Empathising with the Enemy is a lens-based project developed through forging a network of individuals & organisations located in Palestine and Israel.

PROGRAMME
Exhibition Opening View : Thursday 19 September 2024, 6 — 8pm.
Exhibition : 16 September — 18 November 2024, 11am — 6pm.
Culture Night Event : Exhibition Walkthrough with curator Anne Kelly, 20 September, 4pm.

Special Event

We are delighted to announce guest speaker Sulaiman Khatib of Combatants For Peace will be in conversation with Amel Yacef (The Rowen Trust) on the preliminary date of Thursday 17 October 2024, 1pm (Date TBC), in NCAD Gallery. Booking details forthcoming.

NCAD Gallery is delighted to introduce lens-based artist, photographer and maker Louis Scully with his first solo exhibition titled Empathising with the Enemy.

Empathising with the Enemy by Scully is a lens-based project and film work developed through forging a network of individuals and organisations located in the geographic areas of Palestine and Israel – made manifest through a dialogical approach of interviewing activists’ of varying communities who voice their wider perspectives’ from within the contested occupied territories of Israel-Palestine. Filmed in March-April 2024, the presented work features nine Palestinian and Israeli activist interviews’ that includes interviewees: Noor A’Wad, Tom Mehager, Naser Odat, Mohamad Jamous, Ofer Shorr, Rana Salman, Danielle Cantor, Rav Hanan Schlesinger and Or.

Scully continues to connect with Palestinian and Israeli activists’ working towards ending the occupation and achieving peace and equal rights for everyone between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea to inform his work-which combines modern storytelling processes with traditional media such as analogue photography, darkroom activity and letterpress printing.

Curator Anne Kelly, NCAD Gallery. Empathising with the Enemy, 2024, Louis Scully. Video still of Naser Odat, a Palestinian filmmaker, singer, and activist leading the Standing Together movement in Haifa. Standing Together is a grassroots Jewish-Arab movement fighting for peace, equality, and social justice in Israel-Palestine.

Louis Scully is a lens-based artist and recent First Class Honours graduate from the Moving Image BA Program at the National College of Art & Design (NCAD). His final project involved interviewing Palestinian and Israeli activists on location, who work towards ending the occupation and achieving peace and equal rights for everyone between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea. This work combines modern storytelling processes with traditional media such as analog photography, darkroom activity, and letterpress printing. Scully describes his Empathising with the Enemy project, to serve both as a historical archival document at a poignant and devastating moment and as an artistic visual expression highlighting the glimmers of hope that persist against the odds. Currently, the main focus of his practice is interrogating the intersections of truth, solidarity, perspective, and Western ignorance.

Sulaiman Khatib is Co-Founder of Combatants for Peace, and was nominated for the 2017 & ’18 Nobel Peace Prize, on behalf of Combatants for Peace. He is a Board Member of ELHAM – the Day After and a local organizer who has been recognized internationally for his contributions to promoting, peace, social justice and equality for all. He is a renown speaker and lecturer worldwide.

In  2006, Khatib was the co-founder and General Director of Al-Qud’s Association for Democracy and Dialogue. The program works with youth in order to create effective and sustainable projects and programs focusing on the promotion of peace, democracy and civic participation in the Palestinian Territories. In 2008, he co-founded the People’s Peace Fund. In 2010, he became the director of Alquds, an organization that organized joint Israeli-Palestinian sports teams for youth.

At the age of 14 Khatib was sentenced to fifteen years in prison and served a term of ten and a half years where he spent his time learning about history, Hebrew, English and about other world conflicts and peace activists such as Ghandi and Mandela. He acquired his entire education and worldview in jail. This is when he started to have new thoughts about the conflict and the means for resolving it.  As a result he is today a committed advocate for peace in the Middle East and an has been an active member of various programs aiming to promote a peaceful solution to the Palestinian-Israeli conflict for the last twenty years. During the second Intifada, he was one of the main voices calling for non-violent resistance.

In 2004, he went on a mission to Antarctica with a joint group of Israelis and Palestinians. Their team consisted of eight members: four Israeli, four Palestinian – many of whom were former fighters from both sides. They sailed over 100 km in the world’s most dangerous waters and climbed a previously unclimbed peak. The objective: “to find common ground.”

Sulaiman and Chen Alon, another co-founder of Combatants for Peace, were nominated twice for the Nobel peace prize in 2017 and 2018. Both times the nomination was on behalf of CfP. Sulaiman starred alongside fellow CfP activists in ‘Disturbing the Peace‘, an award winning film detailing the origins of the Combatants for Peace movement, which was released in 2016.

Sulaiman is the author of In This Place Together: A Palestinian’s Journey to Collective Liberation, alongside co-author Penina Eilberg-Schwartz. The work chronicles the powerful experiences that led him to dedicate his life to joint nonviolence, through encountering the deep injustice of torture, witnessing the power of hunger strikes, and studying Jewish history. Combatants For Peace Link

Amel Yacef, originally from Algeria, has made Ireland her home for over 20 years, she describes her practice as transformative and compassionate justice. She has extensive experience in organising and mobilising young people, women and grass roots community leaders coming from communities marginalised by systems and institutions that were never built for them.  She is the Community Engagement Manager at The Rowan Trust, an organisation grounded in social justice and equality, a committed and creative funder who partners with organisations, social movements and people to use our combined resources in the fight for equality. Amel leads the work to build and nurture relationships with potential and existing civil society partners across The Rowan Trust’s strategic areas of focus. She has managed and coordinated projects with a focus on social justice, racial justice, gender justice, equality and human rights. She is passionate about facilitating processes that enable those voices in the margins to sit in their power, and impact political discourse, believing in the importance of creating and holding spaces of radical transformation and healing justice for the individuals and communities harmed by oppressive systems. Yacef is the Chairperson of Akina Dada wa Africa (AkiDwA) a national network of migrant women living in Ireland.
The Rowen Trust Link