Refusing to Meet Your Eye

Overview

August 1969, Leila Khaled and Salim Al-Issawi, two members of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP) hijack flight TWA840 on its way from Rome to Tel-Aviv, diverting it to Damascus Airport. Leila–the first female hijacker–describes details of the operation and the PFLP’s intentions behind blowing up the empty plane in Damascus in her autobiography, stating that a photographer hired by the PFLP was waiting at the airport to document the explosion for archival purposes. Nevertheless, he forgets to take off the cap of his camera lens, and the archive is left with a black photograph. The artist takes the black photograph as a point of departure for this work, investigating what images can tell us and how we read them in relation to historiography and the processes of archival ‘truth-making’.

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