"We Don't Need the Key, We'll Break In": Learning about the Occupation through Aesthetic Encounters with Three Artists

This dissertation explores developing a pedagogy that is concerned with what might be learnt about the Occupation of Palestine from artists and their work. I consider the pedagogical significance of imagery in relation to loss by examining art as having a transformative potential. The dissertation draws on literature, artworks, and interviews that I conducted with three Palestinian contemporary artists: respectively, Ayed Arafah, Hamza Abu Ayyash, and Majd Abdel Hamid. I do so in order to explore how people find themselves caught in history and how these three post-Nakba artists nevertheless navigate and challenge the Occupation while calling for democratic and political freedom. Through my thinking with the artworks, I offer a new reading on how experiences with insurmountable loss are traversed and contested through art that resists. In particular, I seek to explore the pedagogical potential of political aesthetic practices in spaces of confinement: how art that resists can illuminate complex ideas and so unveil that which is hidden or muted, thus making room to reimagine alternative ways of thinking, doing, or being that are not limited to the confines of colonial logic.