Noah Simblist Out of Site

“Out of site is about the architecture of conflict in Israel-Palestine. In the summer of2008, I participated in a program run by the Israel Committee Against HousingDemolitions (ICAHD), which gathers international activists to rebuild Palestinian homes destroyed by the Israeli government. While living and working in the village of Anata, I came to see that a house being destroyed and rebuilt connects the practice of everyday life with much larger historical and ideological currents. As a result, the symbolism of the construction or destruction of architecture has enormous symbolic weight. Identity becomes interwoven between the layers of building blocks and rubble, which quickly become more abstract than their mereutility.

There is a separation barrier that is being constructed through Anata. Dividing two national identities and cultures within one socio-economic fabric, this wall has been compared by its critics to its predecessors in South Africa, Warsaw and Berlin.These powerful allusions speak to the depth that this wall and the language surrounding it cuts into the landscape and to the collective psyche of its inhabitants.

Out of Site investigates the religious, political, and nationalist symbolism inherent in ideas of home, land, and borders. Out of Site speaks to the specters of diaspora and exile that haunt the landscape of Israel-Palestine, a site which seems out of reach, always bathed in its utopian and messianic mythology.”

Noah Simblist is an artist and writer living in Dallas, TX. His work explores iconography that deals with the political role of the artist, the concept of forgiveness, Christian Zionism and the idea of home in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. An Assistant Professor of Art at SMU, he won the 2007 Moss/Chumley award and has written for ART LIES and Art Papers magazines as well asGlasstire.com, Zerodegreesart.com and …might be good. Recent projects include co-editing issue #56 of Art Lies magazine with Michelle White, Assistant Curator at the Menil, around the theme of collectivism and Collecting and Collectivity, a series of lectures, panel discussions and exhibitions in Dallas that questioned the relationship between radicality and the market in the contemporary avant-garde.