Visions of Performance in Exile: The Book, the Exhibition, and the Digital Archive

This article adopts the trope of exile in order to investigate the visual and spatial displacement experienced by the artwork of certain female artists when, in the passage from one technology to the next, disappear and re-appear technically and poetically, ‘surviving’ in new critical forms of reception and understanding. The photographs that Emily Jacir collected in Where We Come From (2001-2003) re-appear on the pages of the ‘book’ devoted to Seeking Palestine (2012); Shilpa Gupta’s digital installation I Have Many Dreams (2008) travels from Mumbai to Europe where it reaches the art exhibition DigitaLife-2012 held in Rome; Latifa Laâbissi’s choreography Loredreamsong (2011) transforms the ephemerality of its live event into its virtual documentation within the digital archive of re.act.feminism # 2 (2008-2013). The ‘book’, the ‘exhibition’ and the ‘digital archive’ become the new ‘homelands’, the new contexts of ‘survival’, of the artists’ originary performances. The Palestinian photographer Jacir, the Indian artist Gupta, and the Arab choreographer Laâbissi come from various geographical, political and cultural spaces, displaying, in their uses of languages and technologies, a critical art which proves the ability of women to survive beyond the difficulties of their ‘exiled’ existences by hoping, dreaming and resisting creatively.