Khaled Jarrar’s multi-disciplinary practice spanning film, photography, performance, and sculpture explores modern power struggles and their sociocultural impact on ordinary citizens. Merging personal narratives with activism, his work compels us to reflect on interrelated themes of freedom; sovereignty, belonging; identity; home; resilience; and collective responsibility. Jarrar’s immersive approach blurs the line between artist and subject, resulting in an intimate portrayal of displacement’s physical, emotional and psychological toll. By documenting personal and collective experiences, his practice contributes to a broader effort to resist cultural erasure and reclaim agency. Engaging with Jarrar’s work is to engage with him, and by extension his people; making it deeply affecting, and impossible to ignore.

To fully experience Jarrar’s, work is to bear witness, to feel implicated, to have one’s heart opened. Tasting the olive oil he made from the trees he nurtured back to life on land he purchased with the proceeds from sculptures made of barrier wall fragments he chiseled off by hand is to literally drink the fruits of his labour. In so doing, we symbolically ingest the Sisyphean cycle of dispossession and attempted reclamation that begins with expropriated land (lost to Jarrar’s grandmother) and ends with the purchase of new land only made possible through the commodification of Palestinian suffering packaged as art objects sold to Collectors. This clever subversion, which serves to expose and disrupt the settler-colonial cycle of expropriation and exploitation, is present in much of Jarrar’s art.

Central to his work is the recycling and regeneration of materials and resources – from the concrete barrier wall ground and re-cast as sculptures (Upcycle the Wall) to the steel he removed from the US-Mexico border wall, repurposed and erected in front of the wall as a ladder-sculpture (Khaled’s Ladder). Jarrar also used financial proceeds from the sale of these concrete sculptures to buy land near his native home in Ramallah, where he practiced the bio-dynamic subsistence farming tradition learned from his grandmother to rehabilitate, and “liberate from toxins”, the soil and the 48 suffering olive trees living there. This multi-year process finally yielded olive oil 6 years later. And this too became art - the Unknown Olive Oil project - replete with stories of his culture which he shared, along with the oil. “Like the Palestinian ‘infiltrators’ [in Jarrar’s film of the same name] who merely wish to access their homeland, but use subterfuge and disguise to get there, the cans of oil will enter under false pretences, and these become part of the art object’s identity.”¹ The oil did in fact cross borders - from the West Bank to New York City - disguised as art objects. And this too became part of the story.

The sharing of the stories rooted in Palestinian culture, and ongoing oppression, keeps them alive; and that in turn keeps the culture alive. As Khaled said: “We’ve been under occupation all our lives and we never stop struggling to be free in our thought, free in our body, free in our land, sky – even our dreams are occupied. I have been dedicated to finding ways to heal from all the trauma by learning what has been lost: our story, the story of love, the story of solidarity, the story of hospitality. Our story is us, and we are the story of the people who have been fighting non-stop since so long, to make sure that we are not deleted from existence.”

¹ Baumann, H., (2023) “Morphing forms, undermining border regimes: in conversation with Khaled Jarrar”, field 9(1).