The Palestinian Gazelle

Objects-in-Focus

The Palestinian Gazelle

Artist Manal Mahamid

Through her body of work on the Palestinian gazelle, Manal Mahamid speaks to the erasure, dispossession, the renaming of villages and the denial of the history of the Palestinian people as part of the strategy undertaken to refashion and re-represent the physical landscape and its representations as an image of an ideal ‘Jewish homeland.’ Mahamid’s Palestinian Gazelle, named ‘Israeli Gazelle’ at the zoo, looks at first glance like an ordinary gazelle. It is upon closer observation that we notice its amputated leg. The gazelle seems to resonate as a metaphor for the daily contradictions and paradoxes lived and experienced by Palestinians in the 1948-occupied territory.