Un-Charting

Un-Charting is a multimedia installation consisting of an immersive film, archival resources, and public programming. The third in a trilogy, it investigates settler-colonial imaginaries shaping ideas of the Holy Land and sustaining the erasure of Palestine. Through 3D animation, documentary footage, and archival material, it traces the entanglement of Christian Zionism, British imperialism, and contemporary U.S.–Israel relations. It asks how religious messianic belief fuels imperial expansion, genocidal violence, and cartographic fantasy, taking as a point of departure a messianic plan for a New Jerusalem by British colonial naval officer Richard Brothers. Rather than offering a single linear history, Un-Charting assembles fragments and visual ruptures to expose the myths that sustain dispossession and erasure, opening space for a counter-narrative.

The exhibition unfolds across three spaces: the Archive, presenting research materials and documentary sources that inform the film; the New Jerusalem Plan, an enlarged floor map of Brothers' unrealized 1801 urban plan for Palestine, activated through public programming; and the Simulator Room, where the 19-minute 3D animated film is projected on a 180-degree curved screen.

Created prior to October 2023, its questions have taken on renewed urgency. The project had its first iteration at MOCA Detroit, curated by Jova Lynne, and its second iteration at the James Gallery, CUNY Graduate Center, curated by Katherine Carl.

Key to Un-Charting are public programs that take place on top of — and actively unsettle and counter — Brothers' map of his envisioned New Jerusalem. These programs are created collaboratively with organizations, scholars, artists and activists, and reflected on local and global themes relating to the exhibition from an intersectional lens. At the James Gallery, public programs were created in partnership with curator Adam HajYahia's Footnotes On The Fictive Present, curator Katherine Carl, New Red Order & Kite, and with CUNY's Middle East and Middle Eastern American Center (MEMEAC). These gatherings are aimed at creating a site of gathering and collective knowledge production, grounded in a decolonial framework. The programs included talks, performances and screenings which foreground the emancipatory possibilities of political imagination, through experimental pedagogy, conversations, and artistic experimentation.