Humour in states of occupation: Contemporary art and cultural resilience in Palestine, Greece and Australia

This chapter investigates how and why artists from around the world are increasingly turning to humorous aesthetic strategies for documenting and re-assessing experiences of emergency, crisis and collective trauma that arise from the experience of occupation. Critically engaging with diverse understandings of the concept of ‘occupation’, this chapter focuses on three key case studies to offer a comparison of how humour operates within contemporary art produced in diverse geographies currently under various forms of occupation: Palestine (military occupation), Greece (financial occupation) and Indigenous Australia (denied sovereignty). Focusing on the work of contemporary artists including Emily Jacir (Palestine), Richard Bell (Australia) and Panos Sklavenitis (Greece), and mapping changes to art infrastructure across these three sites, this chapter makes clear laughter’s unique ability to communicate the lived experience of occupation. Underpinned by a discussion as to why humour is crucial to the social function of art, this chapter thus aims to reveal humour’s capacity for operating as a tool of cultural resilience in three key ways: through political enactment, critical evaluations of collective identity and a reconfiguration of relationships to specific geographies.