Dog’s Funeral
Video art, 8 m 30 s, 2021
Dog’s Funeral spins off from a family story that was passed down for generations since the Nakba. In 1948, Mahajena’s grandparents fled their village with their children and livestock, but the family dog refused to follow. He remained behind at the threshold of the family home as they faded into exile and his defiant yet desperate barks lingered with them for life as symbols of loyalty, rootedness, refusal and resistance.
Responding to Tomb’s title Farmyard, the work stages a funeral for the dog as a means of honoring a figure who resisted the erasure of place. The piece understands animals not as passive victims of war, but as witnesses and actors within it. Rather than offer a nostalgic return to rural village life, the work interrogates the farm as a contested zone: what was once a space of relation between humans, animals, and land, is now fractured by war and colonialism. The dog’s presence in that space asserts an unwillingness to surrender it. By exploring animal resistance within Palestinian landscapes, Dog’s Funeral challenges the human-centered narratives of resistance by highlighting how animals, too, enact forms of presence and defiance. The dog, in his final act, remains when humans cannot, claiming the home, even as it was lost. Through this gesture, Dog’s Funeral enters The Lost Paintings not as an image of what was, but as an insistence on what continues to resist erasure.
Yara Kassem Mahajena is a Palestinian multidisciplinary artist, lecturer and co-founder of Shahinat Burtuqal, a digital platform promoting Palestinian art. Her work explores trauma with a focus on political trauma and animal resistance in Palestine. She holds BA and MFA degrees from Haifa University, a Community Art certificate from Beit Berl, and a Leadership certificate from Roger Williams University (USA). Yara has taught at Haifa and Mercy University (NY) and held roles at Givat Haviva, Bezalel Academy and Umm Al-Fahm Museum. She has exhibited and curated internationally and received multiple awards recognizing her artistic achievements.