“Intimate Terrains” is the latest exhibition at the Palestinian Museum, continuing its mission of supporting and representing Palestine’s art and culture. The 3500-square-metre Palestinian Museum inaugurated in 2016 and is now still in the process of developing its Phase 2, which will be twice as large. This year it was awarded the 2019 Aga Khan Award for Architecture for “its role as a setting that fosters creative endeavours and educational programmes as well as democratic dialogue and a culture of openness and tolerance”. The Museum was also selected as the winner for its “distinct design which blends harmoniously with its natural, rural surroundings among the hillside terraces that characterise the Palestinian landscape”.
The Museum was designed by Irish architecture firm Heneghan Peng, and its gardens by Jordanian landscape architect Lara Zureikat. In addition to this harmony, the Museum’s sustainable construction has also earned it LEED Gold certification. Its gardens, sloped along the hillside, narrate the agricultural and botanical history of Palestine. “Intimate Terrains”, the current exhibition closing the eventful year for the museum, seems to be particularly appropriate, as it explores the changing representation of landscape by Palestinian artists. A landscape whose documentation and preservation the Palestinian Museum is contributing to, creating more space for Palestinian history, art and culture in a shrinking territory.
The exhibition is curated by guest curator Tina Sherwell, an art historian, artist and curator, and former Director of The International Academy of Art, Palestine. Sherwell writes in her curatorial statement:
Intimate Terrains explores the changing representation of landscape by Palestinian artists, and our relationship to place and location through the themes of erasure, fragmentation, distance and belonging in a spectrum of artworks drawn from the 1930s to the present day. The depiction of landscape over the decades provides us with a prism onto the experience of loss and longing, a prominent subject matter for artists, as its topography holds a central place in Palestinian identity formation. Landscape is at once both a vast site of projection and a deeply layered terrain of remains, memories and histories.
Nature and landscape have traditionally been part of the vernacular in Palestine, and references to them as well as their representation could be found in a range of cultural practices and traditions, such as wall paintings, textiles, ceramics, tilework pottery, stonework, popular folktales, place names, superstitions and sayings. As opposed to the European artistic perspective of landscape views and vistas, in Palestine it was the rhythm and patterns of nature that dominated, as found on textiles, embroidery and pottery.
The curator organised the show into nine sections, including the Glass Gallery, designed to complement the display and support the artists’ propositions. The Gallery features leaflets and wall texts with a selection of poetry, prose, infographics, chronologies and advocacy materials, arranged around the themes of Loss, Erasure, Fragmentation and Resistance.
The other eight sections, presenting work by 36 artists, are Motherlands and Dreamscapes, Be-Longing, Fragmentation, Elusive Viewpoints, Traces of Memories, Archaeology of Place, Distance and All That Remains and The Unrecognizable Landscape.
As Sherwell writes, “Palestine has a long history of being the ambition of others, who have desired to conquer and re- fashion it.” The landscape has physically changed throughout history, and its representation has seen transformations in painting, photography and literature, as well as political and religious discourses. The image of Palestine as the Holy Land has been long cultivated in the European collective imagination, as closely tied and associated with colonial and political strategies.
The “question of land” and the “representation of landscape” have therefore been at the centre of of the colonisation of Palestine for centuries. Israel in particular has been engaged in the transformation, confiscation and destruction of land and sites across Palestine, and in 2001 Israel built the Separation Wall, which has exacerbated the already precarious and difficult situation for the country. Sherwell points out that it is in this “highly charged context” that the exhibition is situated and that the works on show can be better understood.
In the first section, Motherlands and Dreamscapes, Sliman Mansour’s painting Yaffa (1979) represents the dominant trend in the Palestinian art of the mid-1970s and 1980s of painting idyllic, utopian landscapes with female figures. This conincided with a revival of heritage and folklore as expressions of a national identity, reflected in painting in the motherly female figure. These dreamy representations of a nostalgic utopia served to escape the realities of the present and Isreali occupation.
In the section Fragmentation, Steve Sabella’s photographic work captures the darker reality of Palestinian land. No Man’s Land, which displays an indistinguishable mass of what looks like an arid, perhaps mountainous landscape, questions the recurring elements of any landscape, by representing something that has no specificity. The work is a seamless collage of everyday elements from the landscape, like rotting leaves, feathers, pollen and dust on the surface of a lake.
The artists in Archaeology of Place all engage with the erasure of sites, by documenting the memory of places and thus creating a record of their existence. For instance, in GH0809#2 (Gaza houses 2008-2009), Taysir Batniji creates an archaeological record of historic ruins. He created the work after the military operation against Gaza that took place between 27 December 2008 and 18 January 2009, which left over 1,300 Palestinians dead – 65% of them civilians – and 5,450 wounded.
Infrastructure and houses were pounded into rubble. The artist asked journalist Sami al Ajrami to take photos of the bombarded houses, and then selected 20 for his series. He displays the photographs of each home as real estate adverts with detailed neutral description of each house as seen in such advertisements. Wit this work, the artist wanted to create a memory of the sites, by creating a type of archaeological record of historic ruins.
In his collage series Archaeology of Occupation, Hazem Harb combines archival photographs of Palestine before 1948, with ominous concrete structures floating in space and invading the landscape. There is a strong sense of foreboding in the images, with the alien concrete forms filling the Palestinian landscape, as part of the physical infrastructure of occupation. As explained in the work statement, Harb is here referencing modernism in relation to architecture, the occupation of Palestine and the Bauhaus style that worked hand in hand with military occupation.
In Distance and All That Remains, Tarek Al-Ghoussein presents his “C Series” of photographic works, where he captures a lone figure within a vast landscape. Al-Ghoussein himself explains that
While the work has been concerned with barriers, land, longing and belonging, this most recent series departs from these defining/confining concepts and instead focuses on visualized ideas of transience … while unexpected the strong emphasis on longing led to consideration of changing landscapes and ephemeral moments that are fixed in time rather than located in a specific place.
In the last section, titled The Unrecognizable Landscape, artists from different eras represent just what the title suggests: the landscape that now has become unrecognisable. Samira Badran’s Jerusalem was created in the 1970s after the occupation of East Jerusalem. The city in the painting is disintegrated, a landscape of haunting, dysfunctional structures made of ancient architecture and ruins. The image is in sharp contrast with the idealised, romantic ideal of the Holy City. For the artist, the work symbolised “The continuous existential struggle of women repressed and suffocated by the Israeli occupation and by the burden of patriarchal social restrictions.”
Tawfiq Jawharieh’s 1930s landscape depicts a surreal scene, which could be Palestine, but could also be anywhere. Such contemplative landscapes point towards “a site of projected dreams”, where landscapes are imagined and become fantasies. In a similar fashion, Larissa Sansour constructs fictitious, sci-fi landscapes in her film In the Future, They Ate from the Finest Porcelain. Taking place in a future landscape, the narrative unfolds between a resistance leader and psychiatrist. As the exhibition guide explains, in the film
a resistance group sets out to create a future history for a fictional civilisation by depositing fine porcelain in the landscape to support its claim as a people before being eradicated. Returning us full cycle to the question, what are our dreams and visions of the past and the future?
Sherwell proposes questions that Palestinian artists have been and are still asking themselves, and important issues that they are exploring through their work. Although of extreme relevance to the Palestinian reality, such questions also resonate with many others, and can be viewed as universally significant:
How do artists negotiate and articulate collective and personal memory in relation to representations of landscape? What keeps us in a place? What are the limits of nostalgia? How does exile and different experiences of alienation shape views of the landscape? With our diminishing access to the land, the segregation of communities and the fragmentation and isolation of the terrains, and as the violent confiscation and destruction of the land unfolds, how do our intimate relationships to places manifest around landscape? Yet undeterred by this, what have been and what are our dreams and visions of landscapes of the past and future?
C. A. Xuân Mai Ardia
“Intimate Terrains” is on view from 2 April to 31 December 2019 at The Palestinian Museum, Birzeit, Palestine.