A Kilo
Installation: mixed media, sound and text, 1 min 70 cm x 50 cm x 90 cm, 2024
In an ordinary moment, a vessel breaks. It is merely the weighing dish of a kitchen scale the family has inherited, but its damage causes memories to flood out of the details that time etched into its surface. It is said that the woman who sold the vessel was an informant for the Zionist militias before the Nakba. Though Tarabey has never encountered this woman, her imprint remains among the objects. The vessel was not only part of a scale, but a secret instrument for sizing up Palestinians— for penetrating their daily lives across multiple intimate spaces.
The work is made of stacked pots made of paper mache that appear stable, but are actually fragile and fractured— tools that sit in an unusable pile. From within the installation one can hear the sounds of a home kitchen: banging of pots and pans, constant friction, sounds without talking. It is a familiar domestic sound, but does not bring peace of mind. The repetition expresses the anxiety that lives in the every day— and unspoken fear that quietly repeats itself. Maroun Tomb’s title, The Broken Vase, serves as the initial fracture that is a prompt for exploring what the act of repeated breaking does to the collective Palestinian memory and the effect it leaves behind as it carves out an absence. This physical void not only exists in Tomb’s archive, but also as an opportunity to imagine what has been struck out of our memory. Tarabey manoeuvres the notion of return— not in the literal sense but as a means to recreate something at the source of that very breakage.
Dalleh Tarabey is a visual artist whose work includes video, performance, installation, and text. By using personal stories as a starting point for exploring space and deconstructing its textual, visual, and spoken representations, Tarabey questions who has the right to space, who is entitled to write about it and who is marginalized. Through the mediums of body and sound, she contemplates the relationship between remembrance and authority. She is an active member of the Itar Arts Group for Youth in East Jerusalem, through which she had her first solo exhibition. Tarabey has a BA in Arabic and an MFA from the University of Haifa.