Experienced eyes

Alan Philps

• Last Updated: February 22. 2009 9:30AM UAE / February 22. 2009 5:30AM GMT

The Wadi Rum triptych by Sama Alshaibi hints at the limitless landscape of the Iraq-born photographer who now holds an American passport. Photographs courtesy Le Violon Bleu

Images of Palestinians crowded the television screens last month – usually of men tearing at the rubble of their homes or women sitting in despair at the side of a road. But what do Palestinians feel away from the war zone, when the bombs are not falling?

An exhibition in London that showcases the photographic work of four female Palestinian artists aims to go some way to answering this question. Focused on the two poles of Palestinian experience – exile and confinement – it comprises the work of artists whose work is shaped by their geographical realities. Sama Alshaibi lives in America and has a US passport; Rula Halawani, a resident of East Jerusalem, sees the painful realities of Palestine every day as she battles through Israeli checkpoints to get to the West Bank; Rana Bishara has chosen to live in her hometown of Tarshiha in Galilee, far from the big cities of the West Bank or Israel; Anisa Ashkar lives in Tel Aviv and has opted to work in the public sphere of Israeli art.

The exhibition, called Aperture 27,000 – a reference to the land mass of historic Palestine in square kilometres – makes no excuses for being political. The title, explains the curator, Salma Tuqan, subverts the meaning of aperture – the adjustment that controls the amount of light passing through the camera lens – by forcing it to refer to the control of movement by the Israeli occupation. This control was highlighted in the cruellest of ways by the fate of the people of Gaza – living in a war zone but with nowhere to flee from the Israeli attacks.

No one can fail to be moved by the 12 photographs shown by Rula Halawani of the Qalandia checkpoint, which she is forced to pass through on her way from Jerusalem to Bir Zeit University, a few flaps of the wing as the crow flies but for most Palestinians a near impossible journey. Every picture focuses on a pair of hands – those of the Israeli soldier and those of the Palestinian supplicant, anxious, tired or resigned. Their faces are not shown. But the whole gamut of humanity is hinted at in the hands – the gnarled fingers of a peasant, the snow-white cuffs and mobile phones of the middle class. The series is called Intimacy, which only highlights the fact that the hands of occupier and occupied never touch. All interaction is conducted through the showing of ID cards and paper passes, the searching of bags, or the humiliating display of underwear as Palestinian men have to lift their shirts to prove they are bomb-free.

“At the checkpoint there are no privileges. Everyone waits in line and is reduced to an ID number, and everyone is searched and questioned,” says Halawani, who is the director of the photography unit at Bir Zeit University. “In these images we see different gestures of waiting and postures of the human body as they are positioned in an unequal power relation.”

Perhaps even more eloquent than the hands are the concrete blocks that take up the centre of the images, their massive bulk seeming to be more real than the faceless people whose power and impotence are displayed on either side of them. Though the checkpoint is an opening in the wall, these pictures never let you forget that it is really just another part of the blockade.

The other end of the scale is Sama Alshaibi, an assistant professor of photography at the University of Arizona. Born to a Palestinian mother in Basra, Iraq, but now holding a US passport, her life is not defined by the struggle against occupation but by nostalgia for a half-known homeland and a search for an identity for her and the next generation.

In one photograph she displays the belly of a pregnant woman – her own, as it happens – with the date 10 Nov 04 written on it. There is a conundrum in this date that – in a rather intellectualised way – she uses to highlight the separation of diaspora Palestinians from their people. Yasser Arafat died in Paris on Nov 11, 2004, though it was still the previous day in Arizona.

“I wanted to show that a dispossessed people cannot even mourn together. They cannot mark the date on the same day,” said Alshaibi.

Her experience is that of the wandering Palestinian: her parents fled the Iran-Iraq war, waiting for a safe time to return. Her mother decided that she could not spent a lifetime waiting. “My mother could not take any more. She had seen her father waiting for a chance to return to Palestine which never came. She went to America.”

As an American citizen, her world is wide. One of her photographs shows a lone woman in the desert of Wadi Rum, an empty landscape apart from a single tent in the background.

This limitless landscape could not be further from the reality of Rana Bishara. Her most striking image, called Homage to Palestine, is of cactus leaves bottled in a glass jar. The cactus jar dates from 1999, and now seems a work of extraordinary prescience. The Gazans are confined in a glass jar, with no prospect of escape.

Anisa Ashkar, a performance artist first and a photographer second, represents a different strain. She has gone out of her way to create a challenging identity. Born in Acre, she lives in Tel Aviv – a Muslim Arab in the most Israeli of cities, a woman in a male-dominated world.

Trained in Israel, she uses references from beyond the Arab world, including Van Gogh, Paul Klee and the Greek myths. In a self-portrait titled Agria Matia she has photographed herself as Medusa, the female monster of Greek myth with snakes on her head whose single look was enough to turn men to stone. In Ashkar’s view, Medusa is a character of great female strength. Yet this Medusa affirms her Palestinian character, with Arabic script written on her face.

The exhibition opened in January during Israel’s attack on Gaza. The timing is what the gallery owner, Selma Feriani, calls “an unfortunate coincidence”. At the opening of the exhibition it was announced that five per cent of the proceeds of the sale will go to Medical Aid for Palestinians, a charity that is working to supply Gaza’s overstretched hospitals.

The exhibition highlights a peculiar dilemma for Palestinian artists. The public expects them to focus on their cause but, if they give the public what it expects, the public may shrug and say, “Is that all they can do?”

Salma Tuqan, the curator, believes that the identification of the Palestinian artist with the cause is becoming weaker as time passes. “Many people think that the work of a Palestinian artist has to reflect the conflict. But that is not always true. Some artists embrace it and some stay clear of it. It seems to me that there is a younger generation of Palestinian artists who are more subject to international influences, so their work is less overtly political.”

Alshaibi says the issue is not whether the work is political or not. “There is much more here than stories of displacement and confinement. It shows how the reality of Palestinians is shaped by the documents we each have. Everyone’s experience is different, and no one has the right to speak for all Palestinians. This exhibition is where we take back the power.”

Aperture 27,000 is showing at Le Violon Bleu Gallery, Maddox Street, London, until Saturday.