Mirna Bamieh

Mirna Bamieh
Bitter Things: In the name of an Orange, 2024
Installation with ceramic and glass artifacts, six-channel video installation (color, sound), c-prints, and freshly made Bitter Orange marmalades and juice
292 × 650 × 292 cm 
Commissioned by TBA21–Thyssen-Bornemisza Art Contemporary
TBA21–Thyssen-Bornemisza Art Contemporary Collection

In Bitter Things: In the Name of an Orange, Palestinian artist Mirna Bamieh conceived an immersive kitchen where the sensory language of food becomes a medium for remembrance, resistance, and storytelling. Commissioned for the exhibition The Ecologies of Peace, curated by Daniela Zyman at C3A in Córdoba, the work was developed during an artistic residency.

Collaborating with the local collective La Fresnedilla, Bamieh processed over 200 kilos of bitter oranges—preserving them as marmalades and juices while also transforming them into sculptural, visual, and narrative forms. This act of collective labor, documented in video by Lourdes Cabrera, is at once poetic and political, evoking intergenerational memory, land loss, and the everyday rituals that endure through displacement.

“When an orange became a kitchen, it became a story of light, clay, and fire, infinite glasses of bitter, sour juice concentrate, and jars of sweet, bitter marmalade. Bitter Things is my father's story of an orange growing in his garden—an orange from Jaffa.”
— Mirna Bamieh

A raw clay landscape unfurls from the kitchen, evoking the sediment of time and memory. Scattered across it are ceramic sculptures of Shammouti Jaffa oranges—echoes of a Palestinian agricultural heritage violently disrupted after the 1948 Nakba. Five videos embedded in this terrain depict traditional Andalusian and Levantine methods of harvesting and fermenting bitter oranges. A sixth video offers a meditative view of the installation’s central kitchen, highlighting it as a space of both labor and care.

While echoing Bamieh’s earlier Sour Things series, which explored the politics and sensory culture of fermentation, Bitter Things shifts focus to the affective and historical resonance of bitterness. Bitterness becomes a lens through which to trace loss, exile, and resilience—an emotional and material register distinct from sourness, yet equally rich with cultural meaning. Two adjacent photographic collages deepen the historical context. One incorporates a 1946 document recording the wartime economic losses of Palestinian orange farmers. The other includes pages from the first historiography of Yaffa authored by a Palestinian, featuring a personal recollection by Najat Bamieh, a family member of the artist, describing her life in Jaffa before 1948 and the forced exile that followed.

By blending ceramics, video, photography, archival material, and the tangible presence of food—its scents, textures, and tastes—Bitter Things becomes a multisensory archive. The kitchen is no longer just domestic; it becomes a site of political knowledge, where recipes are also records, and flavor is testimony. The act of tasting a spoonful of marmalade becomes a gesture of continuity and resistance.

At its core, Bitter Things is a story of the orange—a fruit of contested land, fragile memory, and enduring symbolism. A question lingers from a poem by Mahmoud Darwish:

“Asking the wisdom of our forefathers: How can the ever-verdant orange grove be dragged

To prison, to exile, to a port,

and despite all her travels,

Despite the scent of salt and longing,

Remain evergreen?

I write in my diary:

I love oranges and hate the port

I write further:

On the dock, I stood

watched the world through winter’s eyes.

Only the orange peel is ours, and behind me lay the dessert.*