On Women in Revolutions is a research project organised by the A. M. Qattan Foundation in partnership with the Institute of Women’s Studies at Birzeit University, Gallery One and Ramallah Cinema Club. The project takes the form of a series of interventions in preparation for a central event in 2019 on revolutionary women.
This project arises from the vital importance to investigate worldwide leading women figures of twentieth-century revolutions. Much literature has been written on the subject, including diaries and memoirs that describe the women’s everyday interactions within patriarchal social and political structures of liberation struggles as well as against colonial and authoritarian regimes. Figures like Dalal al-Moghrabi, Djamila Bouhired and Kathleen Cleaver have become iconic to contemporary movements and anti-state uprisings. Nevertheless, many stories and accounts remain to be told about women’s leadership in resistance movements and rebellions who remain invisible. Many such leading revolutionary women who were fundamental pillars of the movements disappeared from prominence after their liberation struggles peaked, left to either lead ordinary domestic lives, were imprisoned for years or were absorbed into the lower ranks of the institutions of post-liberation political regimes.
Chapter One – Women and Liberation
The seminar sets a theoretical background for the project and seeks to rethink past and present relationships between feminist histories, women’s movements, women’s representations and the anti-colonial liberation movement in Palestine and similar movements across different geographies and struggles. It probes the multifaceted and contradictory representations of women in literature, media, film, photography, music and the visual arts. In so doing, we aim to bring conversations about liberation struggles in Palestine and elsewhere together, to foster a contemporary dialogue informed by a range of rich and complex experiences. The seminar is concerned with unearthing and exploring overlooked political histories, spaces, practices, subjectivities and revolutionary processes in order to shed new light on the relationships between feminisms, liberation movements and their shared de-colonial projects, and women’s representations at times of fraught relations.
Chapter Two – Re-enactment
In his film, Here and Elsewhere (1974), Jean-Luc Godard underlined the patriarchal construction of women’s roles in the Palestinian revolution including through their media representation. The 1960s re-emergence of the feminist movement in the global north was followed by a transformation in how the Palestinian revolution consciously worked on the visual grammar of women’s representation in the Western media to gain international empathy for their cause. The exhibition is presented in four sections and is concerned with how iconic women imagery of the 1960s and 1970s is contemporaneously subverted.
The first section considers the logic of Google’s algorithmic archiving and how it influences image search results. The installation suggests the transformation in the semantics and historic value of words such as “women” and “revolution” through the search engine’s selective range of results, which elicit other contemporary terms from the Web to also be displayed alongside historic iconographies.
The second section comprises two videos depicting the patriarchal framing of women’s roles in the Palestinian revolution exemplified through footage of women reciting speeches.
The third section is a series of old photographs restaged within a contemporary setting. This juxtaposition of eras undermines the shifting values of the Palestinian liberation project and its present state-building manifesto.
The fourth section explores the institutional hierarchies and role of women in the Palestinian Civil Police Force through a video projection documenting recent interviews with a number of women working within the police ranks.
Chapter Three – On Representation
The late 1960s saw a historic upsurge in dramatic social conflicts across the world with multiple popular rebellions against military and bureaucratic elites. Against that backdrop, in 1968, many leftist film-makers and photographers shifted their attention to revolutionary movements like the Black Panther Party (from 1966), the anti-Israeli occupation of Palestine (from 1967) and anti-Vietnam War movement (from 1964).
Many of these film-makers and photographers visited Palestine between the late 1960s and mid-1970s to document those in exile, freedom fighters and the genesis of the Palestinian liberation project. Part of the documented visual material focused on women freedom fighters carrying rifles and fighting alongside men. The depiction of women in these visual documentations cannot be read in isolation from the global feminist movements of the 1960s, founded on the principles of civil rights and political freedom.
The exhibition invites visual artists to reflect on women and their representations, the agency and patriarchal delineation of their roles before, during and after revolution.
Chapter Four – Out of Reels
The film programme assembles a selection of local and international film that shed a light on women’s realities across the world, in Palestine and the Arab World. The films variously explore narratives on themes ranging from resilience and forced exile to alternative forms of everyday protest and prison diaries. The films tell stories of women fighting against white supremacy and oppression; of their experiences in the face of patriarchal violence and domination; and of disparity, helplessness and dispossession. The programme also includes films portraying women’s narratives in the wake of revolutions within the ensuing political and social post-colonial national structures.