An exhibition in collaboration with Dar Yusuf Nasri Jacir for Art and Research.
Exploring themes of land and cultural resistance, Water like tears, flour like soil is a group exhibition formed in partnership between ICD Brookfield Place Arts and Dar Jacir for Art and Research. This project is part of the ICD Brookfield Place Arts Program, which explores ways of supporting regional creatives and the UAE’s cultural landscape through year-round programming and exhibitions. Water like tears, flour like soil hosts collaborators from Dar Jacir to explore ways in which collective narratives and storytelling connect across time, lineage, and landscapes.
Located in Bethlehem, along the historic Hebron–Jerusalem Road, Dar Jacir is a family home from the 1880s that transformed into an artist-run initiative in 2014. Over the last decade, Dar Jacir has been a site of hospitality and exchange for artists and researchers from Bethlehem, across Palestine, and worldwide—hosting generations of stories and imaginations amongst its terraces filled with sunflowers and olive, citrus, and almond trees.
Organized by ICD Brookfield Place Arts and curated by Camila Palomino, Water like tears, flour like soil brings together artists with deep ties to Dar Jacir through experiences of residency, community, and exchange. The title of the show is inspired by a traditional saying included in a performance by former Dar Jacir Land Program resident Shayma Hammad: “Pour the water like tears upon the flour until it becomes like grains of soil”; a saying shared by Palestinian women who organise grieving rituals of kneading, baking, and eating bread together after a loss, recalling the sacred transformation and healing between the body and the earth.
Participating artists include:
Ahmed Al-Aqra, Samer Albarbari and Duncan Campbell, Mohammed Al Hawajri, Aline Baiana, Adam Broomberg and Rafael Gonzalez, Mohammed Hadia / Biishoss, Hazem Harb, Shayma Hamad, Emily Jacir, Stéphanie Janaina, Dina Mattar, Dina Mimi, Mohannad Smama with Dirar Kalash, and more.
About Dar Jacir for Art and Research:
Founded in 2014, Dar Jacir for Art and Research is an interdisciplinary experimental learning hub that fosters cross-cultural and intergenerational exchanges. A process and practice-oriented platform, it is devoted to educational, cultural, and agricultural exchanges and productions for the Bethlehem community and beyond. Through a participatory approach, collective knowledge is created, experimental new works are produced, and structures for care and repair are fostered. Dar Jacir is the only artist-led space in the Southern West Bank that provides arts education and residency programs for both Palestinians and internationals, operating across visual arts, sound, cinema, performance, dance, literature, and agriculture. Together with its diverse community of artists, farmers, researchers and cultural workers Dar Jacir brings together a broad public that is deeply involved in community activity and collaboration in a particularly shared territory. Intimacy is at the heart of the project. Artist-led and women-led, it facilitates and gives agency to artists and participants to lead, ask questions, and encounter international and local artists, thinkers, and cultural leaders. Emily Jacir and Aline Khoury are the co-directors.
About Camila Palomino:
Camila is a Peruvian-American curator, researcher, and writer from Queens, New York. Her research is invested in aesthetic, political, and transregional relationships between urban infrastructures and memory. Camila has organized exhibitions and programs at institutions including Abrons Arts Center, Hessel Museum of Art, and Sculpture Center. She has previously held curatorial and research positions at the Vera List Center for Art and Politics at The New School, 58th Carnegie International and The Drawing Center. Her writing and interviews have been published in exhibition catalogs and in periodicals such as Art21, CURA., Mousse, and Topical Cream, and she was the guest co-editor of the fifth issue of Viscose Journal, “Retail” which focuses on the role of fashion retail within urban spatial politics. In 2023, she was awarded a research grant from The Graham Foundation. She is currently a resident on NTS Radio where she hosts Saywite, a radio plaGorm for contemporary and experimental music from the Andes, Abya Yala, and their diasporas. She serves on the Board of Dar Jacir.