Artists from Palestine don’t need to go looking for subject matter and daily reduce complexity to concrete materiality in order to exist. Smart and sophisticated, already working against type, seasoned in circuitousness and daring directness, they’re delivering some of the most intriguing art of our times.
Guy Mannes-Abbott – Babelmed – 19 October 2010
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Future Movements Jerusalem
City States at Contemporary Urban Centre
Liverpool Biennial 2010
19 October 2010
By Guy Mannes-Abbott
Curated: Samar Martha
Artists: Basel Abbas and Ruanne Abou-Rahme (Palestine), Jawad Al Malhi (Palestine), Sarah Beddington (UK), Anna Boggon (UK), CAMP (India), Raouf Haj Yihya (Palestine), Alexandra Handal (Palestine/ UK), Shuruq Harb (Palestine), Maj Hasager (Denmark), Jakob Jakobsen (Denmark), Bouchra Khalili (Morocco/ France), Larissa Sansour (Palestine/ Denmark) and Oraib Toukan (Jordan)
Wandering through this year’s Biennial -seductively staged in semi-derelict buildings which upstage some of the art shown- reminded me of Shoreditch circa 1993. Here pubs are already open on Saturday and things are visibly in train; big architecture is in the air, vast areas are being readied for regeneration. But where there is art there is excited edginess, most names are not well known so work is encountered naked. If there is by now a slightly practised Biennial air -a nicely-knackered garage showing Raymond Pettibon’s lackadaisical film- it’s excusable: this is a celebration.
The “changing urban structure” of the city between docks, cathedrals and stations is also the introductory phrase used to describe a show that brought me up from London with high expectations. Future Movements Jerusalem is part of a larger presentation called City States which focuses on other unlikely cities -Vilnius, Quebec- at the Contemporary Urban Centre in Liverpool’s Baltic Triangle. Future Movements is curated by Samar Martha from the Palestinian city of Ramallah. It’s a version of a larger exhibition shown last year in Jerusalem, while some of the artists who showed there have made new works for the Biennial.
Half of the artists are also from Ramallah, excepting Jawad al Malhi whose home is a refugee camp in Jerusalem often, as here, the focus of his work. The other artists are either displaced Palestinians or artists who have held Residencies largely in Jerusalem. If that sounds convoluted it is as nothing next to the disingenuousness of a phrase like “changing urban structure” when applied to Palestinian territories still under brutal Occupation. It would be closer to the truth to refer to the “growing ethnic cleansing” of Jerusalem, for example, as works here document.
Meter Square is a sickeningly brilliant piece; artfully provocative, politically acute as well as a buzz to play.
The show is startling for the quality of the work in it as well as the ambivalence it generates. This is best exemplified by Raouf Haj Yihya’s Meter Square, a video game in which the player has to learn how to stop demolishing the homes of the Tawiil, Darwish, Daoud, etc. families of Silwan, a part of the city where homes are routinely demolished by the Occupation and rebuilt in resistance. Meter Square is a sickeningly brilliant piece; artfully provocative, politically acute as well as a buzz to play. Yihya’s achievement is to condense all the issues at work here in an urgently compelling piece.
A visual encoding of interpretative presumptions, variant scripts and the multiplicity of meanings in acts of naming.
Shuruq Harb, also from Ramallah, is exhibiting a new and puzzlingly clever example of her highly considered work. Wiki City renders 12 wiki names for Jerusalem as dots and lines according to mathematical schema developed by an Abbasid calligrapher. The ‘words’ look like Morse Code and architectural plans, still resemble Arabic but are not actually legible. The piece is a visual encoding of interpretative presumptions, variant scripts and the multiplicity of meanings in acts of naming. Calligraphy has a significant presence within the visual aesthetics of Arabic arts, Harb represents the winningly cerebral end of its spectrum.
It’s hard, nasty and tough-minded yet it’s also freed-up as art; an abysmal amusement arcade remixed by Burial.
Contingency is a sound installation by Basel Abbas and Ruanne Abou Rahme, both members of Ramallah Underground. Their work, like Harb’s, is independent of its context and yet borne entirely of it. Contingency is an exploration of the “sonic fabric of colonial structures” as embodied in the monstrous Qalandia checkpoint separating Jerusalem from most Palestinians. It’s a room lined with reflective metal sheeting, full of disembodied voices and the machinery of Occupation. LED tickers run intermittently around the top, reflecting against the steel: One by One, Your Fingerprint, Show Me ID. It’s hard, nasty and tough-minded yet it’s also freed-up as art; an abysmal amusement arcade remixed by Burial.
His are more withholding and protective of a place made near-invisible. Against the light of occupation, Khalili reclaims Palestinian space in a disarmingly potent gesture.
The launch of the exhibition also brought a book of photographs by Yazan Khalili to Liverpool. Landscape of Darkness contains photographs of the Palestinian hills at night, with very little visual ‘information’. Light is power in Ramallah, connoting Settlements and surveillance. It also forms a nocturnal sea beyond the prison of the ‘West Bank’, flooding the plains from which so many refugees in Ramallah were expelled. Khalili has captured something more subtle and intimate, reminding me of the anonymous night lights in Dayanita Singh’s Dream Villa series. His are more withholding and protective of a place made near-invisible. Against the light of occupation, Khalili reclaims Palestinian space in a disarmingly potent gesture.
Sarah Beddington contributes a nicely judged Elegy to Mamilla
Other works are less freighted, rawly substantial or fully achieved. Notable is the humour in Larissa Sansour’s film of the first Palestinian moon landing. Bouchra Khalili filmed a young Palestinian drawing the route he’s forced to take from Ramallah to Jerusalem to evade the military on a detailed UN map of the Occupation. Sarah Beddington contributes a nicely judged Elegy to Mamilla ; a filmed record of the ancient Muslim cemetery beyond the walled City and the vulgarity of construction works on a ‘Museum of Tolerance’ by the occupying power.
The title of the show apparently echoes a political movement called The Future, founded by Marwan Barghouti. Politics gnaw at everything here but the best works are not reducible to it. There’s a rich vitality amongst a broad ‘generation’ of Palestinian artists that is beginning to achieve global recognition and which is exciting to witness. Ultimately art is judged both within and without context, by its compelling attractions or nothing. This is a very ably curated sample of new art from Palestine with weight beyond its freight, as it were. Amongst all the achievement here are hints and assertions of much more to come.
Artists from Palestine don’t need to go looking for subject matter and daily reduce complexity to concrete materiality in order to exist. Smart and sophisticated, already working against type, seasoned in circuitousness and daring directness, they’re delivering some of the most intriguing art of our times.
After thoughts 10 Feb 2022. I was wondering about this exhibition and my having written something*, partly because it was my first sight of CAMP’s work and their importantly brilliant poem of resistance; Al jaar qabla al daar (The neighbour before the house) (2009–2011). A sight limited to an -at that moment- badly-lit screen that was also not moving, or moved spasmodically for a short while over a short run. I remember nevertheless how coolly impressive even a few glitched frames of it were but couldn’t write anything about it obviously (certain amount of critical ethics involved re highly constrained efforts to put on such a show in the UK). As I write this I am remembering seeing it ‘properly’ more than once in Sharjah a year later (sigh).
The image I retain of that screen, the close-up of a yellow-walled exterior it contained is not a post-rationalisation; it has always haunted me a little. However, the works above described in what is not my best piece of critical writing but it is an attempt to locate the work in the moment and the location, i.e. blocking things out a bit, not least to encourage visitors over thresholds. However it makes for a very evocative read to me now; acute on Shuruq’s acute work, some of which I’d seen before, not least at Delfina I think. This was the first work I’d seen and perhaps visual work exhibited of Basel and Ruanne’s and a tentative but sharp piece it was.
Yazan’s book (Landscape of Darkness, 2010 with intro texts by Reem Fada & Adania Shibli) was connected but not exhibited at the show/Biennial, so far as a recall; photographic images around the hills and wadis of Ramallah at night. I got that right above about the work being; ‘withholding and protective of a place made near-invisible. Against the light of occupation, Khalili reclaims Palestinian space in a disarmingly potent gesture.’ I hope you know the work, and have seen the book? I wonder now whether one has to have been inside the open-air concentration camp of the Palestinian Territories to truly get this, amongst other indelible truths (ie. my accurate description of its reality in this sentence)? How many are honest or rigorous enough to even contemplate that? But if you can’t or won’t understand this ongoing horror from within then your every complacent thought, word, deed, is complicit with the unique horror that it is. Not inconsequential or irrelevant as I so much want to say, but all-too consequential…
I was reminded of this light, these poetically, politically, philosophically resonant qualities of light by Haig Aivazian’s All of your Stars are but Dust on my Shoes (2021), showing now until March 19 at The Showroom; a definite must see. I’ve only seen it once so far but it engages with many of these qualities of light during the recent period of Beirut’s fall (or push); ‘Electricity is a nerve / the nerve of life / we’re not seeing electricity.’ Haig’s film is more exposing and confrontational, while it retains a poetics that is crucial to both these projects in rendering palpable non-sense as acts of resistance. I also wrote about some of the located qualities of light in these same hills -the power of light in multiple senses- in my In Ramallah, Running (2012).
I don’t think this excellent exhibition was critically engaged elsewhere at all, but may have misremembered. I say so because it was deserving of greater essaying length then, perhaps still. That would have allowed me to think more attentively with the other artists and works only briefly cited above. Meanwhile, there is a mortifying temporal ravine that opens in thinking about this, given what is going on in the same places today, day by day. Raouf’s brilliant work should have been broadcast by the BBC in the Disaster Relief slot! Footage of ongoing dispossession, displacement, and what is in current International Law (however faulty, limited, fake-universal, but mainly failed by its authors in implementation as they and their allies became perpetrators once more) recognisable as ethnic cleansing and war crimes. And to see the word Mamilla again, in 2022…
There are personal associations with this exhibition too, travelling with Adania and (newly met) Yazan, ordering off menu with determined curiosity (and someone’s impressive appetite) which I promise you was heartily taken up by the kind kitchen and staff in Liverpool. A great deal of laughter! Recalling dimly a conversation about the next Biennial with its Director about staging a conversation between myself and Khalil Rabah in a moored hot-air balloon🍉 above the city, in the context of IR,R, which petered out for reasons I can’t remember. This fine idea did not come from me and would have stolen the entire show/Biennial, of course… See my forthcoming volume of Unmade Art Projects, which I categorically commit to never re-conceiving as an NFT or any other billionaire-BS (keep your sponsorship monies).
More after thoughts; 18 March 2022
I wrote about a later exhibition; Points of Departure at ICA London (2013), for Ibraaz, focusing in particular on Basel Abbas and Ruanne Abu-Rahme’s increasingly and ongoingly brilliant work. I’ll post this properly but meanwhile it is here.
NOTES FROM A FRUITSTORE 