This work, which I first started in 2005, comes within the framework of a series of recent works (photography in particular), that were created over the last few years, and acquired their final shape during my trips between Europe and Palestine.

The theme of this work is related to “photographic portraits” that were created in shops, workshops, cafes, and other work places in Gaza. The main theme of these portraits is photographs of “the head of the place” (mainly the late founding father and in some rare cases the current owner of the place). The photographs are usually hung up behind the desks, on a prominent place on the shelves, or are lost among piles of goods and various products depending on the activities of the store… a set of “unconscious compositions” [1] of the set-up of the place.

A sociologist would see through this work, a question about the place and status of the father figure within the Palestinian or Arab society, and the preservation of the patriarchal authority practiced by him after his death. This conduct (hanging up the picture) for the successor (the son or the relative) is the successor’s way of paying tribute to the father in order to maintain his presence somehow in the place that he had established, where he had spent most of his life.

But regardless of any sociological or cultural analysis, as is the case in some of my previous works [2] , this set of photographs enhances a special interest of mine, the state or (the non-state?) of the present absence or the absent presence (non-absence, non-presence). The presentation of the absence and the relationship that is created between the image of the “father” and the elements of the visual space that is captured by the lens (the image inside the picture) constitutes somehow for the merchant an attempt to build a relation between the present environment and the history of the place. For me, this work represents, in more general terms, a way to question the history and the present situation.

I ask myself about this encounter here, between the personal circle and the public one: the picture of the father, the private “mentor”, the family’s authority, the collective reminder of the patriarch, the public family memory (the collective) of the business place, the store, a place for living (on the inside) and a place of daily constant joint interaction (on the outside). Just like the open door of the business place, the boundaries between the two circles are intertwined and vague, the non-private and the non-public “ a place in between”.

The work “Fathers” is one of a series of photographs and video works that were produced over the last few years (“Untitled/Gaza walls”, “Gaza-Diaries”, “Untitled 2001-2005”) all relating to a unique documentary project, part of which is being described and explained by Tayseer in his review of the exhibition. This project is not related to the direct presentation of life conditions inside “the big jail with open skies” that is always referred to, and in the confines of which more than one million Palestinians are living since 1948. The project is also not related to the norms and rules of journalistic reporting, nor with the stereotypes produced and reproduced by the media (violence, rocks, burnt tyres, poverty of streets overcrowded by the residents, etc.).

In contrary to the familiar representations of the material and human spaces that are defined by the geographical and political status of the area, this work highlights the imagination, which Jack Ransier insists “is not merely about telling imaginary stories” but is one that “builds a relationship between the appearances and the reality, the visual and its significance, the individual and the collective” [3] , instead of a detailed representation of the objective powers that produce the enclavement and secrete the grumbling, the boredom and the desperation by Gazans, the work creates a new composition, that is more silent and confidential than the tension and the resistance that exist behind the loud noises of the appearances.

Thus, the work “Untitled/Gaza walls, 2001” was presented as if it were colored slides of abstract paintings - pictures of Gaza walls, covered with symbols (names, slogans, political posters, pictures of Intifada martyrs). The aesthetics of the pictures and the transformation to symbolic forms of modernity in the photography (abstract forms, torn posters, graffiti) hide the authentic original meaning of the writings that had illegible walls) they hide the authentic meaning of the writings that were only legible to the Arabic-speaking viewer. The collection “Fathers” suggests today an inventory, incomplete obviously, of portraits (paintings, prints, or photographs) that one finds framed and hung up on walls of cafes, shops, business places, workshops and other work and living places and spaces in Gaza, as elsewhere in the Middle East. These pale, usually fading colored pictures, often dusty and crooked, rarely refer us to the current owner of the place, but rather to the founding often long-deceased owner. They are the favorite themes of a “silent nature” but of a special type somehow, since they relate to a place replete with symbols of signs of presence, and of human chaos of owners and users, a place filled (with goods, belongings, memories and traces of life) yet empty at the same time, a place of the present and the past almost as ruins from the time that shortly follows a catastrophe that we will be able to know nothing about.

The power of these images lies in what they hide and in what they show simultaneously. To be more precise, the power lies in what they evoke of inevitable disparity among the various readings and interpretations, here and there, in Gaza and in Palestine and in many other places. For the Gazan or the viewer who is familiar with the region, these “pictures of the pictures” refer us to a visual culture that is expert in the various parallelisms and juxtapositions (with or around the pictures of the fathers, one can find, depending on the place, pictures of Arab leaders- Arafat, Saddam, martyrs, Sheikh Yaseen, but also of Rachel Corrie, pictures of Mecca and Qoranic verses), even if Gazans are oblivious to the aesthetic system of the pictures (defining the details, resorting to “the documentation style, the serial order) which usually attracts the attention of the foreign viewer or visitor of the exhibition. This confusing and imposed distance among the various readings of the fully contemporary pictures reposes a question on the historic nature of the struggles when the idea of globalized arts would rather make us refrain from it.

[1] A term quoted from Walker Evans.

[2] Untitled (colored slide show- Diaporama, 2001. Or “Untitled” (photographic installation 2001) or “Untitled” (rooms 2005).

[3] Catherine David, Commissioner of the national museums in Paris, Curator of exhibitions.