The Subject of Palestine by Samia A. Halaby January 2005 Resistance is the Palestinian response to the tragedy known as the Nakbe, when in 1948 statehood was lost to Israeli occupation.Scattered by war and its negative effects, the majority of Palestinians are refugees or exiles bound together by the trauma of their history.Thus, tragedy and resistance permeate Palestinian national life and are the primary subject matter of Palestinian art. During the 1970’s and 80’s, in the years leading up to and including the first Intifada, Palestinian art was primarily an art of liberation growing with the groundswell for freedom.While it polarized into two main trends at the turn of the century, the subject of Palestine has remained constant as its content. One trend is comprised of the heirs of the liberation movement, artists who direct their discourse to their own population. At the other pole are artists who carry the message of Palestine to the outside world, directing their discourse primarily to English-speaking audiences – the explicatory artists. The liberation artists in all parts of mandatory Palestine and surrounding Arab states.Typically, they gained their education in universities and art schools of surrounding countries such as Egypt, Iraq, Syria, and Turkey.Living with conditions of war and struggle, these artists create their own galleries and unions, and write their own history.Their freedom from the administrative layers over artists typical in Europe and the United States allows their work to be more directly influenced by the general population and, as such, takes on a popular character. The liberation artists also maintain an international attitude of brotherhood with other liberation movements.In Harvest and Famine in Africa, Mustafa Al Hallaj expresses solidarity with African liberation, narrating the story with images of the fertility of African soil and the hard work of Africans, contrasted with the contradictory images of hunger and malnutrition.At the top of the image is an extended palm, asking why such contradictions exist. Struggling against the consequences of censorship and occupation, the liberation artists often work on paper, and their paintings are of modest scale; they also reproduce their work in posters.These are highly prized by the population and are proudly hung wherever possible, even in the streets.In A Rose is a Rose is a Banner, a signed silkscreen poster, Adnaan Zbeidi draws the Palestinian poppy.Red, green and black are the colors of both the poppy and the Palestinian flag.Outrageous as it may seem, Israeli law prohibits use of these colors in Palestinian painting; Zbeidi was jailed by the Israeli military and interrogated about this poster. In technique, the liberation artists continue to use the language of two-dimensional painting, drawing, and printmaking, while in form they embrace a style similar to that of the Mexican Mural movement.Like the Mexican muralist, Diego Rivera, they use the symbols of their population’s folklore within a Cubist form.They consciously reject the perspective and chiaroscuro of Renaissance art, while they embrace the history of their ancient ancestors, the Assyrians, Canaanites, Egyptians, and Sumerians. Liberation artists of the 1970’s and 80’s reflect the popular discourse of the masses.Thus themes found in their work are those of the struggle for freedom, support of political prisoners, and the right to return to their stolen homes and lands.Stubbornness and endurance at a dangerous moment in national life become important at the turn of the century; thus, exploration of attitudes towards loss, family unity, and endurance in the face of Israeli attack take precedence.In a work by Zahed Harash, Home, images of an evening with a partner, walled doorways, prison bars, and an eye symbolizing awareness, expose the mixture of pain and love that is the Palestinian hearth. One frequent, and very interesting, representation of suffering in their work is the cross and crucifixion.In this work, it is a secular theme seeming to descend from the same ancient patterns of thought that gave rise to the Christian crucifixion in ancient Palestine.In The Martyr, Tayseer Barakat creates the image of the cross from a shrouded horizontal female crossing, at a right angle, a vertical male companion from whose hand a dove flies upwards, as though the hopes of the departed loved-one pass first through the bereaved. Adnan Yahya tells us of the pain endured by Palestinian and Lebanese families in Sabra and shatila Massacre, where tree roots, like sucking fingers, reach down to a pile of bodies while Picassoesque old mothers stand over them in stooped postures of grief.Striking a slightly different note, Abdl-al-Naser Amer’s Fire tells of grief and anger in a turbulent expressionist image of a man on a stretcher – an image of the victims of Israeli military attack which residents of Ghazze (Gaza) see far too often.Amer renders his images on paper made of those Israeli and American newspapers that are full of lies, which he angrily tears, pulps, and reuses to tell the truth. The Baby Martyr Iman Hajjo by Abdal Rahman Al Mozayen is part of a Palestinian Muslim tradition of honoring those who are killed while following the path of God.He honors the two-year-old Iman, killed by Israelis in 2002, by showing her with dignity adorned by all the symbols of the resistance and her Canaanite ancestry.Though a child, he draws her as her future might have allowed her, wearing the traditional woman’s embroidered breast piece on which doves spell out her name.This is an image of respect, the respect of resistance to the daily humiliations imposed by Israelis on every detail of Palestinian life, standing in striking contrast to her dehumanized assassination in the electronic mass media. The explicatory artists, on the other hand, tend to live in Europe and the United States; some spend considerable time in Palestine.They speak English and other languages fluently and are generally educated in Western universities. Most explicatory artists maintain a connection to organizations of the homeland but are also influenced by Western aesthetics.As they engage with the Western art world, their work is partly molded by the preferences of European and American museum curators, dealers, critics, and historians. Despite living in an apparently larger world than those who live in Palestine, with access to larger and diverse areas and countries, the explicatory artists are generally less international in their attitude.They tend to sympathize with the internal liberation movements of Western states; thus, at times, they address racial and gender issues.Sympathizing with feminism, Mary Tuma divides her work between the subject of Palestine and the subject of the body.In her work on Palestine, Tuma transfers her feminist interest in the surface of the body to land as the surface of the nation, thereby challenging the traditional male claim of the fertile land as “our female” by laying feminist claim to national land as “our body.”During the year 2000, when Palestinian hopes for peace were high, Tuma created Resurfacing Palestine.The stones of the piece, symbolizing the Intifada, are softened by thread and used to resurface - that is, rebuild - Palestine. Distant from the terror of war and destruction, the explicatory artists often create installation works of considerable scale where immersive environments capture the viewer.In Homage to Childhood, Rana Bishara creates a fragile environment lasting only the duration of an exhibition.Within the created ambience, photographic negatives of injured and martyred children are seen inside white balloons, as crowns of barbed wire hover above.Viewers in this freshly created environment see in a new light what had been impersonal and cruel in newsprint. The explicatory artists seek to explain Palestine, its history and its tragedy, to an audience perceived to have power over political reality - an audience whose good opinion Israel wants to maintain.They challenge that hegemony, often utilizing the language of mass media.Rula Halawani, a photographer with international press credentials, uses her photographs to frame and group the realities of the West Bank, presenting them in ways that expose the lies of propaganda, utilizing innovative perspectives and techniques to deliver harsh images of reality in Palestine.“Intimacy,” a photographic work of close-up shots at the Qalandia checkpoint, allows us a view, as through a peephole, of the humiliating and numbing daily routines Palestinians undergo of waiting, being searched, showing identity cards, and waiting again. The visual language of the explicatory artists partly relies on verbal language to heighten its meaning.Since the language used is English and idiomatic it limits the audience to those who understand its meaning.For example, in the work of Rajie Cook, Memories Preserved, everyone will understand the visual message expressing the horrors of the 1948 massacre at Deir Yassin where many Palestinians – estimates range to 250 - were massacred by the nascent Israeli military, but only English speakers would precisely understand the ironies of the title in relation to the canning jar full of bullets and a baby doll. The explicatory artists use the subject of Palestine to dispel the misinformation and negative propoganda.A major theme within this subject is being a nation without a state and being refugees, both in their homeland and outside. Sandi Hilal and her Venetian husband Alessandro Petti’s work covers all the negative legal and political conditions created by a foreign occupation intent on changing the demographics of the population.In their work, borders, walls, checkpoints, and identity cards counter pose Palestinian dreams for safety and freedom.The dreams of the Palestinians are presented in The Room of Dreams, a video in which they describe their hopes.We are shocked into poignant empathy by the simple desire of Palestinians to live their daily lives unhindered.
Thus, as the exhibition makes manifest, the separate concerns of liberation and explication in Palestinian expression lead to different results in form, yet these two poles remain focused on Palestine as the fundamental subject of their work.They reflect the understanding Palestinians have that as their liberation struggle is in a semi-dormant stage having taken on the attributes of endurance, the need to take their story to the outside becomes nearly as important as taking care of the aesthetic demands of their own society. The unity of Palestinian artists and of their concerns with the subject of Palestine remains unusually strong.A shared emotional response to powerfully affective tragedy binds them to each other in touching and wonderful ways, in Palestine and outside.Aesthetic traditions begun in the liberation movement continue today as artists who live outside return regularly to the land that is Palestine, participating in exhibitions, symposia, and workshops, reinforcing their connections and maintaining contacts that stretch, connect and weave like invisible threads around the globe. Samia Halaby is an artists and writer.Born in Jerusalem, she has studied and taught at several American universities and her work is included in numerous public and private collections.She has curated distinguished contemporary art exhibitions and published books and articles on contemporary art, including Liberation Art of Palestine (2003).She lives and works in New York. |