In his video work The Messenger, artist Daniel Kiczales is seen standing on the ridge of Mount Scopus overlooking the Palestinian village of Al-Issawiya, and accompanying the village muezzin’s five daily prayers on his guitar. Up until now the work has gained interpretation in the spatial context, focusing on the geographic landscape extending between the mountaintop and the village below, and engaging in the political and cultural tensions it embodies. Without discounting this interpretation, Time/Resistance wishes to read The Messenger as an act that takes place in the dimension of time as well, and proposes an encounter between two different everyday practices that belong to different time regimes. The one-sided dialogue created by Kiczales’s musical accompaniment disengages both the prayers and the guitar playing from the cultural-social context designated for them, and opens the possibility for an intercultural dialogue that emphasizes the power relations and the act of appropriation existing within it. The work signifies the muezzin’s prayer as an act performed along a time continuum that extends from daybreak to sundown, and indicates the way art is able to not only suspend and isolate an everyday practice from the hegemonic time regime to which it is subordinated, but also to intersect different time regimes to highlight the political potential inherent in the everyday.
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