Anchor in the Landscape
Join us at Printed Matter for a conversation between artist, activist and educator Adam Broomberg and activist Issa Amro as they discuss Broomberg and Rafael Gonzalez’s jointly-authored book, Anchor in the Landscape.
Anchor in the Landscape is a collection of absorbing 8x10" black-and-white studies of olive trees growing in the Occupied Territories of Palestine, some of which are thousands of years old. This project considers the importance of the olive tree in Palestinian identity and its role as a marker in a changing, contested, and often destroyed landscape. Included is a text by Irus Braverman. The publication also coincides with an exhibition of the work at the 60th edition of La Biennale di Venezia
The olive tree is a totem of Palestinian identity, culture, and resistance. It supports the livelihoods of more than 100,000 Palestinian families, is a centre of traditions and identities, and has long been a target of destruction and theft. Since 1967, 800,000 Palestinian olive trees have been destroyed by Israeli authorities and settlers. Over the course of eighteen months, artists Adam Broomberg and Rafael Gonzalez photographed olive trees in the Occupied Territories of Palestine, many of which are thousands of years old. This book brings together their studied, absorbing portraits of these trees, which act as fixed points in a historic and transforming landscape that is constantly disputed, altered, and increasingly destroyed. Each portrait bears witness to the presence and resilience of the Palestinian people and their relationship with the land.
Adam Broomberg is an artist, activist and educator. He currently lives and works in Berlin. His activist work currently includes having founded Artists + Allies x Hebron (AHH), an NGO which he co-directs alongside the celebrated Palestinian human rights defender Issa Amro. His work is currently being exhibited as part of the Venice Biennale. For two decades, he was one half of the critically acclaimed artist duo Broomberg & Chanarin. Together they had numerous solo exhibitions, including The Centre Georges Pompidou (2018) and the Hasselblad Center (2017), among others. His work is held in major public and private collections including the Art Gallery of Ontario, Baltimore Museum of Art, Centres Pompidou, Cleveland Museum of Art, MoMA, Stedelijk Museum, Tate, Yale University Art Gallery and Victoria & Albert Museum.
Issa Amro is a Palestinian activist based in Hebron, West Bank. He is involved in monitoring the application of international human rights and humanitarian law in the Occupied Palestinian Territories. He advocates the use of nonviolent resistance and civil disobedience to fight the Israeli Occupation of the Palestinian Territories. Issa was awarded a 2024 Right Livelihood laureate for his non-violent resistance work with Youth against Settlements (YAS) and in 2010, he was declared “human rights defender of the year in Palestine” by the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR). Issa is also the co-founder of the NGO Artists + Allies x Hebron. His house in Tel Rumeida, Hebron, in the occupied West Bank, is constantly under threat and attack. It also serves as a community centre of the Palestinian civil society organisation Youth Against Settlements, which seeks to end settlement expansion through peaceful civil resistance.
