Alexandra Sophia Handal (born 1975) is a Haiti-born Palestinian artist, filmmaker and essayist.[1] Handal has been Based in Europe since 2004, but spends extended periods of time in Palestine.[2] After living for ten years in London, Handal moved for a time to Amsterdam, the Netherlands, before residing in Berlin, Germany with her family, where she has established her studio.[3]
Due to her family's displacement from Palestine, Handal has spent time in many countries.[4] Her family is Bethlehemite from Palestine. She was born in Port-au-Prince, Haiti in 1975 during the dictatorship of Jean-Claude Duvalier. Her family eventually moved to the Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic, where Handal spent her teenage years.[5]
She went on to pursue art at Boston University, where she obtained a BFA in painting and minor in art history in 1997; followed by an MA degree in studio art from New York University in 2001. In 2004, Handal was granted a UAL Research Studentship Award to undertake a practice/theory PhD[6] at the University of the Arts London, graduating in 2011. During her postgraduate studies, she was member of the research centre: TrAIN[7] (Transnational Art, Identity and Nation).
Handal had her first solo museum exhibition, Memory Flows Like the Tide at Dusk at the Museet for Samtidskunst,[5] Roskilde, Denmark (September–December 2016). She showed new works alongside existing ones, drawing together her works focused on collective loss. In 2007, she began conducting oral historical fieldwork[8] with Palestinian refugees and exiles from West Jerusalem.
In this exhibition, Handal described displacement as "a constant in [her] family" over three generations. Over time, she went from feeling like a perpetual outsider wherever she went to feeling that lacking a sense of belonging to any one country allows her to feel connected to many of them, perceiving them with both the insight of a resident and the objectivity of an outsider. She has come to identify with the term "outsider," but also to recognize the concept of insiders and outsiders as a manifestation of power structures. She says that this understanding allowed her to "access a new cultural terrain that includes all of me."[9]
Among the works on exhibit at the museum was her ongoing mammoth project, Dream Homes Property Consultants (DHPC). It displays listings of "Arab-style houses" from which Palestinians were displaced in 1948. Each listing has biographical information about the family that once lived there a long with other animations and artifacts.[10] This interactive web documentary art’ has been in the making since 2007.[11] It was an Official Selection at IDFA DocLab (2013), where it had its international premiere. It was included in a number of festivals such as UXdoc[12] Rencontres internationales du documentaire de Montreal (2014), Przemiany Interdisciplinary Festival at the Copernicus Science Center, Warsaw, Picturing Palestine: Film Screening and Panel Discussion at Modern Art Oxford[13] for Israeli Apartheid Week (2015) and After the Last Sky Festival[14] in Berlin (2016). Dream Homes Property Consultants (DHPC) won the 2014 Lumen People's Choice Gold Award (UK), 2015 Second Prize for the Freedom Flowers Foundation Award[15] (Switzerland) and it was Shortlisted for the 2013 Artraker Award[16] (UK). DHPC was noted as being the ‘first independently produced interactive web documentary by an artist-filmmaker from the MENA region’.[11] Since 2014, DHPC has been among the 20 most viewed web documentaries on the MIT Open Documentary Lab, which is a database exploring the impact of technology on documentary.[17]
Another work that was part of Handal's solo exhibition was her experimental short, From the Bed & Breakfast Notebooks. It was selected for New Contemporaries[18] 2009 – an open submission juried exhibition that takes place annually since 1949 and showcases the works of emerging talents from British art schools. Studio International Magazine called her film a 'quietly powerful political engagement',[19] while the Chair of Bloomberg New Contemporaries, Sasha Craddock described it as ‘poetic and gentle’.[20] Handal was mentioned in The Guardian among the 'few names to watch'.[21] The selectors for 2009 consisted of: John Stezaker, Ellen Gallagher, Saskia Olde Wolbers and Wolfgang Tillmans.[22]
Handal has presented papers at a number of conferences where art intersects with other fields, discussing themes of memory, history, power, knowledge and geographical imagination in her work. She participated in the Art and Geographical Knowledge[23] at the Royal Geographical Society with IBG, Annual International Conference, Manchester, UK (2009), the [Record] [Create]: Oral History in Art, Craft, and Design[24] at the Oral History Society Annual Conference in association with the Victoria and Albert Museum London (2010) and the Art and Resistance Conference[25] organised by Dar al-Kalima University, Bethlehem, Palestine (2016). Handal contributed an essay "Chronicle from the Field" for the book, Oral History in the Visual Arts.[26]