The Fire

Video and sound, 8 min and 50 sec, 2024

Boyadgian’s imagination is so captured by olive trees that they filled his sketch books and painting blocks between 2010 and 2015. He did not intend to convey a sense of nostalgia, but rather, a feeling of a fleeting time, place, and emotion. He brushed poetry into the imagination of a landscape that has historically been represented in distorted ways as a result of orientalism and colonialism.

The olive tree has become a symbol of collective Palestinian identity, of belonging to a place. Yet, this tree — which outlives humans, and can thrive for centuries — tells stories that go beyond symbolism. Draped in evergreen leaves, the entangled gnarls of their trunks evoke the many lives that coalesce into a body. As time passes, the center of the trunks hollows, carving out a void where memory dwells and bears witness to the connection between people and their habitat.

There is resonance between Boyadgian’s landscape work and Maroun Tomb’s landscape etchings and paintings. By painting the disappearing landscape of a valley in South Jerusalem, Boyadgian creates a record that challenges its disappearance and an image that asserts the possibility of a landscape in our imagination. The loss of Tomb’s paintings mirrors the loss of the olive groves in Wadi el Shami– therein the erasure of Palestinian culture is connected to the erasure of the Palestinian landscape.

Benji Boyadgian is a painter and a multi-media artist based in Jerusalem whose works explore themes revolving around perception, memory, territory, environment, architecture and landscape. Boyadgian studied architecture at the École Nationale Supérieure d’Architecture de Paris La Villette, specialising in urban sociology in post-conflict areas. He has been exhibited in group shows at Centro Internacional das Artes José de Guimarães, Portugal; EVA International, Ireland; SAVVY contemporary, Germany; Yerevan Biennial, Armenia; Istanbul Modern, Turkey; Jameel Arts Centre, United Arab Emirates as well as in Palestine, Tunisia, Sweden, and Finland.