Cynthia Cruz: Emily Jacir’s recent show, Intervals, at Alexander and Bonin, featured her installation Ex Libris (2010–12), a documentation of the 30,000 books looted from Palestinian homes, libraries, and institutions by Israeli authorities when the Palestinians were displaced en mass for the creation of the state of Israel in 1948. Six thousand of these books are kept and catalogued under the designation “A.P.” (Abandoned Property) at the Jewish National and University Library in Jerusalem. Jacir, a Palestinian-American artist, photographed the books using her cell phone over a span of two years. The images of pages of the looted books, some with signatures, some with coffee ring stains, don’t say anything. They remain silent. […] Silenced, erased, censored — how then to represent this loss, this nothingness? One way would be with anger, with stark, strong imagery, slick videos or photographs that capture the evidence: razed homes, bombed community centers, a woman and child held at gunpoint. Instead, Jacir has chosen to fold into this nothingness, this endless, stretching shadow. Her works exists inside the negation, inside the emptiness. The rooms within which Jacir’s photographs are displayed are blank, empty, tabula rasa aside from the “shelves” of books, the displays of pages. There is no banner, no explanation, no photographs documenting the situation on the ground. Her photos document the echo of a people; they inhabit the emptiness of that echo. More here.