OCCUPIED: Palestinian Artworks

Palestinians have been living under occupation for over 50 years. Though many accounts have been heard about daily struggles and injustices, it's impossible to know how it feels unless experiences first-hand. Being occupied is not just a force that takes over the land, it restricts people physically and can even inhabit the mind. Art is one of he great forms of expression and has helped these artists communicate their thoughts, feelings and reality. Through the pieces in this exhibition we can experience frustration and disillusion but also perseverance and hope.

According to the artist, the early meaning of zeft in Arabic is asphalt. Zeft it also commonly used as a pejorative term that expresses a wide range of feelings from a disheartened state of mind to revulsion, or a curse when applied to a situation, and sometimes it refers to misfortune. It is well known that Israel’s national interests and colonial project demand acquiring the language of the enemy, and the Israeli soldiers were certainly aware of the negative nuances of the word zeft when they covered the streets with asphalt. Besides, we must remember that in Gaza, with the circulation of political leaflets being as restricted as the mobility of people, messages and statements are transmitted through graffiti or inscriptions on houses and walls in public spaces.

Abdulrahman Katanani is a young artist whose work is noted for its intensity in portraying a vivid recollection of stories amassed throughout the years that initially depict the tragedy and hardships endured at the camp. Through his work, he is delivering the campʼs message of resistance and endurance using tools from the camp that resonate happiness, apathy, empathy, tears and joy. Katanani has come to incorporate found objects from the camp such as bottle caps, rags and utensils, with corrugated iron and barbed wire – materials indigenous to the camp’s structure. Some of his more recent work include olive trees that are native to Palestine, rendered in barbed wire; as well as children made from corrugated iron flying kites formed from tin cans.

"My work addresses issues of the transformation of the body and the spirit through the use of clothing forms applied to found objects or placed within a contextual environment. The use of old fabrics and found objects is important in creating a work or environment that evokes a feeling of loss, or distant memory. I am interesting in the sorting of images from the past, images that are like shadows or ghosts, something not quite whole and no longer real but still of great influence and power.

In most of these works there is evidence of loss—an allusion to the passing of time; a vacant space within a form once occupied; an identity that merges fully with it's environment. To speak of this loss, I superimpose worlds. "Bodies" of sorts are caught up in unmistakably alien forms that speak of our transformative nature. A "skeletal" object or structure, which provides a context and framework, is redressed within a sheer, ghost-like skin: the resulting forms are like skins and bones—the interior and exterior of one possible system.

There is an intangible "place" where the body becomes an emotional landscape. Though I cannot define this, it is a goal of the work to describe that place. Ideally, this leads to work both mournful and humorous, simultaneously real and surreal." - Mary Tuma

This young man stripped to his underclothes is disturbingly emasculated and alluring. Aramesh’s series of Actions are sculptural-cinematic reenactments of episodes of violence and humiliation perpetrated by men upon men across conflict zones from Korea and Vietnam to Algeria and Palestine. Referencing historic representations of Christian martyrs, such as Saint Sebastian, Aramesh’s youth has a fraught presence, while the plinth is a telling reminder of the real concrete barriers that divide a contested region.