Artworks

Wild Cards by Zeina Barakeh is a presentation of video animations and works on paper. The title of Barakeh’s exhibition references both the unpredictability of war, as well as ID cards and credit cards that are connected to warfare. Her video, Homeland Insecurity (2016), for example, draws on current events that illustrate the mechanisms of war, as well as the history of cotton as a core resource in the economic growth and spread of Empire from the Islamic Era through the Crusades, and from slavery into the present. The main characters are the Centaur – a male human head and torso with a lower body of a horse – and the Horse, an avatar of the artist’s own body with the head of a horse. The colonizing Centaurs are based on the mounted soldiers of the British Mandate of Palestine (1920–1948), in struggle with the Horses who, as stand-ins for colonized subjects, embody agency and resistance. At once both humorous and unsettling, Barakeh’s painstaking animations invite a deeper consideration of how we related to histories of imperialism and their manifestations in our present-day. Wild Cards featured video work Homeland Insecurity (2016), Slam Bang Blue (2018), and Projections From the Third Half [Cloud Storm (2020), as well as photographs from Holy Land and Homeland Insecurity series.