‟The stewardess has a recurring dream of her airplane soaring / through a milky veil of rotating clouds / Clouds of memory, clouds of erasure, / Clouds blurring the view of her homeland below,” says Peggy Ahwesh in the poetic yet pointed voiceover anchoring her solo exhibition ‟The Wayfinders,” recently on view at New York’s Microscope Gallery. Ahwesh (b. 1954) is an icon of experimental film and forerunner in avant-garde digital animation whose traveling 2021 survey ‟Vision Machines” was received with great acclaim. Her latest show marked a pivot: in a first for the filmmaker, the new large-scale installation assembles both original footage and animated clips captured in an early-2000s flight simulator. She shapes it all into an elegy for Palestine’s thwarted right to the sky.

At its center is the abandoned Qalandia/Atarot airport, situated between the town of Qalandia and Jerusalem. Built by the British during the British Mandate in 1924 as a military airfield, it operated as a civilian airport from 1948 to 1967, until Israel annexed the site and renamed it Atarot. Hovering somewhere between ruin and monument, it marks a moment when Palestine’s borders were porous—unlike today, when life and death can hinge on a settler’s whims. Where does the border end? The show suggests: wherever the day decides. Where Ahwesh’s imagery shows contemporary modes of tr...