MA Forum in collaboration with LIO: Adam Broomberg

Between 2021-2022, together with Rafael Gonzalez, Broomberg photographed olive trees in the Occupied Territories of Palestine, many of which are thousands of years old. This project, executed on large format analogue film, brings together the portraits of these trees, which act as fixed points in a historic and transforming landscape that is constantly disputed, altered, and increasingly destroyed. Each portrait bears witness to the presence and resilience of the Palestinian people and their relationship with the land.

Around Jerusalem 240 million pine trees have been planted by the Jewish National Fund (JNF). Many of these forests have been systematically planted on the expropriated land of Arab villages, forcibly evacuated and destroyed in the Nakba of 1948. It was not only sandy desert that was forested but cultivated olive groves and rural villages so as to prevent any further cultivation or resettlement of the land by non-Jews. The images made in Chicago (2005) of the forests contain vestigial evidence of these communities, more than 450 in total, barely visible today: the occasional skeleton of a wall, an Almond tree that would have been part of a garden.

Adam Broomberg is an artist, activist and educator. He currently lives and works in Berlin. Broomberg is professor of Photography at Istituto Superiore per le Industrie Artistiche (ISIA) di Urbino and Practice supervisor on the MA in Photography & Society at The Royal Academy of Art (KABK), The Hague. For two decades, he was one half of the critically acclaimed artist duo Broomberg & Chanarin. Together they had numerous solo exhibitions, most recently at Fabra i Coats Centre D’Art Contemporani Barcelona (2021), Centre Georges Pompidou (2018) and the Hasselblad Center (2017), among others.

MA Forum is a seminar series on artistic research, hosted by HDK-Valand in collaboration with L’Internationale Online. Through invited guests, the series explores different dimensions of artistic research. The lectures are public and open to all.