Farid Abu-Shakra, Spring 2008
An Artist’s Correspondence: Between Cultures, Heritage and Innovation

Walid Abu-Shakra was born in Umm al-Fahm. In his works he corresponds with his native landscape, which he photographs and then examines and relearns over there, in foggy London. There a curious thing happens, a translation of Mediterranean landscapes with their characteristic light, shade and climatic features, so different from those of Europe. His coppery prints show the forms of our land, but their Romantic atmosphere is European; they thus constitute a fascinating correspondence about the contradiction created by the atmosphere which they exude as well as their complex landscapes consisting of hills and valleys, almond and olive trees, prickly pears between the houses, plots of land embroidered with crops, meadows and open spaces. These are the lost landscapes whose disappearance he had predicted already in the 1970s: “The day will come when we will no longer see these beautiful landscapes because man awaits behind the door to seal their fate”, he would say.

Asad Azi uses his art to correspond with his childhood, with the sources of his development and education in the rustic surroundings where he grew up. Azi, a child who lives the story of a traditional village and embraces folk customs such as pledges to saints, relates: “From the day I was born until the age of six I was pledged. This was because of my three brothers, who had died before they were born. So when I was born my parents made a pledge to the prophet Jethro. They hid the fact that I was a boy and raised me as a girl, so that the angel of death would not notice my masculinity and take me away”. He adds: “So this is how I portray myself in the works for this exhibition, a small boy with long hair, wearing a girl’s dress. His hair is tied. In one hand he holds flowers and the other grasps the hem of the dress. The dress with which I deceived the angel of death did no harm to my childhood, but gave it another dimension, of gentleness and femininity, which percolated through me as a result of this experience”.

“The Knight” is the title of a number of new works by Ahmad Canaan. They are a natural sequel to a number of sculptures he made throughout the 1980s and up to the year 2000. The knight can symbolize the plowman. The knight plows and the mare is plowed, or is used to plow. Horse and rider, plowman and what is plowed, rider and mount: this connection between opposites led the artists to take up the theme of the knight, in the wake of his “Plowman” series. Knight and plowman both extend beyond the limits of the symbolic meaning which their existence assumes. Both have collective meanings and yet both are assigned individual meanings. For the artist the knight stands for a warrior, a general, a devoted lover. The knight and the lover can be myself. Canaan constructs his sculptures out of “ruled” spaces, which he sprays with paint in order to give them the undulating form of a knight. As if it were part of a puzzle for children, one part after another is added, passionately yet patiently, so that the knight comes to possess yet another characteristic, childishness. Ahmad Canaan corresponds with himself, with his own society, with the other who has a different national identity, and with the social conflicts between the innumerable quarreling communities in this land. Conflict is important as background and provides the artist with the motivation needed to express his conceptual as well as his subjective emotional structures.

Ahlam B'soul documents a past that has been abandoned and ignored: the villages which, following the expulsion, have become part of nature and its banality. The villages and their architecture, which have surrendered to time and the vicissitudes of the weather, are facts that lie hidden in the folds of nature and civilizations. Her works call on us to observe and to listen to the past, without ignoring the present and the obstacles which it erects so as to prevent us from realizing our feelings and our uniqueness. She calls on us to gaze at the landscapes and the structures in order to ask questions, to clear away obstructions, and to express our need for correspondence and human and political dialogue with the other, that other who constitutes part of the problem of the ruins and has today become a component of this problem and this culture.

In Fatma Abu Rumi’s works we see the figures of the artist and her father, as well as dolls in both. One doll appears in the composition where Fatma appears with her father; in the other composition twelve dolls allude to the Last Supper. Her traditional oil paintings tell of oriental customs and traditions imposed by one’s father or elder brother. The artist adopts a style of multiple artistic directions. She uses social realism, associating formal feminine terms with emotion-charged conceptual structures whose origins lie in what is left of the patriarchal society with its single opinion. She mixes these terms and represents them by carefully crafted abstract Islamic arabesques. The traditional color scheme in Fatma’s works, together with the abstract arabesques, generate excitement and an interesting correspondence between east and west. Through dialogue with color and technique, their encounter with the canvas and the oriental presence created by the seen and hidden arabesques, she succeeds in concealing the painting’s background and canceling other details, or integrating them. The arabesques are very attractive and precise, but they create a charged presence that expresses the obstacles which society puts in her way. The play of concealment and cancellation is Fatma’s unique and shrewd way to tell us what is on her mind, to express her silent rebellion against male behavioral patterns which strive to dominate women and subordinate them to their own authority and logic, and her rebellion against the suppression of other opinions and the denial of their legitimacy.

Khitam Younis appears to have abandoned traditional painting tools and the classical attitude towards artistic endeavor. This she does by utilizing the theme of lack of awareness and consciousness as a sign and compass which direct her in the construction of her works. She thus manages to uncover both small details and wide expanses in nature and gives them the importance they deserve, honestly and spontaneously. This experience led her to turn her back to objectivity in favor of the subjective approach. She corresponds with “the day after”. The day after is not the day before, nor is it the “yesterday” of before the event. It is the “today”, which predicts what may come. The random lines, the dark paint spots, the cracks and the grooves which the artist constructed as the contents and the terms through which she tries to document the events of “the day after”, these terms generate tumult in her works and give rise to forms instead of compositions, abstract, absurd forms and ideas which arose spontaneously in the course of execution. The randomness and absurdity draw the onlooker into his or her own internal world, on a search for qualities which can make it possible to correspond with these works.

The presence of the word in Buthina Abu Milhem’s works raise many questions. She arouses our feelings and our thoughts. She speaks to us in the language of our fathers and forefathers and then places these feelings and thoughts in the space of reality,  linking the word to a traditional folk saying. Her attempt to correspond with the language, with the word, with her heritage, generates a verbal output that possesses human, social and political meanings. However, it is fair to ask, what motivates Buthina to bring these meanings together and to translate them by weaving them into the clothes which she has woven herself? Buthina presents us with cloth fragments embroidered with ready-made Palestinian patterns, on which she poured powdered tea or coffee to give a feeling of poverty, and added pins and needles to provide a sense of disaster. Buthina tries to pull her ideas together into a single whole and pour them into one mold, of existence, heritage and identity.

Mervat Essa uses loaves of bread to correspond with the existential needs of all creatures on earth. The loaves help pass on Mervat’s artistic message in her works, which is the need to exist, and to ask the eternal question of “to be or not to be”. This does not mean just to have or not to have a full belly, nor is it to be understood just in the literal sense; rather, the question goes beyond that, to meanings that have to do with identity and culture, with time and place, so that it turns into social and cultural criticism. Mervat’s correspondence between her private and the collective memory examines and studies the dividing line between ourselves and the other while trying to understand cultural and political patterns and movements.

Zohdy Qadry maintains a dialogue with the conflicts within himself. This has made him challenge himself, especially after his return from Russia, where he studied art. Russia with its contradictions stands in contrast to the orient: Cold and heat, life in open spaces as against life in narrow crannies, social freedom versus social restrictions, the Western awareness of and openness towards art in contrast to the lack of awareness of and openness towards the plastic arts and esthetics in the orient, freedom of opinion and of movement as against the restrictions of the local street and neighborhood. The artist took all these contrasts and examined them under a microscope here in the East, in order to correspond with them. He may become reconciled to them; in that case he will grant them recognition. Or he may quarrel with them; then he will ignore them. Zohdy’s works, entitled “Caesarean Sections”, were inspired by a Caesarean section his wife had to undergo when she gave birth to their son. The exhibits simply express the couple’s sufferings at the time. Two paintings are of particular interest. One depicts a cross and in the other a question mark covers almost the entire area of the painting. The question mark has a cut to the left of the pole, made with a knife by the artist; thus the pole symbolizes masculinity and the circle femininity. In the painting of the cross there is a white pole in the center of the cross, symbolizing the suffering of the male, as if he also underwent the operation, and not just his wife.

Manal Mahamid states: “I correspond with the world, with anything interesting. Anything can arouse my curiosity; it may be something mundane which people find completely unimportant, or it may be something of supreme importance. I correspond a lot with my childhood, which shaped my identity as Manal, who continues to maintain a dialogue with the past and all its absurdities and nostalgia. I still see myself under the oak trees, hearing the sounds of nature and speaking to myself. Indeed, I used to speak to myself, and answered. I would disappear inside the thicket of yellow-flowered growth”. Manal corresponds with the contradiction between beauty and ugliness, between life and death. She takes negative meanings and looks at them affirmatively. In her video installation we see an unidentifiable figure plucking the yellow flower’s petals. But in the same film we also see a cancerous tumor. Manal studies the active role of time; she takes the flower completely apart, next to the tumor. These two elements represent temporary beauty and the ugliness which is what makes beauty temporary. Her “affirmative” work is full of yearning, nostalgia and emotion; it is made of a wooden fence, inside of which are love letters handwritten in red paint. This color symbolizes the extremes at both poles: the height of love and the height of pain.

The spontaneity and randomness characteristic of Huda Jammal’s works are very far removed from calculations and rules about balance and fit. She succeeds in expressing her ideas and thoughts, and in communicating her meanings and feelings to the onlooker innocently and clearly. Her colors symbolize vitality and a bit of mystery. The foggy colors are derived from courage and experience, spontaneity and improvisation. The corn flour is a fine powder which Huda mixed with water colors and acrylic paint in order to create foggy colors which the observer may find dubious. Her themes are inspired by her environment, by the stories and identities told by the Palestinian embroidery. The way Huda formulates her embroidery and the precise composition of her colors surprise the viewer, in view of additional elements that play an important role in her works, such as needle-sewn nylon threads. Such techniques are transformed in Huda’s hands into dramatic narrative tools that relate to the life of women in the Middle East and allude to a language imposed on society by a predominant patriarchal environment.

The contrasts between the two cultures enrich the works of Khader Oshah and also provide him with human and social inspiration. He corresponds with his heritage, which he documents on the backgrounds of his portraits. The figures are those of members of his own family, and of a Jewish family with which he is befriended, the family of the artist Haim Maor. When I asked him why, he said: “Because we have a lot in common, for example the memory of the Holocaust and the memory of the Palestinian Nakba. I paint my family with its sorrowful history, and Haim does the same, so that the same themes bring us together. Khader draws on animal hides with ink. Ancient parchment preserved documents and some of history for a long time; in Khader’s hands it becomes an instrument for documenting both written and pictorial documents. Hide does not disintegrate and can document people who are no more, and others who may disappear at any moment.

Hanna Farah, like some of his colleagues, corresponds with a memory whose sounds echo in the present. He corresponds with John the Baptist, who was beheaded when he refused to give up his faith, as the people of the Renaissance and their predecessors depicted him. The similarity between John the Baptist and Farah’s works constitutes a clear declaration that matters of principle take precedence over personal interests. He corresponds with the time dimension; his works describe two different times. He stands under the window arch in the ruins of the house in the village of Bar’am. The house symbolizes the past whereas Hanna himself symbolizes the present, which comes there in order to read the texts of history and to search for tools that will make it possible to interpret them. Hanna offers himself as one of these tools; in a manner of speaking, he expresses John the Baptist’s adherence to principles, and his own as well, as can be clearly seen in his “Distorted Group”, where we see his own head on a copper tray, to complete his statement.