Sour Things: The Door

Mirna Bamieh is a Palestinian artist who works with preservation as both culinary practice and political condition. Since leaving Jerusalem in 2023, she began the Sour Things series, each installation a fragment of an unlivable habitat.

 

The Door is the latest chapter of this home in dispersal. The ceramic curtain of raw white stones constructs a conditional passage, engaging the body into negotiation. In Arabic, ḥajar binds stone to prohibition; hajara means to migrate, to abandon. Close in sound, distinct in root, both trace a single rupture: separation. The stone that halts the body is the same that sets it in motion.

 

Maps and names of ingredients – zaatar, sumac, saffron, dill seeds, dates, pomegranate – circulate across sculptures and drawings. Against the weight of obstructions and enclosures, diasporic voices in the films attest to the persistence of what has always traversed: tastes, recipes, movement, forms of transmission that precede and exceed the borders.

 

The artist’s ancestors traded okra – bamieh – across the Levant and North Africa. Porcelain forms of the plant scatter across the ground. Too tender to speak and too heavy to swallow, reads one. Viscous memory, another. Some retain their shape; others collapse, split, as if pressure had altered their bodies from within. Yet viscosity resists severance. Dried to endure transit, the pod carries, in its cellular structure, a knowledge of return.

 

Extract from a text by Anne Davidian →