BESSMA KHALAF

Knock Out (Landscape), 2008

Archival pigment print on photographic paper

Collection Mills College Art Museum, Gift of the Artist, 2017.3.3

Knock Out documents a performance piece created by Bessma Khalaf in which she punches through projected images of the California landscape, breaking the serenity of the images to encourage audiences look deeper into the complicated meanings embedded in these landscapes. An immigrant from Iraq, Khalaf came to the United States as a child to escape religious persecution for being Catholic. However, she now lives in a country that uses violence and forced military occupation to destabilize her homeland. Khalaf expresses her conflict about this situation through absurdity and humor, utilizing destruction as a motif. Knock Out is subversive and expresses the artist’s resentment at the seemingly ideal California/U.S. landscape by disrupting and deconstructing it with her fist.

Grace Patterson