Bitter Things in the Name of an Orange

Bitter Things is a multimedia installation of a kitchen, which the artist employs to tell stories about oranges, from bitter oranges from the C3As backyard to sweet oranges from the artist’s father’s garden. The storyline moves from ancient times to histories of colonization and occupation and how they all find their way to the artist’s body.

When an orange reaches the kitchen, it becomes a story of light, clay, and fire; infinite glasses of bitter, sour juice concentrate; and jars of sweet, bitter marmalade. Bitter Things is my father’s story of an orange growing in his garden, an orange from Jaffa.

A raw clay landscape spills from Bitter Things kitchen, expanding beyond it like a shadow. Six videos are staged in different manners on this landscape. The videos look at the traditional Andalusian and Levantine methods of harvesting and processing bitter oranges while intertwining the imagery with tales of wilderness and dispossession. Engulfed in the clay landscape are around twenty ghostlike white ceramic sculptures of Shamouti Jaffa oranges, whispering of a time that has once been.

In an adjacent space, two photo collages, are on view, one of which is an archival document from 1946 addressing the losses Palestinian orchard farmers suffered during World War II. After the 1948 Nakba, most of the Palestinian-owned orange groves were forcefully taken by the new Israeli state. The second collage displays spreads from the first history book on Yaffa (Jaffa) written by a Palestinian; one of the spreads is a recollection by Najat Bamieh, the artist’s family member, written in 1987, about her life in Jaffa before Nakba, the loss of their house, and their forced exile along the rest of Bamieh family members, a very touching testimony weaving the city to oranges and the losses the city experienced with the forced exile of its inhabitants.

Part of the installation Bitter Things is the 2014 video Interrupted Biographies from 2014. It highlights an almost forgotten period of history when the borders between Palestine and Lebanon were open, a period that made it possible for the artist’s parents to meet and start a family. This work is a visitation to incidents in the artist’s family history, where the ever-shifting possibilities and impossibilities of politics intervene in Lebanese and Palestinian family members’ choices and choices that politics dictated.

Through this combination of mediums and techniques, I build a visual-spatial language that expands history into materiality, highlighting the value of the lived and the intimate.

(Text written by Mirna Bamieh and used as wall label in the exhibition "The Ecologies of Peace", C3A, Córdoba, 2024)