Vivien Sansour
PalestineJune - December 2018
Vivien Sansour is the founder of the Palestine Heirloom Seed Library. Trained in the field of Anthropology, Vivien worked with farmers worldwide on issues relating to agriculture and independence where she wrote about and photographed rural life and practices.
Her solo show, Terrain: Palestinian Agri-Resistance, a collection of rural portraits of agri-Cultural Palestine was exhibited in The Jerusalem Fund Gallery in Washington, DC (2012).
Vivien was selected artist for Confrontation Through Art residency in Nicosia, Cyprus where she was part of the collective exhibit, “Where The Sky And The Earth Touch”. As part of her work on seed autonomy Vivien has created the Traveling Kitchen Project where she designed and built a mobile kitchen that journeys across Palestine to engage people in discussions about heirloom varieties, biodiversity, and seed conservation. She is working on bringing back threatened varieties ‘back to the dinner table to become part of our living culture rather than a relic of the past’. A public speaker, Vivien has presented her work as an artist, independent scholar, and conservationist in several venues locally and globally including SALT Art Center in Istanbul, Georgetown University, Qalandiya Biennale, and Columbia University.
An avid lover of nature and the arts Vivien recently founded El Beir, Arts Seeds studio in Bethlehem. She is co-director with Riad Bahour of the feature film, El Bizreh Um El Fay, which won best project at RamallahDoc 2015 and is set for release in 2019.
Supported by the A. M. Qattan Foundation through the “Visual Arts: A Flourishing Field” project funded by Sweden.
