Ya Ghanamati (Billboard no. 02)

Nida Sinnokrot, 2014

600 x 300 x 20cm (L x H x W)

steel, aluminum, sheepskin, motor

 

 

Oh my sheep

Baa Baa

You are my life.

Baa Baa

What shall I feed you?

Baa Baa

What shall I offer you to drink?

Baa Baa

With poison I shall kill you!

Baa Baa

 

Ya Ghanamati - Palestinian nursery rhyme

 

 

Sheep, it is said, know the future. They can read the signs of the time. Every Palestinian child has sung the morbid rhyme Ya Ghanamati. One child yells the refrain while all the others bray in unison. The closing call,  sem yahreekoum,  has the leader promising to decimate the flock with poison. One prominent sign of the times is the proliferation of billboards across the West Bank advertising cheap mortgages. Precarity is nothing new to Palestinians; it's a foundational component of their modern experience, but bubble economics, consumer debt and real estate speculation are the contemporary ingredients of that experience in Palestine.

Ya Ghanamati - Billboard no. 2, a full-sized 6- meter long mechanical tri-louver billboard, partially surfaced with sheepskins pulled and squeezed between its rotating, reflective aluminum surfaces, is an emblem to the mechanisms of commercial debt. Billboards are tools for projecting dreams or for promising satisfaction though consumption. However Sinnokrot takes advantage of this tool to re-invoke a very basic desire, that of return. The perpetually rotating surfaces of polished aluminum and sheepskin are constantly disappearing and returning in a cycle that provokes us to consider our most important national dream within the current landscape of consumer culture.