Lydda Airport

As with many works by Palestinian artist Emily Jacir, Lydda Airport is constructed around hearsay – the watershed between fact and myth. There are two stories at the heart of the animated video installation: the first is a story told to Jacir by a contact, Salim Tamari, whose father recounted waiting at the airport with a bouquet of flowers to greet the aviatrix Amelia Earhart, who never arrived; the second is the tale of Hannibal, an Imperial Airways flight that departed from Karachi bound for Egypt on 1 March 1940 and disappeared without a trace over the Gulf of Oman. Jacir performs in the short animation, editing contemporary footage of herself into archival footage. Taking the role of Tamari’s father in the Earhart myth, Jacir creates a character displaced from her own time, waiting for someone who never arrives. Weaving together personal accounts, memories, urban legends and fact, Jacir creates a wistful narrative that lingers between states of being: arrival and departure, fact and myth, past and present. The animation is presented alongside an epoxy model of the airport, a second element of the original work.