I just returned from my annual trip to Paris, where I made some interesting contacts for Gallery Al-Quds, and saw some very good exhibitions. At Galerie Kamel Mennour, Moroccan artist Latifa Echakhch showed huge abstracts of the color school variety, but with a technique developed in the 1930’s of letting a certain kind of blue ink seep into the canvas, thus allowing the medium to create the message somewhat on its own. Algerian artist Samta Benyahia had several installations of arabesques across town and at Galerie Mamia Bretesche, where she incorporated classical Islamic design into textiles, stained glass, paintings and mixed media. We will be doing some exhibition exchanges with this gallery next year.
I met with Hani Zurob, the Gaza artist, now resident in Paris, whose work we featured as part of our The Map is Not the Territory show. A fictionalized version of his story has been turned into a film, Mars at Sunrise, which premiered in February in New York.
Excerpts from the NY Times review:
Mars at Sunrise, Directed by Jessica Habie
Addressing the Israeli-Palestinian conflict through stylized compositions, nontraditional narrative and a stripped-down aesthetic, Jessica Habie’s “Mars at Sunrise” distills a war among many to a single, devastating duel.
The foes are Khaled (Ali Suliman), a Palestinian artist, and Eyal (Guy El Hanan), the Israeli soldier who once detained and tortured him. While giving a lift to a young Jewish American poet (Haale Gafori) on her first visit to Israel, Khaled is shocked to encounter Eyal at a checkpoint and recalls the story of his interrogation. This setup is simple, but what follows is less so: an impressionistic battle between imagination and brute force that too often veers from enlightening to exasperating.
Told through memories and dreams, poems and paintings, this experimental first feature (partly based on the life of the exiled artist Hani Zurob) uses spare, playlike scenes to illustrate the power of art to shore up the spirit. Time lines snap and blur, thoughts are made manifest, and actions are increasingly open to interpretation. And by giving Eyal his own suppressed artistic urges, Ms. Habie ensures that our sympathies are finally more fluid than the situation would seem to demand.
Though the film’s abstractions can alienate, and intellectual connections are sometimes paid for in drained emotional heat, “Mars at Sunrise” is a thoughtful and inventive look at a seemingly endless war. More than anything, the ambivalence written into the roles — and poignantly captured by the performers — seems to suggest that while taking sides is not impossible, it is almost certainly fruitless.
I also checked in with my contact at the Institut du Monde Arabe, who told me that the museum is going to be partnering with other institutions such as the Louvre, to give them access to more extensive Islamic art collections. Unfortunately, a shake-up of the Institut will preclude contemporary art solo shows for the near future.
In other news, look for the MAP show to open at the Levantine Cultural Center in Los Angeles on April 26.
“Art is not what you see, but what you make others see.” -Degas
Till next time, Dagmar
