Review of the Exhibition: « Palestine, la création dans tous ses états ».

Institut du Monde Arabe, Paris, June 23 to November 22, 2009

A Palestinian woman in a cute white spacesuit plants a Palestinian flag on the moon. The image used for the poster and other communications for this exhibition is drawn from Larissa Sansour’s video ‘A Space Exodus’(2008). The artist remarks ‘One small step for Palestinians is a giant leap for mankind’ and waves the blue earth goodbye. A homeland, finally? No, because the film ends on the astronaut hurtling through space on an outbound journey from the earth. The exodus is not over.

As the rest of the world is celebrating the 40^th year of the first man on the moon, the exhibition curator’s choice for this image is not only savvy, but also very pertinent. Mona Khazindar, who works for the Institut du Monde Arabe (IMA), does not fail to make the point in interviews about how Palestinian art has grown beyond its political constraints and has become part of the world’s contemporary art movement.

The time where curators approached contemporary Middle Eastern art from ethnographic or humanitarian perspectives fortunately seems to be coming to an end. It certainly helps that there are now professional curators with Middle Eastern backgrounds. There’s no denying that political issues play an important role in the work of many Middle Eastern artists. But that doesn’t limit the scope the artists have, in either their conceptual or formal explorations.

Some Palestinian artists feel daunted by the complexity of the issues facing them and their people in their daily lives. They produce small-scale, modest works focusing on a single aspect of their reality, as if they silently hope to discover the universality they seek in an anodyne gesture. Al Hawajri’s woman cutting spinach, Jumana Abboud’s pictures of shops where the owner has gone to pray, or Taysir Batniji’s ‘diary videos’ of Gaza fall in this category. One wonders however whether they have found what they are looking for, and if not why they would want to show the work at all.

Another work by the Gazan artist Batniji replicates the Bechers’ famous photos of water towers. Twelve Israeli watchtowers are neatly framed and hung in a square, as the Bechers used to do. But not only is the light not as perfectly neutral as in the originals; one also rapidly notices that some of the watchtowers are the same, albeit taken from different angles. The Germans’ utter honesty in their methodology, an essential aspect of their work, is here not followed. Maybe it’s because the artist didn’t take the photos himself (he is not allowed to travel to Palestine) and the photographers were scared to take the pictures. But then that could have become a subject addressed by the work.

Two artists, clearly from the older generation, are difficult to connect to the rest of the exhibition. Kamal Boullata’s work is a purely formal exploration of painting, while Samia Halaby’s giant collage ‘Palestine from the Jordan to the Mediterrean’ may be a stunning work in itself, but it only references the theme of the exhibition in its title.

These famous Palestinian artists are joined by two even more widely known ones, Mona Hatoum and Emily Jacir, with one work each. Both women have received many international prizes and their work, political but subtle, incorporating some traditional Palestinian practices but strongly innovative, has been shown at many international art fairs. The works they show here are inspiring in their own right but one does start to wonder at the curatorial concept underlying the exhibition. Although to be fair the subtitle “creation in all its states” does warn that this exhibition might go in each and every direction.

The other artist over 60 years old is Suha Shoman. The indignation at the Israeli occupation that her videos express – one documenting the uprooting of more than ten thousand trees in her father’s village orchards, the other the killing of innocent Palestinians – reminds one of the activist art of the 1970s and 1980s. It is certainly very honest but it does not allow for multiple readings, leaving little room for the spectator or, one could argue, for artistic interpretation. What’s interesting is that this militant approach is apparently considered démodé by the younger Palestinian artists.

Sharif Waked for example is a master of irony. The visitor is greeted by his ‘Chic Point: Fashion for Israeli checkpoints’, beamed on a giant surface. The male models walking up and down a catwalk with clothing especially designed to facilitate body searches at checkpoints never fails to impress. It is just a little unfortunate that this one video, first shown in 2003, is so appealing because his other work – thoughtful, playful and always esthetic – rarely makes it into exhibitions.

Another master of irony is the conceptual artist Khalil Rabah, whose ‘United States of Palestine Airlines’ installation is shown here. The empty airlines office, with all the logos and paraphernalia of such places but no trace of any human activity, allows several readings. It looks so real that, as the artist told me, there were actually Palestinian refugees waiting in front of the office hoping to book tickets when the installation was first shown in Beirut’s Al Hamra street, during the Homeworks art festival of 2007.

Further down the hall, the Bethlehem-based architect Sandi Hilal is credited with the ‘Al Qasas’ project where the attitudes of Palestinian women towards their lives in refugee camps are explored. As far as I know Sandi develops her projects together with her husband Alessandro Petti, and as a matter of principle they both involve as many as people as they can, in a strictly horizontal manner, in their fascinating and practical studies of how to organize new forms of spatial resistance to the Israeli occupation. Including many foreigners, such as the London-based Israeli architect and theorist Eyal Weizman. It seems the curator however prefers to emphasize her Palestinian name (upon careful inspection one finds more credits on the label), which is contrary to her own logic of cooperation.

The young artist from Gaza Hani Zurob uses a lot of the pent-up energy one feels among young Palestinians in his seven fairly large ‘Standby’ paintings. They vaguely portray male figures who seem to be stuck in their motions, ‘in standby’, waiting for someone to free them from the canvas, and filling it with their dark thoughts and frustrated gestures in the meanwhile. The seven paintings have different hues and the manner in which they have been hung side by side works very well.

One of the most impressive works in my eyes is Rana Bishara’s installation ‘Homage to Childhood’. White balloons strewn on the ground contain black and white prints of children. Many of the balloons are opaque and one does not at first notice the photographs; but since they are at different levels of disinflation and some seem to have popped, their charge is revealed. In the middle of the room lies a mattress with more such photos, excerpts of what must be UNICEF declarations, and from the ceiling hang disks of gauze surrounded by barbed wire, as clouds. The lighting is multicolored but subdued and one hears a sad Arab song very softly.

The subject – the death of innocent children – is very difficult to tackle without getting tacky. But the young female artist manages to evoke so many possible interpretations that the spectator cannot lapse into easy sentimentality. Are the white balloons on the ground reminiscent of vanitas paintings, and do they represent the departing souls of the dead children? Or are they eggs that will never hatch, but shrivel and disintegrate? Or are the balloons with the photos inside the residual remains of the children’s lives, and are their spirits represented by the gauze clouds floating in the air? But the clouds with their ‘silver’ barbed wire linings may also represent the dreams of the youth, hemmed in by an aggressive Israeli occupation. Or, more prosaically, they represent the current Palestinian territory, of small patches surrounded by the occupier.

Hommage to Childhood. Rana Bishara, installation, 2008

Outside hangs a giant ‘kuffiyeh’, the typical Arab headdress, as if seen through a microscope. The black and white threads are actually tiewraps, used by the Israeli army (and the US army in Iraq) to handcuff potentially hostile civilians. This work is also by Rana Bishara, clearly a talented and inspired artist.

The exhibition draws a lot of visitors and is a milestone in the presentation of Palestinian artists, even if the lack of curatorial concept is a little disappointing. Many of the works presented are very good and indeed, as the curator Mona Khazindar points out, are not inferior in any manner to the best contemporary art in countries which have a more established contemporary art scene.

Robert Kluijver, July 22, 2009