Joyce Joumaa Untitled

Joyce Joumaa’s site-specific installation on five video screens in Toronto’s Yonge-Dundas square probes multiple modes of Palestinian representation, transnational community building, and solidarity by bringing together Chile-based football team Club Palestino with Mustafa Abu Ali’s 1974 documentary film They Do Not Exist. 

Chile is home to the largest Palestinian community outside of the Middle East, for whom Club Palestino, a soccer team based in the city of Santiago, plays a central role. Founded in 1916 by Palestinian immigrants, the team plays in the first division—Chilean Primera División—and is one of the top teams in the country. To use the artist’s words: “the club represents the Palestinian people and has been a foundational pillar of a diasporic community to which the Palestinian struggle is a central mobilizing force.” The club’s support in Chile speaks to the longstanding international solidarity the community has been able to generate in Latin America.

In Untitled, Joumaa presents us with a recording of a Playstation game featuring Palestino. The rich, luminous colours of the game—the saturated green field with white demarcation lines, the bold and bright uniforms, coupled with bursts of red and black in the signs for the club and in advertisements throughout the stadium—mimic the colours of the Palestinian flag. Layered within the game’s footage are scenes from Abu Ali’s documentary They Do Not Exist. Abu Ali, a pioneer of Palestinian cinema who lived in exile most of his life and was one of the founders of the Palestine Film Unit, titled his documentary after remarks by former Israeli Prime Minister Golda Meir, who proclaimed in a 1969 interview that Palestinians “do not exist.”¹Cited in Kaleem Hawa’s “From Palestine to the World, the Militant Film of the PLO,” in The New York Review, October 17, 2020. https://www.nybooks.com/online/2020/10/17/from-palestine-to-the-world-the-militant-film-of-the-plo/ The film focuses on the Nabatieh Refugee camp located in southern Lebanon and its bombing by Israel the same year the film was made. 

Joumaa, herself a Lebanese artist whose practice is rooted in documentary filmmaking, lauds this film. They Do Not Exist was novel not only for its subject matter, but also for its approach. Arguably mundane yet beautiful and poetic footage opens and punctuates the film, as Abu Ali shares scenes of everyday life for diasporic Palestinians living in the camp. Young children ride their tricycles and enjoy popsicles in the sun, while mothers hang laundry and bake bread. These moments are braided together with images of the recently destroyed camp, and interviews conducted with an array of people affected by the bombings and ongoing occupation—from grieving mothers to children, to citizens, soldiers, and politicians—giving them a voice via the opportunity to speak for themselves. These violent scenes and interviews mirror what we are witnessing today, reminding us that what has changed for Palestinians in the intervening 50 years is only an unfathomable increase in violence, displacement, and death, with a genocide unfolding in real time, with full visibility as our global community watches together, seemingly unable to see. 

Joumaa’s choice to record the video game footage arose from the lack of online footage of the actual Club Palestino: an eerie and unexpected connection to Abu Ali’s title, and to the erasure of Palestinian life and culture. The game’s avatars bring forth a nuanced representation, and an alternative means of retaining Palestinian visibility and presence  when faced with such elimination. What does it mean when such avatars are coupled with a documentary film that exists within a more traditional genre of filmic representation? The coupling of the football club in its digital iteration with Abu Ali’s film generates an important space of political potential, community visibility, and transnational support. It’s empowering (and heartwarming) to know that Playstation players worldwide can choose to be a part of, and play for, Club Palestino—a simple, beautiful, and important metaphor of choosing to ally with, and be on, Palestine’s team. By punctuating the gaming footage with They Do Not Exist, Joumaa does not let us forget the contemporary moment of ongoing death, occupation, and land dispossession. In bringing together these two disparate modes of seeing and representing Palestinian communities, the artist asks us to watch, play, gather, and support, in solidarity. 

Joumaa reminds us that sport—like art—is political, and that the two share many metaphorical and literal overlaps of existence. Both cater to and navigate fandom, engage in a “playing field,” and are founded in concepts of “winning.” Incongruously, in the gaming footage, Palestino is playing Manchester United, a club from an entirely different league, based in the UK, on the other side of the world. Watching this impossible matchup unfold reminds us that the collective gathering, the joy and the anticipation of witnessing the spectacle of sport IRL extends to online spaces and communities, communities where borders and passports and legal status do not usually hold sway. It also calls to mind the discordant history of these two places, with the Balfour Declaration having been issued in 1917, around the same time the club was founded. 

Presented within Yonge-Dundas Square, the Playstation footage, with its catchy colours and the bustle of soccer players running around, visually settles into the city center with ease. Like the myriad surrounding high-definition screens selling consumable objects and lifestyles, from branded clothing to blockbuster Hollywood movies, to the latest iPhone, this work could read as an advertisement for video games, but on closer inspection it disrupts the space of consumption and spectacle. In its site-specificity, Joumaa’s work highlights the connection between politics, consumption, gaming, and war, referring to the performative aspects of these things, but also, importantly, to virtual reality and gaming’s direct role in training and arming soldiers for war. Her work hinges on multiple visual languages and social spaces, leaning into the functional flexibility of Yonge-Dundas Square as a commercial epicenter of our settler-colonial-capitalist nation, and as a site for protest and public acts of speaking truth to power. 

Joumaa’s gesture of placing this work in such a public space foregrounds the contradiction between visibility and seeming blindness, while at the same time safeguards images of Palestinian suffering. 

Curated by Heather Canlas Rigg

Presented by CONTACT in partnership with Yonge-Dundas Square

• 1
  Cited in Kaleem Hawa’s “From Palestine to the World, the Militant Film of the PLO,” in The New York Review, October 17, 2020. https://www.nybooks.com/online/2020/10/17/from-palestine-to-the-world-the-militant-film-of-the-plo/