"Do you believe in peace?" "Of course. Peace is... very good."
May 31, 2021 5:05 AM Subscribe
For those who were interested in the recent thread on the thriving artistic life of Ramallah: here are four contemporary Palestinian artists (one musician/painter, one photographer, one director, and one visual artist) whose work you might not know.
Asma Ghanem is a Palestinian visual artist and experimental musician who makes eclectic compositions using children's toys, electronic synthesizers, and urban field recordings. Ghanem lives and works in Ramallah.
In a 2013 piece on experimental music from around the Levant and neighboring Egypt, Ghanem wrote: "I find the state of being in Palestine very similar to experimental sound production, as the latter is not independent, but rather unstable, broken, volatile, disturbing, and quite cacophonous, not unlike the sounds of war."
Nidaa Badwan is a contemporary visual artist from Gaza. In 2014, after being harassed by Hamas soldiers, Badwan locked herself in isolation in her house in Gaza and created a breathtaking photographic series called 100 Days of Solitude. These "self-consciously and self-referentially staged scenes of the interior world of the artist... forge a connection to... Dutch painterly depictions of bourgeois domesticity from the 16th and 17th century, and to theoretical reflections on the presence of the gaze in the pictorial space." In 2015, she was living in Italy and working as an art consultant at the University of the Republic of San Marino. In 2020, she posted a series of videos entitled What Angel Are You? on YouTube.
2018 interview: I asked her if Italy and Europe had proven to be that safe, or better, place. Her answer was conflicted. While she enjoys greater freedom in Italy, she also described a sense of loss. “I feel like I’ve entered this game called “Solitude” and it’s like a video game,” she said. The move from Gaza was like successfully progressing through a video game only to encounter greater difficulty. “I passed the first level, I won, and now I move to the second level. The theme is different, but it is a higher level of the solitude I had inside my room.”
Muayad Alayan is a Palestinian producer, director and cinematographer. He co-founded Palcine Productions, a collective of filmmakers and audiovisual artists based in Jerusalem and Bethlehem to facilitate collaboration on film and media projects as well as to promote film as an art form among youth. His 2015 film Love, Theft and Other Entanglements is a heist film with a Palestinian anti-hero at its centre.
"From the start, when a car drives through Jerusalem streets over-bedecked with Israeli flags, to radio reports spelling out how many Palestinians are worth one Israeli, to graffiti succinctly damning the Oslo Accords, the pic drives home the idea that no matter how apolitical a local might be, it’s impossible to live in the Occupied Territories and not be caught up in the humiliation and power dynamics. What really saves the film, though, is the incorporation of absurdist humor (Mousa’s interview before a panel of NGOs is the highlight), helping to counter the lensing’s distancing effect."(Variety review)
Khaled Jarrar is a Palestinian visual artist. In 2015, after same-gender marriage was legalised in the United States, he painted the colors of the rainbow pride flag on the Israeli wall near the Qalandiya checkpoint ('Through the Spectrum'). He later wrote an article explaining why. More recently been he's taking handfuls of soil from Palestinian farms and turning them into NFTs. Jarrar lives and works in Ramallah.
Asma Ghanem is a Palestinian visual artist and experimental musician who makes eclectic compositions using children's toys, electronic synthesizers, and urban field recordings. Ghanem lives and works in Ramallah.
In a 2013 piece on experimental music from around the Levant and neighboring Egypt, Ghanem wrote: "I find the state of being in Palestine very similar to experimental sound production, as the latter is not independent, but rather unstable, broken, volatile, disturbing, and quite cacophonous, not unlike the sounds of war."
Nidaa Badwan is a contemporary visual artist from Gaza. In 2014, after being harassed by Hamas soldiers, Badwan locked herself in isolation in her house in Gaza and created a breathtaking photographic series called 100 Days of Solitude. These "self-consciously and self-referentially staged scenes of the interior world of the artist... forge a connection to... Dutch painterly depictions of bourgeois domesticity from the 16th and 17th century, and to theoretical reflections on the presence of the gaze in the pictorial space." In 2015, she was living in Italy and working as an art consultant at the University of the Republic of San Marino. In 2020, she posted a series of videos entitled What Angel Are You? on YouTube.
2018 interview: I asked her if Italy and Europe had proven to be that safe, or better, place. Her answer was conflicted. While she enjoys greater freedom in Italy, she also described a sense of loss. “I feel like I’ve entered this game called “Solitude” and it’s like a video game,” she said. The move from Gaza was like successfully progressing through a video game only to encounter greater difficulty. “I passed the first level, I won, and now I move to the second level. The theme is different, but it is a higher level of the solitude I had inside my room.”
Muayad Alayan is a Palestinian producer, director and cinematographer. He co-founded Palcine Productions, a collective of filmmakers and audiovisual artists based in Jerusalem and Bethlehem to facilitate collaboration on film and media projects as well as to promote film as an art form among youth. His 2015 film Love, Theft and Other Entanglements is a heist film with a Palestinian anti-hero at its centre.
"From the start, when a car drives through Jerusalem streets over-bedecked with Israeli flags, to radio reports spelling out how many Palestinians are worth one Israeli, to graffiti succinctly damning the Oslo Accords, the pic drives home the idea that no matter how apolitical a local might be, it’s impossible to live in the Occupied Territories and not be caught up in the humiliation and power dynamics. What really saves the film, though, is the incorporation of absurdist humor (Mousa’s interview before a panel of NGOs is the highlight), helping to counter the lensing’s distancing effect."(Variety review)
Khaled Jarrar is a Palestinian visual artist. In 2015, after same-gender marriage was legalised in the United States, he painted the colors of the rainbow pride flag on the Israeli wall near the Qalandiya checkpoint ('Through the Spectrum'). He later wrote an article explaining why. More recently been he's taking handfuls of soil from Palestinian farms and turning them into NFTs. Jarrar lives and works in Ramallah.
Thanks for posting! Looking very forward to digging into all of this.
posted by Ahmad Khani at 1:31 PM on May 31, 2021
posted by Ahmad Khani at 1:31 PM on May 31, 2021
I too look forward to digging in to your amazing post. Around about the start of our lockdown last year I found many videos of Palestinian and Israeli youth risking their lives to experience each other's lives and music.
posted by unearthed at 3:32 AM on June 1, 2021
posted by unearthed at 3:32 AM on June 1, 2021
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posted by toastyk at 6:56 AM on May 31, 2021