The Symbolism of Shuruq Harb: Day, flying, and birth
By Tahseen Yaqeen

 I searched for the exhibition at the Sakakini Gallery, but in vain. I couldn’t find even one photograph, so I wondered whether the photograph exhibition had ended. If I hadn’t asked one of the staff at the Gallery, I would have just left right away.
- Yes, they’re inside, but you have to look closely because the photographs are very small.
- Small, that is interesting, how could I have not seen the photographs, even if they were small?!

Shuruq’s photographs are only 10cm each, perhaps in order to echo the larger spaces inside us as human beings.

We go by life in haste, without stopping to take a closer look. This is what Shuruq Harb, the Palestinian photographer and artist, wanted to say with her work, which doesn’t focus on the aesthetics of the photographs as much as their metaphors, meaning, and culture.

They are not normal photos. They were made in a manner evoking and suggesting symbols. She puts together a scene and then photographs it, so that when one sees a woman with a pile of eggs on her lap we will wonder, what did Shuruq Harb mean? What did she want to say?

She wanted the photos to capture inner feelings of the human being, cutting through things on the surface to address an internal dialogue. The photos become psychological expressions showing how a human being feels about things, objects, and feelings.

 Shuruq presented her photos, repeating parts of the same scene. Among those repeated images are two feet, white fabric, eggs, a woman with thistles in her hands (the eggs are at her feet), thistles and woman with a white dress, a child (bride or doll) with a hand on her face, two hatched eggs.

We do not find a ready revelation or explanation for the viewer as one would expect. Shuruq chooses rather to leave meanings up to the culture of the viewer and an individual way of perceiving the symbols. The pictures may be expressions of the viewer’s feelings under certain situations.

The eggs could be symbolic in terms of their roundness and colour, the inside and the outside and what could be if and when eggs are ready to produce a life.  The white colour could be symbolic of birth or death, purity and innocence.  Thistles, the wild flower with its beautiful thorns, could they be symbolic of the dream woman?  The dream of a woman and her hidden feelings, feelings that are concealed, feelings she wishes to reveal.

The human body, all or parts of it are rounded aesthetically, particularly in the image of the woman on the ground, holding the eggs with hope, caution, anticipation, and a stillness that matches the stillness of the eggs. The repetitive rhythms of her feelings, of her heart, seeking to release them, is similar to the formation of potential life of the small chicks, and the bird to fly with her feelings, soaring high with dignity and courage.

An egg sits next to another, despite their whiteness, yet the feeling of the units is far from boredom, because it’s infinite, the round eggs take your breath away on a journey that only ends to start again.

There is an innocence hiding behind the white dress, wishing to fly. There are some kind of surges of storms that condense on the ground and the bed, a search for wholeness.

The overall sensation of the human being towards the universe and life, is a spiritual feeling that creates within the human being a number of human beings and not one, the hand is a human being and so is the foot, the face, the eye, the leg, and even the objects that a human deals with and uses becomes human with him.

The small photos in Sakakini Gallery were not small anymore, the emotions that I write about here are in fact emotions and reactions to seeing, living, and being in solidarity with the beautiful human being we came across and who confided in us.

This is not unusual for someone like Shuruq Harb, the photographer, the philosophy student, who is not satisfied with the naivety of the scenes, but delves into them to reveal the hidden or the meaning that hides out of fear from something.

This exhibition is Shuruq’s sixth. Each time Shorouq searches for a form of expression. We saw that in Shuruq’s exhibition in the Qattan’s Foundation Young Artist Competition in 2004, when she exhibited her photos in a dark place where only her photos were lit. The photos were of nature and based on Shuruq’s belief that it is necessary to experience the scenes, because the scenes themselves do not necessarily create a creative vision. This is why one could describe Shuruq’s photos as the war of mental images of expressive symbols about states of feeling wishing to fly.