Sary Zananiri is an artist and cultural historian interested in colonialism, modernity and the construction of religious and nationalist narrative through visual culture. He has exhibited in Europe, the Middle East and Australia, as well as recently curating exhibitions at the Rijksmuseum Oudheden (May-October 2020), and Haus der Kulturen der Welt for ALMS (June 2019). He has co-edited two open access volumes: Imaging and Imagining Palestine: Photography, Modernity and the Biblical Lens (Brill, 2021) and European Cultural Diplomacy and Arab Christians in Palestine: Between Contention and Connection (Palgrave McMillan, 2021). Zananiri is a Postdoctoral Researcher at Leiden University.

Darwish’s famous line “where should the birds fly after the last sky?” holds an iconic status, producing the sky as space of exile and diaspora. The sky has been a site of often-contradictory narratives – a heavenly site looking down upon the ‘Holy Land’, a space of modernity with technologies of air travel and surveillance and a dystopian site of conflict. Talking Back to the Sky investigates the ways in which the sky has been mobilised in visual culture. It addresses the evolving and unstable Palestinian relationship to the sky, and considers how its omnipotent dominance might be readdressed.