INVERSION OF BOUNDARIES
IN PALESTINE BOXES

A photographic essay by Ibrahim Quraishi

The microcosm of TIME and HISTORY is so intertwined that everything pertaining to the realm of the sacred becomes entangled beyond the frame of its own subjectivity. It is difficult to imagine except when looking at the miniaturization of that very frame that isolated details may give us an objective clue to our understanding of an imagined whole which in itself is normatively incomprehensible and beyond the REAL.

For this reason I have chosen a series of photographs that I took in Palestine during my last and 3rd visit to the Holy Land on a personal investigation on the transcendental origins of a visual language and its ineffable reality of my personal infancy in seeing through the prisms of my own making. It is based on an imagined reality searching for images to construct an artistic narrative from within.

Inversion of Boundaries is not meant as a journalistic documentation on reality and since lived experiences betrays its own contradictions, when attempting to capture it. The idea of pure duration with lived time inhabits the philosophy of life that merely allows for the removal of motion from the realm of experience and cast complex shadows on the attainability of the desired object that is being captured by the lens as gazed by the problem of positionality and the camera lens.

An image is representative of how artists and humans keep inventing games through infancy. The cat and mouse game of REAL politics encompassing the Israeli/Palestinian drama and their daily realities not only demonstrates the obvious tensions within, but a look into the world of frozen miniscule moments inside the frames of their lens are themselves beyond REAL recognition. The cognate is to look into the world of scraps and toys that one plays in, which in itself reveals how everyone becomes representative of humanity’s little scrap dealers with what-ever junk coming ones way from what ever direction. Be it inside our occidental cage or the obvious human prisons Ghettos called Gaza and West Bank, humans preserve profane objects as holy grails and the behavior that accompanies the reverence becomes part of an extremely symbolic Truth of how everything which is old becomes part of the sacred luggage people carry in hoping to find meaning beyond their per-sonalized physical frames of object to subject.

However, the objectification of the subjects can no more be crystalized than in the Palestinian context, for example the bombed out toilet of Yassar Arafat inside Mukata’a (his Chancellery) in Ramallah. Merely to shoot images as a souvenir is in itself representative of ones objectification of a situation gone so perverted. I was only inhabiting briefly as moment inside an obvius complex web of lived imrisonment. But as psychoanalysis shows us, most experiences are those that belong not to the subject but to it. The Inversion of Boundaries finally occurs when the objective context changes in its subjective reality within the momentary perception of how the focus of the lens can shift while one is toying with pure temporal intervals of firing mini shots that inevitably captures an unsuspected fleeting moment inside the very prison one is forced to acknowledge and come to terms with.

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