The Mirror’s Code

Palestine , as a site of beauty, is a twofold prospect: the fulfillment of the real, and the nostalgia for the ideal. Seeing, as a threshold to internalize beauty, becomes, as well, a threefold prospect where sights, insights, and foresights compete. The spectator, then, has to bear the anxiety that resides both in the act of seeing and its subject. As for Reflection, it is the mission and the obsession of the artist to recall anxiety, and recreates its archways over the stream of meaningfulness in a form of humanistic, aesthetic, and political signals. In Reflection there exists a humanistic signal encapsulated in Jawad Ibrahim’s dedication “A Blue exodus for Aziza and Iqbal”—the traditional house decorators in his hometown. It is as if, after one century, Ibrahim announces that seeing oneself through others is still the enigma of the blue, and its birth certificate. Ibrahim does not re-cognize his image in water, or in life—neither submitting to the Prophetic tradition, nor evading Narcissus’s tragedy—but rather identifying with the everlasting subject of the blue—the misery of the oppressed, and their hardship, without which no “Blue Period” in art history would have ever existed.

From the humanistic rises the aesthetic signal in Reflection. Its inimitability stems from Ibrahim’s usage of dust—the essence of being—as a possible medium to wed universe’s things and selves in the substance’s aesthetic psalm of delight. From dust—the primordial element of universe and its most occurring subject; the ‘dot’ and the ‘line’ of being—and from its innocent byproducts ( ultramarine , cid, rusty metal, and faded wood), Ibrahim aspires to construct a humanistic collectivity for the oppressed who are still cultivating their yearning to unite human consciousness, and to secure conditions for its sustainability, even if these conditions were out of sight for the attentive spectator. Dust is a cheerful incident in itself. It seeks no cheerful moment to be realized, but rather the advancement of time stems from its very perpetual dialectic of forming and reforming. Reflection is nothing but an attempt to manifest a sole realization of this ‘ cheerful incident’ within the oneness of the Palestinian-universal dust. 

From the humanistic emerges the aesthetic, and from the latter the political is born. Ibrahim exorcises the cruelty of power out of the maxim that reads: “Truths are nothing but illusions that we forgot to regard as such.” Through Reflection, Ibrahim reverses this maxim asserting that “Illusions are nothing but truths that we were forced to regard as such.” At this point, Ibrahim creates a possible artistic reality out of remembering the Palestinian narrative after it has been, for long, regarded as an impossible political reality. When the colonizer dominates the time and the space of the Palestinian, homogeneousity and familiarity transform into heterogeneousity and estrangement. To overcome this transformation, the Palestinian recalls the idea of the place when reclaiming the place itself is unattainable, and when achieving a triumph over the colonizer is near impossible. Hence, the idea of the place in Reflection entails stripping the place from its most defining feature—power, for place is nothing but a space for implementation of power. Therefore, the idea of the mirror—in the artist’s consciousness—is, also, recalled to refer to the Palestinian’s authentic existence, while emphasizing the presence of his phantom, and recollecting it through the remembrance of the ‘domestic space’—the space of dreams and childhood obsessions. Reflection here is nothing but banishing space as a place for implementing the colonizer’s power. Through Reflection, the mirror is transformed to a home, a narrative, and a space of resistance. The Palestinian enters neither the mirror, nor its ‘phase,’ except as a bright image. He waits for nobody to carry the mirror before him so that he collects the fragments of his desired narrative. The Palestinian himself holds his own mirror, from which, by which, and in which his narrative emerges. Ibrahim neither enters the ‘mirror stage,’ nor leaves it, but rather surpasses it towards the act of Reflection—the artist’s last archway over which he smashes all aesthetic devices as a salute to existence and freedom.

Abdul-Rahim Al-Shaikh