The Mediated Eye: The Lens is a Border

In the contemporary Palestinian landscape, the act of "seeing" is never neutral. For artists Rawan Joulani, Laila Abd Elrazaq, and Yara Mahajneh, the video lens serves as both a shield and a scalpel, dissecting the layers of a reality defined by constant monitoring and the restriction of speech. Though their aesthetic approaches diverge, they are united by an urgent inquiry into how power structures—both physical and digital—attempt to dominate the Palestinian body and narrative.

Rawan Joulani’s Changes in the Distance utilizes a high-altitude, observational lens to deconstruct the fragmented topography of Jerusalem. By zooming in on the layered complexities of Shuafat and its surroundings, she transforms the window into a border, capturing a "panoptic" view of social and political stratification without direct interaction. Her camera documents the landscape as a witness to an architecture of separation.

Shifting from the physical to the digital, Laila Abd Elrazaq employs biting satire to confront the modern mechanisms of erasure. Through the lens of 1980s infomercials and sarcastic tutorials, she exposes the absurdity of SLAPP-suits and social media censorship. Her work highlights how technology, once promised as a tool for liberation, is repurposed by the state to police patriotism and limit the human right to free expression.

Yara Mahajneh grounds these systemic critiques in the visceral and the personal. Drawing from the traumatic reality of an interrogation room, her surrealist journey depicts a distorted world where identity is at risk of total erasure.

Together, these works reveal a shared resistance. By satirizing the "infomercial" of state power, observing the "layers" of occupied space, and surrealizing the trauma of the "interrogation," these artists reclaim the power of the gaze in an age of all-encompassing surveillance.

Curator Rula Khoury

Rula Khoury is an art curator, historian, and critic, currently based in Haifa. She holds a Master’s degree in Art History from the University of Haifa and a second Master’s in Writing Art Criticism from the School of Visual Arts, New York.

Khoury served as General Director of the Arab Culture Association in Haifa (2020) and, prior to that, as Artistic Director of the Khalil Sakakini Cultural Center in Ramallah (2014). In 2014, as part of the Qalandiya International Biennale, she curated the Manam exhibition in Haifa and Mapping Procession, a street-based happening in Ramallah. She was also one of the curators of the Autonomous Biennale (2023, 2025).

Her art criticism has been published in various international magazines, including AWARE, Tohu Magazine, and Tribe Photo Magazine. She has also published two children’s books, one of them in collaboration with the Barjeel Foundation. In addition, Khoury has taught in higher education institutions, offering courses on the history of Palestinian art and the fundamentals of art history.

Her latest projects are the establishment of a new art gallery in Jaffa, Al-Mathaneh and ongoing international travel exhibition “The Lost Paintings: Prelude of Return”.

This exhibition forms part of the third symposium in the series Common Ground: Deconstructing Walls - Narrative and Recognition.

Opening event 27. Feb | 19:00

Atelierhaus der Akademie der Bildenden Künste

Lehargasse 6–8, 1060 Vienna