Scarves (Manadil)
The journey leads you to a thousand stories: Barely the first is finished and already the second begins. There is no end the story and no end the wandering
Mervat's work raises an endless stream of associations about the Nakba (cataclysm) and the expulsion, as well as about the destiny of the Palestinian, whose suffering of expulsion has lasted for over fifty years, and is beginning to seem like a decree from heaven. The objects carried by the deportees as they left have become essential commodities in the life of the Palestinian. They become new concepts in plastic art, part of the artistic life, part of the shaping of the historical narrative and our collective memory. There is no end to the penetrating questions that emerge from Mirvat's works. We are not neutral spectators and she is not a neutral artist. The "Bukja”, the coffin, the bundles, the sack and the scarf are not folklore artifacts.

Salman Natour,
“The transparency of the dream: Between clay and emigration”

 

“The Room of Dreams”; Stateless Nation
Stateless Nation is a long-term research project and an exhibition on the frontiers of citizenship by Artists Sandi Hilal and Alessandro Petti. The artists investigate, observe and research the new relations between territory, state and population and reflect on the new meanings and implications of the physical and social spaces. Through this project several questions are raised such as; what is Palestine today and where are its borders? Who are the Palestinians and what is their citizenship? Why are so many people forced to live in Diaspora, and how does that identify them? And finally, what are their dreams?
“The Room of Dreams”; is one component of the project, its a video that interviews more than fifty Palestinians from Palestine, 1948 areas and the world asking them “What is your dream?". Surprisingly, the answers were a frontal attack on stereotypes and simplified categories, which often minimize the complexity and variety of the human experience, especially in the case of Palestinians. Stories, evidences and thoughts collected not only to focus on a tragedy but, most of all, to draw attention to the great cultural ferment that these tragic events have created. The room of dreams is the physical space where all dreams are collected.

 

Blindfolded History
Blindfolded History is an expression of indelible personal, political and historical memories. It concerns the contentious Palestinian Catastrophe, or Al- Nakbah of 1948-2008, and the destruction of 531 Palestinian villages and towns during the 1948 war, exile and displacement of its inhabitants.
This artwork consists of sixty sheets of glass representing the years of Israeli occupation. I dedicate this work to my father who witnessed the Nakbah and was exiled twice by acts of ethnic cleansing between the years 1949- 1951, and had to live along with his generation a collective trauma. I also wish to dedicate this artwork to Naji Al Ali and all the Palestinian martyrs.
Through Blindfolded History, I freeze moments in history onto glass. This involves a bittersweet juxtaposition that allows them to transcend the status of media images into valuable documents and icons. The media images have been transformed from one reality into another, from the bitterness and sorrow of life to the truth of Palestinian suffering , especially in an era of globalization and materialism.
My choice of unsweetened chocolate as the main medium refers to many things, including childhood. Through this soft, seductive material which looks like dry blood over a microscope slide; I express my longing for childhood of peaceful innocence, a past unaware of the adult reality of occupation and prohibition, and the most uncivilized actions one culture can impose on another. Additionally our body consists of layers of tissue, which is symbolized by the chocolate fatty substance between the layers of glass. As the viewer visually observes these brutal scenes they are gradually absorbed into their memory and body, like the layers of tissue that receive the sorrow and the suffering when physically injured. Moreover, using unsweetened chocolate has an ironic homage to the use of the sweet Hershey’s chocolate bars which were distributed by U.S. troops to Europeans during World War II, as a symbol of liberation. In this work, unsweetened chocolate symbolizes mourning.
The chocolate has been transformed from one state to another- from a state of being melted by heat into a state of being fixed— frozen in an iconic artwork, like a photograph in the darkroom. With this fixing, memory and history are also embedded in the material. By appropriating these images on glass, they are saved from the risk of media manipulation presenting the naked reality where scenes are woven into each other through the transparent layers. The shelves in this artwork symbolize the forgotten chapter of Palestinian history. This chapter, beginning in 1948, has been discarded. In it, lies the story of territory, the root cause of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict. The sense of smell in the space is also an important component. The smell being the most ancient of our senses would linger in the memory of the viewers and would directly connect with the visual component portraying an ongoing tragedy.
The ephemeral character of my artwork Blindfolded History demonstrates the danger of time. I can picture the situation in my country as a game of time, where Israel is gaining at each tick of the clock.
Rana Bishara