Artis

June 13, 2009 - September 13, 2009

Men in the Sun is a group show featuring the works of 13 Palestinian artists working in Israel. Curated by Tal Ben Zvi, Hanna Farah - Kufer Bir'am. Artists include: Abed Abdi, Osama Said, Asad Azi, Ibrahim Nubani, Asim Abu Shakra, Michael Halak, Durar Bacri, Rani Zahrawi, Raafat Hattab, Fahed Halabi, Ala Farhat, Scandar Copti, Rabia Buchari.

 

The exhibition "Men in the Sun" explores contemporary Palestinian art, whose practitioners live and work in Israel. It borrows its title from Ghassan Kanafani's story by that name. Published in 1963, the novel unfolds the journey of three Palestinians who seek work in the Emirates in an attempt to deliver themselves and their families from their harsh conditions of life. Lacking the necessary transit permits, the three are forced to hide in an empty water tank carried by the truck transporting them. At the border station between Iraq and Kuwait the guards detain the truck driver in idle conversation, and the three Palestinians die in the desert heat. The story concludes with the desperate cry of the truck driver: 'Why didn't you knock on the sides of the tank? Why didn't you bang the sides of the tank? Why? Why? Why?' The story of the three refugees illustrates the vulnerability and fragility of Palestinian life.

 

"Men in the Sun" revolves around two axes of meaning which recur in the works. One—"The Shadow of Silence"—continues the tragic, fatal silence of the three refugees. This silence echoes in many of the works in the exhibition. Silence, in this context, is a faithful expression of the impossible daily tension accompanying the circumstances of life and art-practice of Palestinian artists. The other side of the silence coin is a coded symbolical allegorical spectrum which draws away from artistic realism. Although this allegorical configuration partly responds to concrete historical events, it is mostly latent, and does not emerge in the explicit interpretation and discourse regarding the works. 

 

The other axis—"Temporality as a Palestinian Space of Consciousness"—is centered on temporal contemplation of the space. The time-space relationship is present in the works both in the images of emptiness or absence of people from their surroundings, and in the images of the thicket and the labyrinth. The consciousness of ongoing temporality, or the long conscious wait in anticipation of change, is present in the work of these artists from the very outset, yet is gradually replaced by a new consciousness of temporality as a type of normalcy which increasingly takes over their existence.

 

The exhibition is steeped in this dialectical tension. It sets out to unravel the overt and covert stitches which tie silence to speech, temporality to normalcy, the sense of collective urgency to the position of the subject seeking a place for himself in which to create and exhibit, while also striving to change the charged history of representation and the positions stemming from it, and to sketch a horizon of change.