Mahmoud Alkurd
I was mentally prepared to accept the inevitable reality shock before I moved to Rochester from my home country, Palestine. A place like the Gaza Strip, where I grew up, has its own unique reality, where the norms of contemporary life are mixed with a lot of abnormalities. After spending almost two years in Rochester, and just as I was adjusting to life here, I realized I had begun to see my Gazan identity from a new perspective.
Smuggling Life is a multimedia art project that highlights the phenomenon of sperm smuggling by Palestinian prisoners in Israeli prisons. Family members coordinate visits where a visitor picks up used candy bags, cigarette lighters, and chocolate bars containing a sperm vial to be smuggled out. This phenomenon has been going on for two decades, and has resulted in the conception of more than 64 children. Smuggling Life engages with this history, as well as with the circumstances around this phenomenon, such as depriving family visits to Palestinian prisoners, the scrutiny of the conservative Palestinian community, and depriving the children who are born through this process of government documents or passports. This work also reflects on the transition of my own identity and draws a parallel between the children born this way and my own existence as an emigrant who “smuggled” himself from Palestine.
