Palestinian art: conveying the memory of a bygone era

With its exhibition What Palestine Brings to the World, which honored Palestinian History and Art, the Institut du Monde Arabe (IMA) had foreshadowed the crisis. Through this almost ironic title, the IMA exhibited, until the end of last year, the richness of a culture that seems to be on the verge of extinction under our very eyes. A culture that has been forced to mutate as a consequence of a gradual yet massive exodus that spans more than half a century. At a time when more than seven million Palestinians live outside of what is left of their nation, artists in exile express the pain of loss and cultivate an intergenerational nostalgia for a bygone era. Many of them have become the ambassadors of the Jerusalem of their childhood, interwoven houses interlocked one against the other, stemming from a time when the occupation hadn’t yet caused the mayhem we now know. Mirage-like landscapes, intangible, impossible to return to, not only because of political reasons, sometimes exacerbated by their status as “political” artists but also because these places are no longer. What to do then with that gaping wound? Paint it, undoubtedly.

That’s what Sliman Mansour, one of the deans of Palestinian art, dedicates his art to. Despite repeated confiscations of his paintings, he continues to brave, to this day, the Israeli checkpoints several times a week when on his way from Jerusalem, where he lives, to his studio in Ramallah. Through his work, Mansour has become the ambassador of memory. He literally depicts the weight of remembrance through powerful works of art, such as his painting Jamal el Mahamel, considered the most famous painting by a Middle Eastern artist, and sold at Christie’s Dubai in 2015. The painting represents a man in exile tottering under the weight of memory, an eye-shaped memory, compelling us to see the invisible, which he carries as an unbearable baggage: life-sentenced to nostalgia. “It is also the weight of the emotional charge,” Mansour confides. “I am not a refugee myself, but when I visit Jaffa, Akka, Haifa, or Galilee, I get a sense of the loss and the Nakba - the forced exodus of 1948 that the Palestinians went through - and that feeling materializes even more when I see how Palestinians are treated as foreigners or second-class citizens.”  Chronic exile at home.

The Palestinian woman in traditional embroidered tunics typically worn by mothers in his childhood also appears to be a central figure in many of his works. She has become a symbol of strength and of life, sometimes uprooted, in an ultramodern context, which is reminiscent of the famous Frida Kahlo photograph Nickolas Muray took of her in 1946 on her New York rooftop, where the open affirmation through such an out-of-context outfit becomes a revolutionary hymn. Mansour explains, however, that the women he paints are first and foremost a symbol of collective identity and its perpetuation.

In other works of his, one recurrently finds some of the key symbols of Palestine, such as the olive trees, citruses, and the golden Dome of the Rock, as well as the joyous entanglement of traditional houses; an oasis of serenity, a remote mirage of peace where earth and mother become one and the same – a singular refuge. These virginal figures, which Sliman Mansour adorns with a halo in some of his paintings, remind us of the sacred stillness that characterizes this region and which the military occupation appears to be desecrating on a daily basis.

Indeed, this nostalgic plea cannot but transpire into political engagement. This is particularly the case in his painting New Start, where each uprooted tree seems to have to relearn how to grow in an artificial environment. Trees that are now deprived of their earth, a red and fertile earth that is so near and yet made so inaccessible through a separation that doesn’t make sense: an insignificant metal sheet here representing the reality of the separation wall and the painfully disjointed territories. But in this painting, Mansour’s intention remains first and foremost to depict the isolation resulting from exile, where each being, in an outburst of life, arduously attempts to recreate roots in a quasi-desertic environment, with no life to hold on to and no ground to serve as an anchor.

The Gazan artist Leila Shawa, who passed away in October 2022, is considered to this day as the mother of Arab revolutionary art. Her naïve landscapes propose a vivid memory of the warmth of a bygone era, depicting a colorful Palestine that no longer exists. By freezing these landscapes in time, she also denounces the occupation, showing them with their organic significance before their dislocation: landscapes with their very own poetry, with their electric wires, their gateways and stairs reminding us of the tightly knit neighborhoods of yesteryear, and more generally, of the interconnectedness of their residents.

Sliman Mansour, in numerous works, also cherishes the memory of a golden age when Jerusalem and its labyrinthic little houses rested in an immaculate serenity. He, however, confides to us that in his last paintings, made during the recent events in Gaza, his landscapes tend to tarnish to the point of becoming quasi-monochromic.

Some later works by Shawa set themselves apart from her earlier work by expressing more frontally the pain and trauma amongst the children of her country, as we can observe in her series Children of War, Children of Peace. One of the works of this series, which was sold at Christie’s in 2007, shows through a juxtaposition of two images - almost identical, but reversed - the arbitrary fate of children, fallen prey to an alarming game of heads or tails. Her use of screen print in this work resonates with Andy Warhol’s use of the same technique to illustrate the omnipresent consumerism of his society. Here, Shawa purposefully uses it to alert us of the risks inherent to a context that manufactures hate.

As for the Gazan painter Maher Naji, he has long drawn his inspiration from his childhood memories and from the tales recounted by his mother before he left Palestine to study in St. Petersburg. As a result, his paintings display evanescent figures, chanting the times of full History and lively legends. That softness also emanates from the poignant works of his that are exhibited at the Palestine Museum in Woodbridge and which are displayed under the motto “Let art and love be our common language.” Maher Naji confides to us: “When I used to live in Russia, I was influenced by European romanticism and used to mostly paint the embodiment of Palestinian traditions such as scenes with peasants in the fields and women dancing at weddings because I believe that the cultural and civilizational history of any people is a pillar for the continuity of its development. But when I returned to Gaza, my work began to be more closely linked to the reality I was living. It came naturally, as the artist is the son of its environment.” Indeed, Naji moved back to Gaza in 1994, breeding from then on a feeling of double exile that seems to intensify throughout his work. This is clear in his series, where Palestinian and Russian landscapes mix and become one, letting imagination repair a fundamental rupture. Maher Naji explains: “As Palestinians, we carry nostalgia in us, but we also carry the elements of survival and renewal. One attachment to a place replaces thus the other, and nostalgias become mutual.”

Over the past few years, some of his paintings have taken on an unprecedented shift: that of revolution, of fiery anger. “Indeed, some of my paintings frontally express resistance, but I prefer to address the existing conflict between my people and the occupier through works that carry a historical or mythological content and delve deeper into a more structural understanding of the conflict.”

Many Palestinian artists who have been subject to or have witnessed censorship aiming to silence their message of freedom have recently adopted the watermelon as a symbol: Sliman Mansour first introduced this fruit in his paintings as a way to circumvent the constant harassment from soldiers concerning the content of his works, considered as being too political. The watermelon progressively became a substitute for the Palestinian flag in the artistic community, as its green, red, white, and black colors permitted an abstract evocation of Palestine that sidestepped censorship.

The Singaporean artist Hajar Ali, who specializes in AI-generated art, proposes digital works where the blood-red watermelons symbolize the violence of the current massacre in Gaza. As Hajar Ali explained to us: “The watermelon emerged as a subversive symbol in response to the recurring sanctioning of the depiction of the Palestinian flag. When I published this series, I paired it with the song 'Ya Taali-een Al-Jabal', which is a song sung by Palestinian women to their loved ones in prison, promising that release is near, and which they used to sing in an “encoded” manner, through the tradition of imlolaah, which is a singing technique where one adds an extra vowel between each word, in order to obscure its meaning from the occupation forces.” In this series, watermelons pile up and explode, sometimes in the midst of dried-up, desolate, walled-up landscapes, conveying in a poignant and organic manner the violence that civilians and families endure in their flesh. Mute landscapes, through which pain is felt rather than told. A profound work where abstraction ends up playing its role as a means of resistance at a visual level, as well as at an acoustic level. As to abstraction being used as a weapon of protest, she answers: “We see the same patterns in many revolutions; the samizdat tapes, which were self-published to thwart the censorship and monopoly of State publications in the Eastern bloc, the mooncakes used by revolutionaries during the Ming Revolution, to the art of capoeira, which was essentially the cultural customs and martial arts of West Africa disguised as a dance by slaves preparing their insurrection, to bypass the restrictions of the colonialists.” As for the role of non-Palestinian artists as witnesses, Hajar Ali’s position is unequivocal: “It’s absolutely essential. Non-Palestinian artists tap into a different audience and amplify the voices that need to be heard.”

Several international artists have found the courage to denounce the occupation and are contributing to laying the foundations of peace. Bansky’s world-renowned stencil murals on the separation wall are a striking example of such solidarity, amongst which his Flying Balloon Girl graffiti recalls another famous work of his, Girl With Balloon. A reproduction of the latter had been the object of spectacular self-destruction during its auction sale by Sotheby’s in London in October 2018: a way of reminding us that his message of freedom, his tribute to childhood’s innocence, and his call for hope are not for sale and that he does not condone his art being extracted from its situational context and reduced to the status of a mere product.

The New York watercolorist Rebecca Odes was also compelled to pay tribute to broken childhood with two series of portraits of children victims of the massacres and hostage-takings by Hamas as well as by Israel. Inspired by the famous quote by the Jewish American peace activist Lorraine Schneider: “War is not healthy for children and other living things”, the artist shows, through her series, that empathy and the right to justice are not the preserve of any one ethnic or national group.

On rare occasions, Israeli painters have also timidly risked taking a stand for peace. However, the Israeli artists to date who are most deeply committed to a free Palestine are film directors and authors. In the lineage of activist Israeli directors such as Eyal Sivan, who paved the way with his movies “Jaffa, orange’s Clockwork,” or “Izkor, slaves of Memory,” Israeli director Yuval Abraham bravely denounced the apartheid endured by the Palestinians during his acceptance speech for his documentary “No Other Land,” at the Berlinale on the 24^th of February this year. A speech that earned him a hailstorm of death threats. It is, however, through the demonstration of a sharper critical perspective that Israeli artists set the example. Speaking of their minds, they prove that origins don’t necessarily make us the puppets of our government and that freedom of thought carries more weight for our futures than blind patriotism.

Israeli director Avi Mograbi recently presented a powerful documentary at the latest edition of the Festival du Film et Forum International sur les Droits Humains (FIFDH) in Geneva, in which he denounced the colonialist practices of his government. That same week, British director Jonathan Glazer, of Jewish-Ukrainian descent, called for increased awareness in the face of the calamity of occupation. The call came during his acceptance speech at the Oscars for his movie “The Zone of Interest”, in which he addresses the delicate theme of the Holocaust, declaring that his movie precisely aimed at showing what dehumanization leads to.

As for literature, from Ilan Pappé to Shlomo Sand, not to mention Avi Schlaïm, these Israeli authors and historians have - through their comprehensive research and at the risk of their own security - dedicated their lives to exposing truths they could no longer hold back. By doing so, they have added their voices to those of Palestinian authors such as Refaat Alareer, who was killed last December in a raid by the Israeli army. The last poem he delivered to the world before his death will remain a poignant message:  “I am you.”

With painting gushing directly from the veins to the paintbrush and words from the heart to the pen, Palestinian art is to be understood as stemming from necessity, making plain what some might not want to see. Let us then recall one last symbol, the most eloquent in Palestinian painting: the dove. The one Mahmoud Darwish mentions in his poem Another Day Will Come, where his hope transpired through his aching rhymes, longing for the day when doves would finally fall asleep on the abandoned combat tanks.