Noa Schmid is a visual artist and researcher

Contact: noaschm@gmail.com Atelierhaus Auguste, Berlin (visit by appointment only)

Having packed my suitcase more times than I would like - each time however, out of pure privilege of opportunity, I dream of being glued to a chair. In one place, just for long enough to get tired of it. Like everything else, the art I make is read in the context I am in. My family migrated so many times, switched nationalities, kept identities, lost the in between that sometimes I stop believing in the importance of it. All this to say, that my art will be read beyond my control.

My friend recently told me that she had become tired of identity-based art, of celebrating a piece as revolutionary when all it does is showcase the person’s everyday life. If anything, shouldn’t that say more about the viewer’s excitement to see something unknown than about the artist creating something that discovered the revolutionary in the mundane. I agree. And here I am making identity-based art. Art that I hope can convey a political message by showing the everyday. Many of this so-called art is at its core a reflection of me and a fusion of  factual and imagined history. I am not sure I could make art that wouldn’t in some way reflect my identity, my commitment to places and how they shaped the political narratives I believe in.

So, to anyone asking, I would like to make it clear: My art is about war, about displacement, about the Israeli occupation, about nationalism, about belonging. Across figurative imagery and an array of materials, I hope to convey my version (according to my grandparents the Europeanized version) of Moroccan Jewish identity and the seeming paradox that it has become, when in reality it is our political landscape that has created the new normal. So maybe highlighting this lived experience has in itself become an act of resistance to the status quo and can do its part in imagining a vastly different future in Palestine-Israel and beyond ?