Where We Come From: A Profile of Palestinian Artist Emily Jacir.

• Author: Moore, Anne Elizabeth
• Position: Essay

Emily Jacir doesn't go looking for controversy. But the Palestinian conceptual artist often finds herself immersed in it. Even a seemingly innocuous project for the Venice Biennale's fifty-third international art exhibition this year was too much for someone in power, since the project was canceled with little explanation. The Biennale entitled the entire exhibition "Making Worlds," but it didn't end up including her world, even though it had awarded her a Golden Lion award in 2007.

Her project, stazione , intended for the offsite exhibition Palestine c/o Venice, was so simple it might have appeared to be an official act by the Venice Board of Tourism. Jacir proposed translating the signs along the Route 1 Grand Canal waterbus route into Arabic, to sit alongside the Italian names.

Yet this is a conversation the Biennale--or the city council, or the waterbus company, it remains unclear who--decided in March they didn't want to hear.

The proposal was eventually hung in the Palestinian Pavilion, with a description, map, and retouched photographs. But it did not have nearly the impact that the actual project would have had, with Arabic signs affixed to docks out in the city of Venice.

"I was devastated when they canceled the project, especially because this piece was based on such a beautiful and positive history of a shared heritage and cultural exchange between the Arab world and Venice," Jacir explains. "That a translation from Italian into Arabic was deemed so threatening that it should be stopped reflects a most depressing state of affairs."

Jacir has withstood overt censorship or institutional reframing several times in her politically charged career, but far more often she's simply misinterpreted. Following her first exhibition, Memorial to 418 Villages Which Were Destroyed, Depopulated, and Occupied by Israel in 1948 , writers asked the artist what she was trying to teach people about Palestine. Regarded as one of her most successful works, the piece is a refugee tent embroidered with the English names of lost villages. Completed in 2001 through the labor of 140 New York volunteers, originally from Palestine, Israel, and elsewhere, the piece stands as a testament not only to the unrecorded fact of those villages' existence, but of the possibility of people working together to repair ongoing violence in the West Bank.

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"Maybe what was successful about Memorial ," Jacir offers, "was that viewers saw a conversation...