Oraib Toukan
Oraib Toukan is an interdisciplinary artist, educator, and scholar, born in 1977 in Boston, USA, and raised in Amman, Jordan. She lives between Berlin and Amman and is currently a EUME fellow at the Forum Transregionale Studien, Berlin, in collaboration with the Harun Farocki Institute. She holds a PhD from the Ruskin School of Art, the University of Oxford (2019). Her practice spans photography, film, and text, often drawing on the lexicon of the Arabic language to explore the alternative understanding of images. She is the author of Sundry Modernism: Materials for a Study of Palestinian Modernism (Sternberg Press, 2017) and of essay films including When Things Occur (2017), Offing (2021), and Via Dolorosa (2021). Her work has been exhibited at the KW Institute for Contemporary Art, Berlin; the Mori Art Museum, Tokyo; the Asia Pacific Triennial, Brisbane; the Istanbul Biennale; and the Heidelberger Kunstverein.
خط الأفق / KHAT AL—UFUQ
OFFING
2021
video, 28′18″
Edition 1/5
Collection of the Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw
The title Offing refers to the distant horizon of the sea and has also come to mean something that is to be expected or about to appear. In the context of this film, the offing is the view from Gaza towards the vast Mediterranean Sea, which offers a feeling of total freedom, when there is none. The film does not use the offing to avoid the violence of the Israeli state but offers a view of it, contrasting the will to see with the way people are forced to continuously hear the sounds of destruction and the machinery of war. At one point the narrator, Salman Nawati, an artist once living in Gaza, says: “Night and sound are among the hardest things in war…. You cannot imagine its size, its mass, what it does inside of you.” The film predates the current genocide, reflecting the pain, violence, resilience and resistance in Gaza over many years.