Myriam Cohenca

Finding Alquds

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Finding Alquds

Myriam Cohenca is an Arab Jewish artist and writer whose practice is grounded in the histories of the Levant and pre-1948 Palestine. Working with photography, moving image, text and installation, she examines exile, radical love, displacement and interrupted transmission.

Finding Alquds develops these questions through analogue and digital photography, personal documents, maps and writing. Made between Granada, Jerusalem/Alquds and the Mediterranean, the series begins with the impossibility of returning to a place that continues to shape memory, identity and longing. It searches for Alquds through the rebuilding of an archive, the acceptance of an incomplete story  and what remains visible in people, landscapes and gestures.

The project engages with postmemory: experiences transmitted beyond direct memory through images, silence, gestures and unresolved loss. Cohenca inherits a story already marked by displacement, taboo and historical rewriting. In the present political context, even what remains of it is at risk of disappearing.

The sacred is central to the series. In Granada, Cohenca follows traces of Alandalus and displaced Jewish memory to ask how the holy moves when access to the holy place has been broken. Alquds appears through distance, ritual, longing and the patient reconstruction of relation.