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Mary Tuma's
"Homes for the Disembodied."
Photo: Stefan Hard/Times Argus
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The Palestinian-Israeli conflict has come to define the notion of
internecine warfare. In modern history, few other peoples in the world
have been so fully engaged in mutual destruction for so long. And the more
entrenched the two sides become, the more elusive peace seems to
be.
We're familiar with the iconic imagery of boys throwing rocks
at soldiers, of the aftermath of suicide bombings, of refugee camps. But
it's hard to make sense of the human toll behind the news
briefs.
An exhibition at the T.W. Gallery in Montpelier attempts to
make sense of the day-to-day reality of what it is to be a Palestinian in
Israel: What it's like to have witnessed the destruction of villages and
to live under military occupation in refugee camps.
"Made in
Palestine" only tells one side of the story. (You won't find evident
sympathy here for Israelis.) The artists expose the plight of ordinary
Palestinians, which, in the media, is often obscured by political
machinations. And while many of the artists make generalized political
statements, there are no specific references to Palestinian bigwigs or
terrorist groups, only abstract, conceptual and realistic artwork designed
to make the viewer think, feel and react on a visceral level.
Al
Nakba is Arabic for "The Catastrophe," a phrase that refers to the forced
relocation of Palestinians in 1947 and 1948. Hundreds of thousands of
people were expelled from what became the state of Israel and sent to
refugee camps during this period.
Much of the artwork centers on
this pivotal event in Palestinian history and the subsequent
marginalization of Arabs in Israel. Many of the artists live in refugee
camps and have few materials to work with, and so they have used what's
available: mud, crayon, rocks and fabric.
"Made in Palestine" was
organized by the Houston contemporary art gallery Station House. The
curators, including James Harithas who wrote the introduction to the show
now at the Wood, sought out Palestinian artists from the Middle East and
expatriates from the West.
The show in Houston, the first
exhibition of contemporary Palestinian art in the United States, garnered
national media attention and was brought to San Francisco recently. The
Wood gallery showing is the first East Coast venue for "Made in
Palestine."
Mark Hage, a member of Vermonters for a Just Peace in
Palestine/Israel, said the advocacy group heard about the show, contacted
Station House and applied for funding to bring it to Montpelier. The Wood
agreed to host the show (but because of size constraints can only
accommodate half of the original artwork) and the Lintilhac Foundation
underwrote the exhibition.
Hage, who worked for two years to bring
the show here, said he cried when he saw it for the first time on Tuesday.
"It was the first time I'd engaged the occupation through art and for me
it was compelling to look at the broader consequences," he said.
A
painting on a piece of canvas titled "Stripped of their Identity and
Driven from their Land" occupies an entire wall of the gallery. The image
is of a mass of naked people – men, women and children – walking
zombie-like toward the viewer. The artist John Halaka has created the
impressionistic nudes from two rubber-stamped words in black ink:
"survivors" and "forgotten." Some of the figures emerge from the mottled
gray background indistinctly as though they're walking through a fog;
others, in the foreground, are detailed enough to reveal anguished
features. Their anonymity enough to reveal anguished features. Their
anonymity almost blends in with emptiness of their surroundings: They are
a people without a sense of place or identity.
An oversized steel
cartridge sits in one corner of the space, filled with small rocks. The
sculpture, "A Time to Cast Stones," by Rajie Cook is U.S. Army green with
yellowed stenciled lettering in English detailing the caliber of the
bullets (7.62 millimeters), the number of cartridges (240) and the lot
number (LC 12051). Nido Sinnoknot also makes a political statement using
the particular material of this war. Eighty-eight rubber-coated rocks are
lined up on a white shelf. The smooth round stones look as though they've
been dipped like strawberries in waxy milk chocolate.
In "Tale of a
Tree," Vera Tamari eulogizes the olive groves that have been destroyed
during the occupation. A black and white image of a tree has been
transferred to a 4-by-4 foot piece of Plexiglas and suspended over another
sheet of the plastic that serves as a plinth for dozens of crude,
multi-colored ceramic trees. These olive trees become personalized symbols
of the larger image and of the loss of land, a livelihood and source of
pleasure.
Suleiman Mansour's life-size relief sculptures of four
men are made of caked mud on wood panels. The deeply cracked surface cuts
the figures up into small pieces, making it difficult to envision the
wholeness of the stylized forms. These are men whose selfhood has been
seemingly reduced to dust.
Five towering black dresses dominate
another corner of the gallery. The dresses, suspended from the ceiling on
wire hangers, are perhaps 12 feet high, and they're constructed from a
single length of sheer cloth. The transparent emptiness of May Tuma's
sculpture "Homes for the Disembodied" is chilling.
It's this kind
of gutsy raw energy that makes "Made in Palestine" compelling. No matter
what your political views, this exhibition with its edgy experimentation
with forms, materials and conceptual art leaves you with a knot in your
stomach.
From: http://www.timesargus.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20051021/NEWS/510210309/1011 | 
