I Would Like To Visit

Video, 4 minutes 25 seconds, 2017

I would like to visit is an experimental short film that explores the simple desire to travel through the cultural and political realities of being Palestinian. Soundtracked with the anxiety of disposition, the work opts to show a closeup of text being typed and edited on word-processing software. The work complicates a simple desire to travel by adding to it the social, cultural and political realities of being a Palestinian on colonized indigenous land on Turtle Island. 

Erasure is central to the existence of colonial states– particularly the Zionist state– where the systematic erasure of Palestinian presence, history, and memory is a core tactic. Not only is this an act of cultural denial but a genocidal violent tactic of apartheid—destroying cities, displacing families, and attempting to sever the enduring relationship between people and their land. 

In this way, I would like to visit directly engages with the same mechanisms of erasure that led to the loss of Maroun Tomb’s painting. Just as the video insists on affirming the existence of Palestinians and their deep-rooted ties to the land, this exhibition resists disappearance by naming and remembering what was lost in the Nakba of 1948.

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.