, at the Whitney Biennial, the Johannesburg Biennial, as well as in many other festivals, galleries and museums in the United States, Israel and Europe, and has been purchased for the permanent collection of the Museum of Modern Art (NY), the Jewish Museum (NY), the Israel Museum (Jerusalem), among others. She has been an invited guest and featured speaker at numerous conferences and university programs, including the Whitney Museum Seminar series, the Digital Flaherty Seminar, Art Pace annual panel, ACM Multimedia, The Performance Studies International conference (PSI), The Society for Literature, Science, and the Arts conference (SLSA) and others. // tirtzaeven.info

Featured image: Access and Closure by Toby Millman. Image courtesy the artists.