Israeli-Arab art struggles with Western impositions on Eastern traditions
By JOSEPH R. HOFFMAN11asad(photo credit: Asad Azi)Extract from an article in Issue 11, September 15, 2008 of The Jerusalem Report. To subscribe to The Jerusalem Reportclick here.
A copper engraving by Walid Abu-Shakra demands your attention as you enter Jerusalem's L.A. Mayer Museum of Islamic Art, which is hosting its first-ever exhibition of contemporary Arab fine art. In a single landscape, the artist has cobbled together two elements that cannot coexist in nature - the rocky hills, gnarled trees, scattered flowers and deep vistas of the Mediterranean, enveloped in a foggy, romantic Northern European mist.
Abu-Shakra has drained all the light, shade and tonality from his Mediterranean setting. Instead of streaming sunlight, the landscape is dominated by huge cumulus cloud and pea-soup opacity, characteristics of gray, gloomy London, where Abu-Shakra, who was born in the Israeli Arab city of Umm al-Fahm, now lives.
This thought-provoking exhibit, entitled "Correspondences," highlights the painting, sculpture, video and graphics of 13 Israeli-Arab artists. All were born in Israel; except for one Druze and one Christian, all are Muslim; six are women and their ages range from the early 30s to the mid-60s. Taken together, their work highlights the complexities of being an Arab in Israel today.
The curator and author of the catalogue for this exhibition is Farid Abu-Shakra, 43, an art historian and artist, who lives in his native Umm al-Fahm. His own work is presently on exhibit in "Etchings, Scratches and Scars - Changing Representations of the Israeli Soldier" at the Petah Tikva Museum, 15 km east of Tel Aviv. He is the youngest of three brothers, all of whom are involved in the Israeli-Arab art world. Brother Said, 51, is founder and director of the Umm al-Fahm Art Gallery, and oldest brother Walid, 62, is the artist of the hybrid landscape described above.
The Jerusalem Report spoke to Farid in his studio in Herzliya's Mishkan Amanim, a modest structure owned by the municipality that provides artists with exhibition halls and studio space for a modest sum. Speaking of his brother's landscape, Farid claims that by concentrating attention on the futility of mixing disparate artistic traditions, the artist is also gently jabbing at students, who are so eager to recklessly abandon their previous studies, when confronted with the lure of the new. "The artists," he writes in the catalogue, "need to learn what modernism wants to impose on them."
But Walid Abu-Shakra's work is not merely a declaration about the teacher-student dialogue. His art and those of his colleagues deal with the complexity of their position as Arab citizens of Israel, born here but living geographically, politically and/or figuratively elsewhere.
Farid says that he chose artists who see the world in terms which he calls the "I" and the "Other" and that he hopes to initiate a dialogue between the artists and the public - hence the title, "Correspondences." He is most concerned with the imposition of the Western world upon native traditions, like the London fog in his brother's landscape that wraps around the Mediterranean beach. Other themes relate to the dislocation that many Israeli Arabs still feel over what they refer to as the "naqba" (catastrophe), the outcome of the War of Independence that led to the establishment of the State of Israel; the ongoing enmity between Muslim and Jew and between Palestinians and Israelis; and, on a more personal level, the tension between patriarchal society and feminist views of gender.
Abu-Shakra rejects the term "Israeli Arab." "I am not an Israeli," he says. "I may be a citizen of the State of Israel, but I am a Palestinian Arab. Just as there are Palestinian Arabs who live in France or Italy, we are Palestinian Arabs who live in Israel." He points out that much of the art he has chosen for the show represents the tensions that he and the other artists feel in their lives under an Israeli government in the Jewish state.
"We [the Arab citizens of Israel] are trusted neither by the Palestinians of the territories nor by the Israelis. The Palestinians think we have sold out by accepting Israeli rule; and the Israelis, especially if they see us protesting or demonstrating see us as ungrateful." He remembers that one Israeli Jew shouted at him during a demonstration, "We let you live here. Go home and shut up."
Abu-Shakra refuses to feel grateful for the "right" to live in the land he views as his own. But he is quick to say that he is very grateful for the opportunity to organize an exhibition in the Museum of Islamic Art. "This is an important museum in West Jerusalem. It will bring us an international audience."
With clear satisfaction, he notes that "Correspondences" represents two "firsts" for the museum: He is the first Arab freelance curator there, and this is its first modern fine art exhibition. He praises the museum, which usually focuses on ethnography, for bravely dealing with the here and now, adding, "When you deal with artists, you must deal with attitudes and personalities, and an ethnographic museum is not used to that. They did not put any restrictions on the art we would show. They supported us financially, morally and without censorship."
Abu-Shakra agrees with the museum's marketing director, Avishai Yarkoni, who tells The Report that exhibiting the art in West Jerusalem will increase its audience, and that, if no Western Jerusalem venue had been found, the exhibition would have been shown in cities only with a mixed Jewish-Arab population, such as Haifa or Nazareth, or in East Jerusalem. While by no means artistic backwaters, he states that these venues "do not enjoy large international crowds." Yarkoni further notes that giving the museum a wider scope is in its own best interests. "Since the tensions [between Israelis and Arabs] are very much alive, we have a responsibility to follow these developments rather than remain a museum of the past," he declares.
The tensions apparent in the contrasts
between East and West, Jew and Arab and intra-familial strife can be harsh with no room for integration, as in Walid Abu-Shakra's landscape, or it can take a softer turn. Curator Abu-Shakra makes certain that both points of view are expressed. "Every artist has his/her own pain, and we must be sensitive to that. Artists are emissaries, and we must accord them their platform."
A cultural get-together that appears amenable to resolution is "The Family," a series of ink works by Khader Oshah, 34, an artist from Beersheba in Israel's southern Negev region, who creates a dialogue between traditional motifs such as arabesques and Arabic calligraphy with Western-style portraiture and a poem by Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish, who died on August 9 at the age of 67 following heart surgery in Houston, Texas [see article on page 28].
These diverse elements are all inked on sheepskin hides that are irregularly cut, looking like fragmented, makeshift canvases. Oshah has brought folkloristic elements in harmony with a soft-edged portrait of a woman and an ode dedicated to Darwish's mother, "In My Mom's House." The poem also ties past and present because it is a modern-day variation of the venerable mualekat tradition, Arab songs of praise to God, country and womanhood, usually in the form of ballads.
Hannah Farah's unbridled anger and defiance provide a sharp contrast to Oshah's easy-going integration. In a powerful series of photographs, entitled "Distorted" (2004), Farah portrays a truncated figure, visible only from the neck to the knees, holding two mounds of soil in his palms, one grassy and the other dirt.
These two lumps, Farah tells The Report in a telephone conversation, refer to Kfar Bir'im, an Arab Christian village in the Upper Galilee, which was captured in 1948 in the War of Independence. The Israeli authorities told the villagers, including Farah's grandparents, to leave for two weeks, for security reasons, and then they would be allowed to return. But the government reneged on its agreement, making the villagers take the case to the Supreme Court, which in 1953 decided that the authorities had to answer why the inhabitants were not allowed to return home. The government subsequently razed the village and only the church was left standing. To this day, the inhabitants are not permitted to live there, despite repeated Supreme Court rulings instructing the state to allow them to return to their land. But the land where the town once stood is now a national park, celebrating the ruins of an ancient Jewish synagogue, with no official mention of the village that was there until 1948. Farah's two pieces of soil represents Kfar Bi'rim before and after the village's destruction.
Farah, 48, was born in Jish, a Muslim-Christian village northwest of Safed, where his extended family resettled after the expulsion from Kfar Bir'im, and now lives in Tel Aviv where he works as an architect and video artist. He says he is "passionately connected to the Palestinian cause of statehood." As a Christian, he says, he sees the Jewish conquest of Arab territory as akin to the Romans' 1st-century CE occupation of Jerusalem, as evidenced by a second photograph in the "Distorted" series that shows a grisly self-portrait with decapitated head, a reference to St. John the Baptist's fate at the hands of King Herod. He states that there is also a personal dimension in this work, since Hanna is Arabic for John.
A photograph by Ahlam B'soul shows the remnants of an Arab village destroyed during the War of Independence; nature has reclaimed its sovereignty over the land by covering the ruins with a carpet of green. All of the photographs in her series show uninhabited areas, like an abandoned factory or a rocky, uncultivated field. The nearby locales for each landscape are listed on the wall plaques with an Arab place name followed by the present Israeli name; for example, al-Farradiyya/Moshav Barod or Tel Hanan/Nesher.
Despite his own self-definitions, when Abu-Shakra speaks about Arab art, he is careful to distinguish the Arab citizens of Israel from the Palestinian Arabs who live in Gaza and the West Bank. "We have a wider perspective on art, in that we see the beauty along with the tragedy," he claims. Citing B'soul's photographs, he points out that in addition to the meaning of the ruins, the landscape can also be appreciated as a peaceful, verdant view. "The Palestinian [from the territories] sees only the tragedy, not the aesthetics. The Palestinian sticks his finger in his own wound," he explains.
And Abu-Shakra makes an additional point about art from the territories, pointing to the way in which the political and military situation influences their work. "Their art shows very crowded compositions with no real sense of space." In many of the works in this exhibition, he notes, "the figures are in the center and there is ample space on either side. If a Palestinian had painted [a similar painting], he would have narrowed the space, reflecting the confinement of Arabs in the territories."
In contrast to Abu-Shakra, Asad Azi, a Druze from the town of Shfaram who now lives in Jaffa, also sees a difference between Israeli-Arab and Palestinian art. "Ours [Israeli Arab] deals with wider issues, not just the 'naqba.' We are Westernized and secular, bourgeois and not hungry." He goes on to say that "Palestinian art is political and deals with pain. We have no real pain. The only issues we have with Israel is the loss of our homes in 1948, but that is by now only a semantic fight."
Extract from an article in Issue 11, September 15, 2008 of The Jerusalem Report. To subscribe to The Jerusalem Reportclick here.
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