Since first meeting the Jabarin family in the Arab city of Umm El Fahem in 2020, I have been drawing objects from their home and surroundings. The works in this exhibition are derived from numerous blue pencil drawings that I have accumulated since 2020, as well as new works created especially for this show. In the wall installation, I manipulate digital versions of drawings from the Jabarin household and new drawings of objects from my personal biography to create a pseudo- delft wallpaper pattern. The pattern looks ordered, standard, as if it was taken from my ancestors’ Easter-European living room. But on close examination there is no conceivable order. Identifiable images appear side by side with warped and distorted elements, disconnected from their original context. Like a room of curiosities, the objects seem random, antiques beside clocks, knives next to African shields, a bead curtain underscored by horns, a wine goblet beside a piece of coral and a chandelier. Over the wallpaper are suspended narrow shelves holding cutout objects that are easier to perceive, but still make no easy sense. Through this mix I question how we can live in proximity with our Arab-Palestinian neighbors, haunted by my own biography born as a “British protected person of Swaziland” and brought to Israel by Zionist parents who did not want to live under the South African apartheid but somehow failed to perceive the vestiges of colonialism and conquest pervading every inch of this land. On another wall, a large-scale video screening takes the viewer for a slow 9-minute meander through the alleys of Umm El Fahem , while in the background Amir Jabarin tells stories from 3 generations of his family. The entire video is filmed from a single 100x70 cm drawing of a view of of the city from the high mountain where Amir is building his new house, with a massive and symbolically significant Cyprus tree looming in its midst like a sentinel. The camera moves in closer and closer, akin to the manner in which I spent months painstakingly drawing each house and window. But this is not my story. I am an outsider who has kindly been invited in as an occasional visitor. Between the two works is the only original drawing in the exhibition, a view of the Jabarin living room facing outwards towards the window. Even though it is a very specific room, nothing there is particularly culturally identifiable, it could really just as easily have been located in Haifa or Tel Aviv. In all of these works I question concepts of memory, closeness and distance, whether special, temporal, cultural or hypothetical. As I dismantle and restructure the images I drew, I create my own interpretation of how the same reality can seem within and totally outside of my grasp.