ARTIST’S STATEMENT
The title of this project refers to a Palestinian saying that states if you spend enough time in a place you take on it’s characteristics. Living in a house for two months 100 yards from the entrance to the souk in Hebron enabled me to form close relationships with many of the people in the City. Life in the Old City has been severely disrupted over the last twenty years. Recently new schemes were introduced to sponsor the market traders who are a vital part of the infrastructure in the Qusba, or souk who became the subject of my artwork. My project documents a series of elements in the Old City. It embraces the contemporary aspects of the city while highlighting the unique status of the “Khalili” market trader. The ‘Khalili’ (or Arab Hebronite) holds a particular place in Palestinian culture: he is seen as a trader, commercially astute and often stubborn. He is conservative and proud of the history of his birthplace and has a strong sense of local identity. To explore and represent this unique identity and explore this subject further, I painted small black and white oil portraits of the shopkeepers. The images were framed in gold and given to the shopkeepers to hang in their shops. The project will be compiled into a book that includes photographs and documentation of each portrait in the shop with its owner. By using something specific and simple from everyday life, I wanted to contest the stereotypical depictions of Palestinians in the conflict, such as former images of the Fedayeen taken in the seventies and more recent trends that favor traumatic realism, such as images of bereaved Arab women alongside the destruction wrought by IDF bulldozers.
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