Special event of Middle East Now 2023, in collaboration with Museo Novecento Firenze, an exhibition curated by Roï Saade
Museo Novecento – Piazza di Santa Maria Novella 10
14 October / 26 November 2023
(Monday/Sunday | 11:00am / 8:00pm – Closed on Thursday)
Opening with the participation of the curator: Saturday 14 October – 5.00pm
LANDING presents Maen Hammad’s long-term documentary project – a deep-dive into the world of Palestinian skateboarding, a manifesto on the interplay between skateboarding and liberation against architectures of control. It is a collaborative project that looks at the purposeful escape skateboarding provides to a handful of Palestinian skaters. As Maen Hammad — himself a skater — discovered, this purposeful escape is a radical form of resistance to a headspace of violence, situated in the layers of Israeli domination in Palestine.
This work is a hypothesis around the power of skateboarding, space, and resistance. The reader is pulled into the interpretive dance of skateboarding and the built environment. They see the assembling of a community, and most importantly, a centering on the imagination. The body of work includes images and text to provide a portal into the lives of Palestinian skaters. The text is moving, interrupted, and dances with time, while the shadows of the project live in the imagery. The combination provides the full picture: the Palestinian refusal to succumb. Woven throughout are also tales of the artist’s experience of displacement, diaspora, and partial return.
Maen Hammad (1992, Jerusalem) is a photographer, director and human rights activist. His work has been published in the New Yorker and Time Magazine, among others. He is a member of the Magnum Foundation. He lives and works between Ramallah and Washington.
A special event in collaboration with Museo Novecento Firenze
Exhibition curated by Roï Saade
Set design by Archivio Personale
