P is for Palestine

Video, 3 min, 2018

Language is political in this subtle short film, which shows an unnamed man in Amman, Jordan, repeating decontextualized political English words as he waits in an undefined “green room.” Each word contains the letter “P”— a letter that does not exist in the Arabic language and whose pronunciation is socially and economically coded. What could have been a politically charged speech is instead reduced to fragmented terms, rehearsed solely to perfect their pronunciation rather than engage with their meaning.

At its core, the work interrogates what is lost when performing for a Western audience—when speaking in its colonial language and appealing to its respectability politics. It asks what happens to political content when shaped to meet the expectations of those in power.

The piece responds to Maroun Tomb’s painting An Interior. While Tomb’s title references a literal interior space, the video reinterprets “interior” to signify a psychological and emotional state. It reflects on the inner tension experienced by Palestinians when speaking about Palestine to a “global audience”—a struggle shaped by the pressure to be legible within colonial frameworks. Ultimately, the work examines how this process results in erasure, a core tactic of all colonial regimes, including the Zionist project. 

Muhammad Nour Elkhairy is a Palestinian filmmaker, video artist, and film programmer from Jordan. ElKhairy holds an MFA in Studio Arts: Film Production from Concordia University, Canada. His experimental fiction and non-fiction video works are particularly concerned with the legacies of colonial, political and economic power. Intrinsic to his work is the desire to highlight the screen, not only as an ideological apparatus, but also as a surface onto which the performed self exists between the interiority of the personal and the exteriority of the sociopolitical. His work has been shown in several international film festivals and art galleries.