Larissa Sansour
Main Prize - 2009
A Space Exodus
Artform: Film
A Space Exodus is a brief, stylish remake of a few key scenes from Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey, with the artist cast as the first Palestinian cosmonaut. The film takes a narrative of extreme, technological progress and transposes it onto a situation in which a population is bound, constrained and denied the most rudimentary of movements. Larissa imagines a dream scenario in which Palestinians are free to advance, innovate and run in the space race. East Jerusalem has been drawn in the Israeli wall borders and thus separated from others parts of Palestine. The hopes of ever having Jerusalem as a Palestinian capital are rapidly fading. In A Space Exodus, Sansour does finally reach the moon, although her contact with Palestine's capital is cut off.