This image is presented in the exhibition Unruly Archives, curated by Amin Alsaden. The exhibition brings together artists whose work employs archival traces to underscore the global footprint of war and organized violence, and speak to dimensions of conflict that are usually overlooked or deliberately suppressed. As such, the images challenge the correlation between conflict and specific regions, particularly South West Asia and North Africa, while highlighting international complicity through a history of colonialism as well as recent political meddling and military interventions. Organized violence destroys not only human beings and their environments, but also has a lasting, traumatic, and often invisible impact that brings to the fore questions of memory, representation, culture, nationhood, and belonging.

Emily Jacir’s series ex libris, from which this image is extracted, was initially made for dOCUMENTA (13), Kassel, Germany. The project was instigated by the artist’s interest in examining issues of national patrimony, particularly in relation to the dispossession and displacement of Palestinians. Jacir embarked on a research project to specifically discover the fate of printed matter. At the Jewish National and University Library in Jerusalem, she found books that were taken from Palestinian homes, institutions, and various other depositories during the 1948 Nakba (Palestinian exodus), catalogued under the code “AP” (acronym for “Abandoned Property”). Her project revolves around documenting and revealing traces of the community to whom these books belong, especially inscriptions that connect these books to their original owners, thus raising questions about what happens to cultural patrimony when expropriated by another state and culture. She created an installation from the material she gathered at the Library. This image captures the musical score of the song Mawtini (My Homeland), which the artist found in one of the “AP” books. Based on lyrics by a Palestinian poet, Ibrahim Tuqan, and set to music by Lebanese composers, the Brothers Flayfel, Mawtini has been considered the national anthem of Palestine since the 1930s—and it is also a popular song throughout the Arab world.

The following is part of a longer statement by the artist: “ex libris (2010-2012) commemorates the approximately thirty thousand books from Palestinian homes, libraries, and institutions that were looted by Israeli authorities in 1948. Six thousand of these books are kept and catalogued at the Jewish National and University Library in Jerusalem under the designation “A.P.” (Abandoned Property). I took photographs of these books with my cell phone during repeated visits to the library over the course of two years. Initially I focused on documenting the hand-written inscriptions in the books, in particular the names of the owners. But slowly, over time as I worked I became more interested in the small traces left behind in the books... stains, scribbles, marginalia, scraps of paper. There is a strong relationship between the books and the land, as well as notions of custodianship and preservation. ex libris not only addresses the looting and destruction of books but also raises questions regarding repatriation and restitution.”