Otherwise Occupied is an exhibition of Palestinian artists organized by al Hoash as part of the 55th International Art Exhibition at Venice Biennale 2013. Curated by Bruce Ferguson with Rawan Sharaf, the exhibition features two internationally renowned Palestinian artists; Bashir Makhoul and Aissa Deebi who were born inside the 1948 borders and emigrated to become citizens of other states operating in a globalised art world. They still think of themselves as Palestinians and are in search of new ways to imagine the nation from a distance.

Palestine has been occupied for so long it is no longer a spatio-temporal entity but a construction of the imaginary: a national designation that includes a far-flung diaspora, a huge population of refugees, as well as members of an indeterminate territorial authority under occupation and even a large number of Israeli citizens. There exist simultaneously no Palestinian state and many Palestinian states. It is the quintessence of Benedict Anderson’s classic formulation of nationhood as ‘imagined communities.’

It is vital that the idea of Palestine is not defined by the occupation and the title Otherwise Occupied describes other ways of imagining the nation outside and beyond the conflict. Art is capable of occupying cultural spaces that are otherwise inaccessible or invisible, the interstices of intersecting disciplines or even producing new kinds of cultural space or forms of knowledge offering ways of thinking otherwise. The artists in this exhibition being both from inside 48 borders, living outside the occupation and away from the centres of contemporary Palestinian culture have paradoxically found more access to Palestine being further away from it.

To be otherwise occupied is to be busy elsewhere, to be engaged in activities outside the program. For these artists this means making work that does not necessarily comply with the agendas determined by the occupation from either side. The political in their work is paradoxically outside the polis for, they would claim, there is currently not such place as a Palestinian polis. The ‘otherwise’ for them is also an imaginary, parallel space beyond the claims of nationalism that is opened up by global cultural events such as the Venice Biennale. They are extending this idea in thinking of the exhibition as an ‘otherwise occupied’ space within the city and the Biennale which at the same time engages with the concept of the imaginary museum and the perpetually deferred utopian optimism of the ‘Palazzo Enciclopedico’.