Going for a Ride?

Cars are powerful icons in our society-Other than being urban household commodities, cars have become a metaphor of daily life. These inanimate objects even carry an emotional significance to most people. Not for me I never owned a car nor learnt to drive one, but seeing my friend Liza’sVolks WagonBeetleas I peeked from behind the shutters of my windowone morning made me shudder. Thatquaint red car in which we often rode,was visibly smashed. It was lying on its hood wheels up- almost like a real dead beetle.

In Going for a Ride? Those inanimate objects, symbols of well being, status and freedom have in an act of vindictive violence, perpetrated by the military tanks in the 2002 invasion of Ramallah taken a new reality. They metamorphosed from once practical objectstobecome subjects of vengeful voodooism. Do we hurt the Palestinians more by destroying their cherished personal belongings??

My idea in making this installation was not to merely to fashion junk as an art formor an anti gesture as advocated by the Nouveau Realiste or Dada artists such as Marcel Duchamp and Cesare in their crashed car compositions. Both artists challenged the conventional notion of artas an aesthetic exercise. I simply wanted to make a statementhow a mundane logical reality becomes totally illogical through the violence of the war machine.

It is hard to see my installation of smashed cars as not carrying a political meaning.

700 hundred private and public cars were smashedin the military incursion of Ramallah only. I wanted to give those cars a voice - an ironic reflection on the unnecessary nature of violence whose authors were the Israeli occupation forces. This act of destruction became like action art disturbing the status quo of matters.

The soldiers in this case have become the artists/creators.

The soldiers the viewers.

The soldiers as re-creators The installation piece kept changing it had a new energy each time- more violent than the previous one.

I was merely the curator.