http://www.alnakbah.net/ Scottish artist Jane Frere's haunting contemporary art installation, Return of the Soul: the Nakbah Project, in which thousands of wax figures hang in limbo, opens in Edinburgh on 30 July as part of the Edinburgh Art Festival.
Following workshops in drawing, anatomy, period costume, physical theatre and oral history in Palestinian refugee camps in Lebanon , Jordan and the West Bank, these thought-provoking figures were first exhibited in Al Hoash Gallery, East Jerusalem on 15 May 2008, sixty years after the Palestinian 'Nakbah', or 'Catastrophe'. Accompanied by first-hand testimonies, these figures, representing individual Palestinians with names and origins, express the Palestinians' collective sense of loss, heritage and identity in a major artwork of international significance.
The work is a sombre reflection upon the consequences of a never-to-be-forgotten tragedy in Europe that cast the Palestinian people into purgatory sixty years ago, sowing the seeds of perpetual unrest in the Middle East .
Return of the Soul: the Nakbah Project
31 July - 18 August 2008
12 - 6pm
Patriothall Gallery@WASPS,
Off 48 Hamilton Place
Edinburgh EH3 5AY
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