The Bed and Breakfast Notebooks

Abstract

Alexandra Handal is a London based Palestinian visual artist, filmmaker and essayist. She works at the intersection of different disciplines, breaking the boundaries between them in search of new creative expressions and narrative possibilities to explore the human condition in lingering times of war and other man-made disasters. Through her creative practice she attempts to make palpable what is disappearing or has been destroyed, engaging with modern day ruins from conflict zones to areas of urban decay. Handal uses performance-based strategies to experiment with modes of storytelling that are multilayered and mixed-genre. She combines experience, research and imagination to redress absence - blurring the line between written and oral history, fact and fiction, subjectivity and objectivity, past and present. Handal's work includes an eclectic range of media such as digital storytelling, creative interventions, photography, drawing, experimental texts and films that expand the documentary form and propose a new kind of fiction. Handal holds a PhD (practice/theory) from the University of the Arts London, UK (2011), for which she was the recipient of the UAL Research Studentship Award, UK (2004) and the Chelsea College of Art and Design Graduate Fund (2007 & 2009). Her short film From the Bed & Breakfast Notebooks (2009) was selected for New Contemporaries 2009 - an internationally juried exhibition, which showcases emerging artists in the United Kingdom. Studio International magazine (2009) described her short as a 'quietly powerful political engagement' and she was listed among the 'few names to watch' in the Guardian (2009). Recent exhibitions and festivals include: 'Video Lounge', India Art Summit, New Delhi, India (2011), ‘Future Movements – Jerusalem’, Liverpool Biennial, Contemporary Urban Centre, Liverpool, UK (2010), ‘Whose Map is it?' INIVA, London, UK (2010), 'Documentary Program', Rencontres Internationales Paris/Berlin/Madrid (2009 & 2010), 'New Contemporaries 2009' A Foundation, London, UK (2009), and Cornerhouse, Manchester, UK (2009) and 'The Other Shadow of the City', Al-Hoash Gallery, East Jerusalem (2009).