Nebula5.
3, September 2008
Palestinian Art and Possibility: Made in Palestine, an
Examination.1
By Kathy Zarur
Palestine is a place burdened with the weight of representation.2 The majority of
images projected by western media outlets are one-sided, showing Israeli defense against
so-called Palestinian militants and terrorists. This carefully crafted narrative has been
firmly fitted in the western imagination, and excludes knowledge of the historical
circumstances of the situation. Considering American and European economic interests
in the region and the use of the media to shape public opinion, it is difficult to foresee a
shift in the understanding of the situation, one that can be described in simple terms as
the resistance to an illegal and inhumane occupation. Misunderstanding of the situation in
Palestine serves to aggrandize mainstream support of Israel and its activities. Herein lies
the importance of the contemporary art exhibition Made in Palestine, for art has the
potential to communicate vastly under represented perspectives with a language that
requires engagement beyond the level of the straightforward presented in the media.
Made in Palestine also offers a generous slice of modern and contemporary
Palestinian art history, one that is virtually unknown to Western audiences. Artworks by
long-established artists, such as Samia Halaby, Suleiman Mansour, and Rula Halawani
were presented alongside those of emerging artists. Over half of the artists have since
emigrated from their homeland, but many still live in the Middle East, reflecting diaspora
and the experience of occupation as defining aspects of Palestinian reality. Artists
manipulate colors, shapes and forms to visually draw audiences into their subjective,
often personal perspectives, resulting in an engagement with art on intuitive, visceral
levels. Another important contribution of the show concerns artistic and cultural legacy.
The production of fine art is associated with the existence of a long-standing civilization
and higher learning. By exposing US audiences to the work of both well-established and
1
This article is a revised version of an earlier article. See Kathy Zarur, “Looking at the
Levant,” Art in America 94, no. 8 (September 2006) p 154-7.
2
By “Palestine,” I refer to the West Bank, Gaza and what is known as Palestine 48, the
land occupied in 1948 now known as Israel.
Zarur: Palestinian Art and Possibility… 49
Nebula5.3, September 2008
young contemporary Palestinian artists, Made in Palestine states clearly that yes, there
exists an active, healthy and vibrant community working in the realms of art and culture.
Made in Palestine opened in 2003 at the Station Museum in Houston, Texas and
was the first museum exhibition of Palestinian art in the United States.3 The show was
the brainchild of James Harithas, a museum director and curator known for his politically
engaged and socially critical projects such as Frontera 450+, which focused on the
ongoing disappearance and killings of women in Juarez, Mexico.4 Given its dedication to
critical contemporary art practices that focus on political, cultural, and social issues,
Harithas and his team approached Palestinian artist and art historian Samia Halaby with
the idea of producing an exhibition of Palestinian art. Along with co-curators Gabriel
Delgado and Tex Kerschen, Harithas traveled with Halaby throughout Jordan, Syria and
Palestine to visit the studios of Palestinian artists, courting the most accomplished of
them for the show. The trip spawned an impressive exhibit of art high in aesthetic and
conceptual quality.
Harithas planned on touring the show throughout the US, but despite the pedigree
of the artists and the many notable works chosen for the exhibit, finding venues was not
an easy task. He received 90 rejections from various museums and art centers. Friends in
the museum world revealed that institutions feared losing funding for exhibiting
Palestinian art. Finally in 2005, two small art centers — SomArts Cultural Center in San
Francisco, California and T.W. Wood Gallery and Arts Center in Montpelier, Vermont
agreed to host the show. When it came to finding a New York venue, Halaby intervened
early on, engaging the efforts of Al Jisser (“the bridge” in Arabic), a New York arts
organization founded in 2001 to bring Arab artists to international attention. It amounted
to a nearly three-year grassroots fundraising campaign, for she too found no museum or
galley that would host the show. With the support of the Station Museum, Al Jisser
3
Samia Halaby very generously gave me access to her unpublished article, from which I
drew information about the inception and research of, and issues related to the exhibit of
Made in Palestine.
4
These systematic killings are thought to be connected to the presence of US and
Mexican-supported transnational corporations in the border region around El Paso, Texas
and Juarez. For an account of the relationship between gender, representation and the
killings on the borderlands, see Rosa Linda Fregoso, MeXicana Encounters: The Making
of Social Identities on the Borderlands, University of California Press, 2003.
Zarur: Palestinian Art and Possibility… 50
Nebula5.3, September 2008
raised approximately $100,000, rented and fixed up a raw loft space in the Manhattan
neighborhood of Chelsea and called it The Bridge. Made in Palestine opened in New
York on March 14, 2006. It was such a success, the show ran an extra month and
brought in over 5000 visitors. The New York manifestation of Made in Palestine was
slightly different than the original at the Station Museum. Certain works like Emily
Jacir’s Memorial to 418 Palestinian Villages Which Were Destroyed, Depopulated and
Occupied by Israel in 1948, an embroidered refugee tent, were too expensive to bring.
However, even in its abbreviated version, the show revealed innovative and visually
engaging responses to a political situation fraught with turmoil.
Samia Halaby was born in Jerusalem in 1936 and currently lives in New York
City. Her contribution to the exhibition, the 12-foot-long Palestine, from the
Mediterranean Sea to the Jordan River (2003), is a composition of acrylic painted pieces
of canvas and paper. Various organic shapes are joined with glue and thread into strips.
Each instance of Halaby’s installation of Palestine, a process that involves sewing and
gluing together the organically shaped pieces, yields a different version of the work. This
not only reflects her interest in improvisational jazz and rhythmic musical compositions,
but the flexibility and fluidity required of her as a person in diaspora. She evokes the
Palestinian topography with a palette that ranges from sunny yellows and oranges to
forest greens and midnight blues. Halaby’s work breathes beauty and poetry into a
landscape predominantly pictured as war-torn. Her title refers to Palestine as it was
before the brutal creation of Israel in 1948, reminding viewers that the current map of the
region, pocked with settlements and ripped with bypass roads and the apartheid wall is
only temporary.
Nida Sinnokrot was born in the United States in 1971, raised in Algeria and is
based in New York City. His piece, Rubber Coated Rocks (2002, see Figures 5 & 6) is a
site-dependent installation of smooth stones half coated in rubber—a reference to the
often fatal rubber-coated bullets used by the Israeli army against Palestinians wielding
rocks.5 Sinnokrot’s blend of natural and synthetic materials creates a multi-tiered
5
Rubber coated bullets are 1 to 2 mm metal bullets coated in rubber that, when used are
“impossible to avoid severe injuries to vulnerable body regions such as the head, neck
Zarur: Palestinian Art and Possibility… 51
Nebula5.3, September 2008
commentary on Palestinian life. Though simple in appearance, the production process
was a complex one that required exact timing and temperatures. At the Bridge Gallery,
hundreds of the rubber-coated rocks were lined up on the floor along one wall of the large
loft space. Installed single-file, the work suggests people waiting in line, a constant
circumstance forced upon Palestinians when they attempt to cross through checkpoints
set up to regulate and control travel within and out of Gaza and the West Bank. Rubber
Coated Rocks have yet to be tested in the field.6
John Halaka was born in Egypt in 1957 and presently resides in San Diego. His
contribution to Made in Palestine was an impressive 22 foot-long black, gray and white
canvas titled Stripped of Their Identity and Driven From Their Land (2003, see Figure 7).
Because of the artist’s formal technique, the walking figures appear to emerge from the
depths of the canvas space. Halaka created the bodies in the painting by stamping the
words “forgotten” and “survivors,” producing a pulsating effect of anonymous bodies
that recede into space and blur in and out of the background. Halaka purposefully
excluded marks of identity, underscoring the universality of displacement and exile. In
addition, the life-size scale of the figures implicate the viewer, prompting self-
questioning: am I a victim, a perpetrator, or both? The artist’s pared down palette is a
representational play in recollection of black and white photography. Photography is
assumed to represent a real scene, one “that has been.” Roland Barthes came up with this
idea in his ruminations on the medium, where he explained that photography always
refers to a past that can never be recovered.7 In evoking the supposedly objective
medium of photography through a hand-crafted and therefore subjective process of image
making, Halaka blurs the lines between real and fiction, between past, present and future.
Halaka’s formal and conceptual strategies yield no answers, and instead generate more.
Mustafa Al Hallaj (b. 1938 in Haifa) created the most commanding piece in the
show, Self Portrait as God, the Devil, and Man (2000, see Figures 3 & 4). Eight 37-foot
and upper torso, leading to substantial mortality, morbidity and disability.” See
http://electronicintifada.net/v2/article527.shtml.
6
Nida Sinnokrot in a telephone conversation with the author on 27 July 2008.
7
Barthes, Roland. Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography. Richard Howard, trans.
New York: Hill and Wang, 1981.
Zarur: Palestinian Art and Possibility… 52
Nebula5.3, September 2008
masonite-cut prints combine the ancient and the modern, creating a horizontally arranged
narrative that casts the self as man, god and devil. Al Hallaj took a transhistorical
approach to Palestine, integrating Canaanite legends, folk tales and Palestinian cultural
icons up until the present. The massive work features imagery of human/animal hybrids
that are reminiscent of the works of Hieronymus Bosch. Tragically, Al Hallaj died in his
attempt to save the original print in a studio fire in 2002. The print hanging in the show
was created by the his students in the Palestinian Artists Union.
Photography being the language of the media, its use in art practice can teeter on
the side of journalism. Artists who choose to steer away from obvious representations
must therefore approach photographic practice more conceptually. Rula Halawani’s
photographic series Negative Incursion (2002, see Figure 1) includes negative black-and-
white prints showing the aftermath of a devastating Israeli incursion into the West Bank
in 2002. Her use of the negative print technique prohibits a quick and superficial viewing,
instead requiring an intense focus on the scenes she depicts, such as the displaced family
sitting under a tent in front of their crumbled home. Noel Jabbour’s 2000-01 series
Vacant Seats consists of large-scale portraits of Palestinian families who lost members to
warfare. Family members stand stiff, directly gazing at the camera with sad, stoic faces.
The incomplete family portraits are made visually whole with the inclusion of a framed
photograph of the often young martyr. Jabbour’s combination of the formal portrait
format and the snapshot quality offered by the use of natural light imbues the photograph
with an unsettling air paralleled by the representation of the lost son as a photographic
remnant. Her strategy echoes similar 19th century daguerreotypes, pointing to not only a
lasting, but transcultural belief in the power of images. Vera Tamari’s ongoing Tale of a
Tree, begun in 1999, focuses on the Israeli army’s destruction of olive trees owned and
harvested by Palestinian farmers (see Figure 2). A black-and-white phototransfer on
Plexiglas of an old olive tree was hung above a platform holding hundreds of 3-inch
brightly colored ceramic olive trees. Tamari’s use of black and white makes the iconic
image of the olive tree is made even more so. The tree is a symbol of Palestinian
cultural, economic, and spiritual heritage. As the large image looms over tiny hand made
trees, the juxtaposition reminds us that the production of culture and heritage remains in
the hands of individuals working collectively.
Zarur: Palestinian Art and Possibility… 53
Nebula5.3, September 2008
The significance of Made in Palestine touches on two fronts – the potential for art
to impact people’s understanding of the social, cultural, and political, and the
contribution it makes to the field of art history. In the case of Palestine, a place where the
simple act of hoisting a national flag became legal only 15 years ago with the Oslo Peace
Accords, the exhibit offers audiences a unique way to approach the place, the issues with
which Palestinians struggle, and the art they make. Art can play a crucial role when
viewers engage honestly with the questions it asks, the problems it poses and the
demands it makes. Only in this way can we truly appreciate the unique perspectives of
the multiple lives made in Palestine.
“Made in Palestine” debuted at the Station Museum of Contemporary Art, Houston,
[May 3-Oct. 3, 2003]. It traveled to SomArts Cultural Center, San Francisco [Apr. 7-22,
2005]; T.W. Wood Gallery and Arts Center, Montpelier, Vt. [Oct. 18-Nov. 20, 2005]; and
The Bridge Gallery, New York [Mar. 14-May 27, 2006].
Figure 1. Rula Halawani
Zarur: Palestinian Art and Possibility… 54
Nebula5.3, September 2008
Figure 2. Vera Tamari
Zarur: Palestinian Art and Possibility… 55
Nebula5.3, September 2008
Figure 3. Mustafa Al Hallaj
Zarur: Palestinian Art and Possibility… 56
Nebula5.3, September 2008
Mustafa4.Al
Figure Mustafa
Hallaj Al
(in Hallaj
detail)(in detail)
Zarur: Palestinian Art and Possibility… 57
Nebula5.3, September 2008
Figures 5 & 6. Nida Sinnokrot
Zarur: Palestinian Art and Possibility… 58
Nebula5.3, September 2008
Figure 7. John Halaka
Zarur: Palestinian Art and Possibility… 59
