Larissa Sansour takes part in The Absence of Paths, the Tunisian Pavilion at the 57th Venice Biennale 2017. The Absence of Paths uses performance and installation staged in different venues across Venice, as well as an interactive online platform theabsenceofpaths.com featuring text, video, audio, recipes and photography, to generate further inquiry into issues surrounding human migration.
For the exhibition, Sansour presents a series of photos shot in the West Bank town of Bethlehem, titled Eulogy for the Voids. The photo series explores the vanishing voids and empty spaces of an ancient town under demographic, social, political and infrastructural duress, transformed across the decades from sleepy biblical town to overcrowded reservoir, subjected to endless revisions of chaos.
Already beyond sustainability, Bethlehem’s overpopulation forewarns of a town eventually without people, biblical prophesies fulfilling their promise, an apocalypse centuries in the making, slowly insisting upon itself.
