Quote: Pakistani artist Mehreen Murtaza’s “Dubious Birth of Geography” is an assemblage of archival photographs from the turn of the 20th century. We see rowboats carrying passengers into the port of Jaffa in 1911 (a wave of settlers newly landing in Palestine?). There’s a shot of the Swiss geologist Amanz Gressly and Al Qastal, the Palestinian village that was depopulated and absorbed into the spreading suburbs of Jerusalem. Yet in each image, she’s inserted something fantastical – maybe a shimmering, floating island, or the robes of the Ethiopian emperor Haile Selassie evaporating into crystals. The dusty archives she’s raided to find these images are almost vacuums within themselves – where truth and history can be lost in their voluminous depths. By manipulating each image, she shows us that all history is assembled from snatches of memory, image and testimony, all of which can be twisted.