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New Gate, Old City
Jerusalem 91145
P.O.Box 14644
T: (+972) 2 6283457
F: (+972) 2 6272312 |
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Museum of Contemporary Art – Palestine (CAMP):
The Museum of Contemporary Art (CAMP) was established to relate to one of the core Palestinian experiences – displacement; as well as to account for the growing collection of visual art that has been safeguarded by Al-Ma’mal over the past ten years. There was/is a need to create a lever for new opportunities, innovative thought, and dynamic multi-cultural activity within, and surrounding Palestinian art, culture, and environment. Our goal is to utilize CAMP to relate to Palestine and its rich and multifaceted textures (traditional/ historical backdrop embedded within contemporary ambitions), while encouraging and strengthening international communications as well. We believe that a contemporary art museum must be a flexible, living organism; an expanding space that will facilitate the realization of cultural projects, empower creative individuals of all nationalities, and avoid stagnation that might otherwise act negatively in like developments. For this reason, we envision CAMP’s essence not solely as a physical place (for that would undermine our working philosophy and limit creative potential), but as an authentic, accessible, and fluid entity, a nomadic site where dialogue, growth, and resourceful experimentation are encouraged.
Our project involves the biennial 'nomadic' movement of CAMP, its cumulative art collection and 'portable' structure. Every year, CAMP will find a temporary 'home' under the auspices of a 'host museum.' The 'host museums' – located across the globe – will be invited to interact with CAMP's presence and to initiate projects and exhibitions.
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| Alban Biaussat / Anne-Marie Filaire / Ayreen Anastas / Ayse Erkmen / Beat Streuli / Desiree Palmen / Emily Jacir /
Jananne Al-Ani / Jean-Luc Vilmouth / Jean-Marc Bustamante / Luc Chery / Mario Rizzi / Mona Hatoum / Nicolaj Bendix Skyum Larsen /
Peter Riedlinger / Phil Collins / Raeda Saadeh / Rineke Dijkstra / Rosalind Nashashibi / Samir Srouji / Scarlett Hooft Graafland /
Suzan Hijab / Zeyad Dajani / Zoe Leonard /
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Peter Riedlinger
Us /Them
Peter Riedlinger
Born in Loeffingen in the Black Forest, Germany in 1966. Studied at The School of Art & Design, Zurich, Switzerland, and at The Academy of Visual Arts in Leipzig Germany.
Participated in numerous exhibitions and festivals in Germany, Switzerland and Slovenia, including a solo exhibition in Gallery Anadiel, Jerusalem. In 2007, he participated in "Photophobia" at The National Center for Contemporary Arts, Kaliningrad Art Gallery; L'exposition collective, Cite Internationale des Arts, in Paris in 2004. In 1999 in conjunction with his individual exhibition at the Kunstverein, Leipzig, his picture series, Hero city/Heldenstadt was published in book form.
Riedlinger was an active participant of Al-Ma’mal’s initiatives, residing in Jerusalem for several months between 2000 and 2001, contributing as a photography instructor in the workshop program, as well as participating in the artist-in-residence program. For us/them, the photography project that Riedlinger initiated during his time in Jerusalem, the young German photographer focused his interests on themes within the immediate environment, exploring the fragmented view that separates objects from their usual context. The stillness of palm trees reflecting in the blue of a swimming pool, the sky captured at midday, and an empty football field were just some examples of the images Riedlinger focused his camera on, revealing a tranquil yet distant motive. The concept he analyzes in us/them should be understood in its wider sense as the tension between two components of reality, not only between Israelis and Palestinians, but also between new and old, traditional and modern and even between reality and photography. It was the uniqueness of the country he sought to explore and portray, attempting to obtain visual fragments of a most delicate nature in a harsh and divided place.
Riedlinger’s talent lies not in insisting on inspecting perceived realities too closely. He thus captures the momentariness of situations without alluding to the transitory character of the snapshot. Seemingly immaterial details attain a symbolic or emblem-like aura. One is inclined to look at his photographs as an experiment in a new simplicity, where Riedlinger looks at objects without naiveté and with the eye of one fully aware of the impact that such images can have.
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Ayse Erkmen
work in progress-Qalqilya Zoo
1994
Ayse Erkman proposed to work with the Qalqilya Zoo, particularly with the stuffed/taxidermic animals there. What interested her, was the transformation of the Zoo into a natural history museum by freezing and saving life along with stories that are unfortunately/ sadly funny; "Brownie the giraffe dying while fleeing from the sounds of a gunfire, falling down and breaking his neck and ten days later his pregnant partner Rudi having a miscarriage because of sorrow and Brownie and his unborn giraffe son being stuffed to stand together in a special exhibition space inside the zoo."
Unfortunately, due to the political situation at the time and the impossability of entering Qalqilya in 2004 because of seizures and imposed curfews on Qalqilya by the Israeli army, Erkman could not realize this project. The project was therefore postponed to a later date.
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Mario Rizzi
Neighbours(working title)
2006
Selected Solo Exhibitions; MART - Museo d’Arte Contemporanea di Rovereto e Trento, Italy, 2004; Galerie Diana Stigter, Amsterdam, The Netherlands, 2002;
Helsinki City Art Museum, Finland, 2001. Selected Group Exhibitions: This Day, Tate Modern, London, UK, 2007; The London Palestine Film Festival 2007, Barbican Centre, London, UK, 2007; World Factory, Walter & McBean Galleries, San Francisco Art Institute, USA, 2007; Art, Life & Confusion, 47th October Salon, Museum of Yugoslav History, Belgrade, Serbia, 2006.
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"Both the Palestinian and the Israeli society are complex entities or, better, a system of parallel co-existing societies: for an outsider it is easy to remain on the surface, to get aware of the shell without ever getting to the core. Spending a large period of time in the area, especially while with Al-Ma'mal's artist-in-residence program in 2006, has allowed me to have a more intense exchange of ideas and consequently a deeper awareness of the hidden dynamics in human relations, which have logically benefited the work. In a social context where everybody lacks of something, materially and emotionally, the artist tried to concentrate on the events of individuals who can be considered the ultimate “other”, the exception as a hope for the totality. In the artist’s view, focusing on individuals who are exceptional or “different” by definition, contributes to underlining the importance of difference in a mature democratic society and the non-sense of any elitist separation or discrimination. No space whatsoever is anyway given in the work to any kind of political statement. The work is about singular individuals and their life stories. All these stories, assembled together, interact with each other in a complex puzzle of multifaceted humanity. The artist’s personal everyday experience in the area spontaneously flows in the work as an autobiographic element." Mario Rizzi, from the concept of Neighbours (working title).
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Desiree Palmen
The Old City Suit
2006
Maintaining a special interest in biology, in particular, the strange forms and behavioral traits exhibited by mimics within the animal and plant kingdoms, Palmen participated in the artist-in-residence program at Al-Ma’mal with a proposal to develop her “universal suit” project (development of her 2002 Streetwise series), working in direct relation to the security surveillance cameras tightly placed within the old city of Jerusalem. Designing a suit especially made to be ‘camouflaged’ into two particular public spaces within the old city stone walls, Palmen recorded herself modeling the suits (within the public spaces they were made to be camouflaged into) posing with acute stillness for extended periods of time while all along documenting these set-ups from the perspective eye of the surveillance cameras. The Old City Suit is a project encompassing photography and video documenting Palmen's modeling of the suit on location in the Old City of Jerusalem.
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Nicolaj Bendix Skyum Larsen
Mystic Truths
2006
Born in Aalborg, Denmark.
MA Fine Art Media studies at Slade School of Fine Art. BA Fine Art Sculpture, Chelsea College of Art and Design. Exhibitions include: No Way Out- One Way Out, Galerie Quang, Paris, France, 2007; Rising Floating Flying, Nordjyllands Kunstmueseum, Aalborg, Denmark, 2004. Group exhibitions include: Vertical –New Tendencies in Contemporary Visual Art, Barcelona, Spain, 2007. Art/X, Uozo Cultural Hall, Toyama, Japan, 2006. Sharjah Biennial 7 at Art Cologne, Art Cologne, Germany, 2005.
Nikolaj B. S. Larsen’s work is often made in close relation to people or places. When he was invited to participate in Al-Ma'mal's artist-in-residence program in 2006, he started to think of ways to portray Jerusalem as the world’s spiritual, religious and political epicentre and proposed to use the opportunity to produce Mystic Truths – using for initial reference Bruce Nauman’s spiraling neon piece in which he wrote: "The True Artist Helps the World by Revealing Mystic Truths".
The initial outcome of Larsen's residency led him to produce the first part of Mystic Truths (the second part is a documentary film), which entailed a daily visual diary of short video clips which can be seen as semi-visual poems that explore different aspects of daily life in and around Jerusalem. These visual reflections were transcribed into twenty seven separate video clips and were uploaded unto a website specifically created for Nikolaj's project. Viewed together, these video clips give a multifaceted perception of the complexity of life in Palestine.
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Ayreen Anastas
Pasolini Pa* Palestine
2004/2005
Anastas was born in Bethlehem, Palestine, after the Israeli occupation. She is living and working in Brooklyn, New York.
Exhibitions and activities held in cities including New York, Berlin, Chicago, Rotterdam, and Gallery Anadiel, Jerusalem, 2004.
Ayreen Anastas' art practice engages with issues of public and political space, language, and the question of Palestine. She was an artist-in-residence at Al-Ma'mal Foundation for Contemporary Art in 2004 where she conducted research about the Italian director Pasolini and his visit to Palestine in 1962 to make his film 'Seeking Locations in Palestine for the Gospel According to St. Matthew'. The film project she produced titled 'Pasolini Pa* Palestine' turns Pasolini's script into a roadmap superimposed on Palestine's current landscape, creating contradictions between the visual and the audible, the expected and the real.
'Pasolini Pa* Palestine is an attempt to repeat Pasolini's trip to Palestine in his film 'Seeking Locations in Palestine for the Gospel According to St. Matthew' in 1963. It turns Pasolini's script into a roadmap superimposed on Palestine's current landscape, creating contradictions between the visual and the audible, the expected and the real. The video explores questions of repetition - for Heidegger repetition, retrieval, are terms for an appropriate attitude toward the past - and establishes a dialogue with Pasolini. The term discutere (to smash to pieces) is the Latin source for dialogue and discussion. The video does not criticise Pasolini but rather reveals the possibilities in his thought and works back to the 'experiences' which inspired it.' (Ayreen Anastas)
Video, 51 minutes
Produced by Al-Ma'mal Foundation for Contemporary Art, and Ashkal Alwan/Lebanon.
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Phil Collins
They Shoot Horses
2004
Born in Runcorn in 1970.
Selected solo exhibitions: real society, Ormeau Baths, Belfast; baghdad screen tests, Meeting House Square, Dublin (2003). becoming more like us, Artopia, Milan; sinisa and sanja, The Wrong Gallery, New York (2002).
Selected group exhibitions: Mois de la Photo, Montreal; Undesire, apexart, NewYork (2003). Onufri, Tirana; Public Affairs, Kunsthaus, Zurich (2002). Conversations, Museum of Contemporary Art, Belgrade (2001). Manifesta 3, Moderna Gallery, Ljubljana (2000).
In They Shoot Horses, Collins organized, executed, and filmed a dance marathon in Ramallah, exhibiting it afterwards as a real-time video. (Read more in The Artist-in-Residence section of this website).
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Anne-Marie Filaire
Landscapes From Palestine
2004
Born in Chamalières in 1961. Lives and works in Paris</st1:place>.
Anne-Marie’s solo exhibitions include, Deserted Places/Temporary Security Zones, Al- Ma’mal Foundation for Contemporary Art, Jerusalem (2004). Urban and Desert Landscapes of Yemen and Eritrea, Sanaa, Yemen (2003). Photographs 1999-2000, Center of Contemporary Art of Vassivière (2001). Jerusalem, Jericho, Gaza, Kiron Gallery, Paris (2000). Selected group exhibitions, Là: ici et ailleurs, Passage de Retz, Paris (2003). From Orient to Occident, 3rd Annual Biennial of Photography, Bonifacio.
Filaire visited Jerusalem on several occasions, usually traveling to peripheral villages in the region with the intent of capturing the area’s remote landscape where nature takes precedence over human activities. In Deserted Places/Temporary Security Zones, Filaire researched the urban and desert landscapes of the East and Middle East regions, particularly concentrating on what are known as frontier zones. This series of photographs was realized in November 2001, south of the Dankali desert, at the frontier between Eritrea and Ethiopia. These images join other photographs taken in the city of Asmara as well as of the Judea desert.
For Anne-Marie to speak of landscape in terms of photography is a way of expressing a relationship to the world: “to walk around, guided by what I see, my emotions reshape a territory, dream can become reality, place becomes a certain possible place.”
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Luc Chery
Les Habitats - Ode to the Refugee Camps
2003
Chery was born in Bordeaux, France in 1962. He studied photography at Ecole Superieure des Beaux-Arts, Saint Luc a Liege.
Chery was an artist-in-residence at Al-Ma'mal Foundation and participated in Al Ma'mal's Workshop program as an instructor. He introduced Palestinian youths to a wide variety of materials, particularly focusing on recycled materials and the creative possibilities of working with such materials. Chery's 'Les Habitats - Ode to the Refugee Camps' is a photographic project of temporary structures such as tents, shacks and other spaces enclosed by cloth or plastic sheeting in Gaza. In conjunction, Chery photographed assemblages of discarded materials he constructed in Bordeaux in the course of the past years. He used old plastic, fabric, as well as furniture parts to construct small living spaces. Looking at the images of refugee camps alongside miniatures built by Chery, it is sometimes hard to differentiate between Gaza and Bordeaux. Both convey a sense of confinement, closed space.
Artists set before us a valuable distinction, that between waste and its potential as art. In addition, Chery casts light on the current situation Palestinians face. He conveys empathetically a picture of a people sheltered by such 'waste' structures, described as such because of their use of discarded materials to construct them. 'Les Habitats' successfully point to the relationships between the object as waste, its functional form, its aesthetic beauty and the condition of Palestine.
Photography
Produced by Al-Ma'mal Foundation for Contemporary Art.
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Rosalind Nashashibi
Dahiet Al- Bareed
2003
Born in London in 1973. Lives and works in Glasgow.
Exhibitions include: Palestine International Video Festival, Beirut (2002). Global Economy, Les Recontres de Video Arts Plastiques, Centre d’Art Contemporain de Basse Normandie. Getting Closer, La Centrale, Montreal. Oeuvres d’etre -works of being- opera d’essere, Temple Gallery, Rome (2001). True Matter, Constantine Bokhorov, Assembly Gallery, Glasgow (2000). New Work, Lime Gallery, CalArts, California (1999).
Nashashibi participated in Al-Ma’mal’s artist-in-residence program in 2003 with the idea of executing a video work concentrated on the Dahiet al-Bareed neighbourhood, a small Palestinian neighbourhood outside of Jerusalem. In Dahiet al-Bareed, Nashashibi was interested in capturing the rhythm of a usual afternoon in the Arab suburb by giving attention to a particular sense of place, reflecting on the area as both hectic and slow, with a nervous and unpredictable energy; the burning piles of rubbish for example, are the most visible signs of such neglect mirrored by the fact that the filmed neighbourhood is a kind of no-man’s-land, without any real jurisdiction.
Nashashibi’s technique is a kind of watching and waiting, with the films being a testament to the presence of the watcher, as well as a record of what took place before the artist’s eyes. Her film work is always directed to her environment and the people in her immediate surrounding. She is concerned with developing an interesting relationship between the moving and the static on film; a relationship through time as well as space. Her subjects are pedestrians, cars, buildings, trees, and litter disturbed by the wind.
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Emily Jacir
Where We Come From
2003
Born 1970. Lives and works in Ramallah and New York.
Jacir’s solo exhibitions include, The O-K Center for Contemporary Art in Linz, Austria in 2003, and at the University Gallery in Sewanee Tenasee in 2000. Jacir has participated in several group exhibitions that include, Veil, The New Art Gallery Walsall, England; The Museum of Modern Art Oxford (2003). Unjustified, Apex Art, New York; Submerged, Kunstbunker Nuremberg, Germany (2002). Made in Transit, Vacancy Gallery in New York (2001). Ekbatana, Nikolaj Contemporary Art Center, Copenhagen, Denmark (2000).
Living in Ramallah and New York, Jacir’s residency time in Jerusalem in 2002 was utilized to create an artwork inspired by the very personal idea of displacement that so many Palestinians endure. Where We Come From/(Im)mobility is based on the artist’s “freedom of movement” as a Palestinian with an American passport. Jacir utilized her passport to access Palestine for Palestinians who are denied the freedom to go to their own homeland and/or to move freely within it. She asked them to send her their requests of what they wanted her to do for them, and with her “golden ticket” (her U.S. passport), Jacir was able to move freely, circumventing barriers and connecting people to their homeland, their wishes, their dreams. In the very act of connecting people to their homeland by fulfilling their requests, Jacir’s work ascertains and documents their disconnection as well.
Jacir’s desire is to shed light on the absurdity of displacement by showing the adversities exiles suffer over things that most of us take for granted, and in so doing, the artist reassembles the fragments of diaspora. Jacir identifies with the subjects by acting out their wishes (gestures), thus becoming an extension of their will: becoming them even, and it is in this way that her work reflects on the mobility of exile itself as a shifting form of identification, drifting from geographical displacements to psychic splits to moral contradictions. (Jack Persekian)
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Raeda Saadeh
Untitled-Photographs
2003
Born in Um Al-Fahem 1977. Lives and works in Jerusalem.
Exhibitions include, Immaterial, Gallery Anadiel, Jerusalem (solo 2003). The New Shehrazades, Centre de Cultura Contemporania de Barcelona; ArtFocus, Jerusalem (2003). Le Corps comme Territoire, Rencontres Arles, France (2002). In weiter Ferne, so nah, IFA Galleries, Berlin (2001). There, School of Visual Arts, New York (2000).
Raeda Saadeh first worked with Al-Ma’mal as part of the Workshops program and was invited to the artist-in-residence program in the autumn of 2002. Immaterial, is the title of Saadeh’s work created during her residency which concentrated on memory significance as represented through the imagery of youth. One entered the gallery space of Gallery Anadiel only to enter a children’s playground, full of sculptures depicting children engaged in typical outdoor childhood games- some children are skipping, some hanging in midair on a swing, others playing together on the sand-filled ground. The numerous sculptural installations, constructed of wire and clothed in usual children’s clothing are incomplete in physical form; relating to the artist’s reflection on the recalling of dreams, where dream characters may be difficult to remember or to identify clearly. Saadeh refers to children growing up on the streets, who are like dream characters; we know that they are there but we cannot recognize their faces or their identities as we consider them not to be important (immaterial).
Saadeh’s performance, photography and video installation work often deal with female sexuality in universal as well as personal terms, where the female body is dealt with in a most provocative and courageous way. The artist strips the imagery of the Orientalist imagination, (the veiled women in particular) down to its bare reality while challenging any interpretation drawn solely according to nationalized borders.
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Zeyad Dajani
Out Of Place
2003
In the mid-1960’s King Hussein of Jordan began building a royal palace in Jerusalem. The structure was conceived as two rectangles, intersecting at right angles, forming a cross along the North-South, East-West axes. Designed as a two-storey building, it was to allow for vast panoramic views from all directions. Strategically located on an elevated hilltop on the road to Ramallah, the palace would give a clear and uninterrupted line of vision across the Dead Sea and Jordan Valley to the Jordanian capital Amman, a sightline that symbolically bridges the two cities, crossing and uniting the landscape in between. Construction on the building stopped when Jordan was defeated in the 1967 war. The palace, the King’s ambition and desire to leave a legacy in Jerusalem, now stands abandoned and unfinished, out of time and place. It is an anomaly, iconically overlooking the city.
Out of Place came about during my residency with Al-Ma’mal in 2003. This was my first visit to Palestine having grown up a Palestinian in Jordan. (Zeyad Dajani)
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Scarlett Hooft Graafland
Part-Time Human
2000
Born in the Netherlands in 1973.
Graafland’s exhibitions include: Parttime Human, Gallery Anadiel, Jerusalem (solo 2000). Odradek ,The Populas Gallery, Tel Aviv (2000), and Sculptures of Justice, The Ministry of Justice, The Netherlands (1998).
Scarlett initially came to Jerusalem as part of her continuing art academic studies. During her stay in Jerusalem in 1999-2000, Scarlett became interested in the historical meaning of the city, more specifically, in the three world religions that have their holy places within the old city of Jerusalem. She researched the ‘Jerusalem Syndrome’ phenomena that some travelers, as well as residents of the city experience. Individuals with this syndrome tend to have an idealized view of Jerusalem, and as a result, act in a bizarre and irrational fashion. They are literally intoxicated by the Holy City, and some are even declared temporarily insane due to the extreme measures of their religious beliefs.
In Parttime Human, Scarlett questions issues about ‘the real Jesus’, reacting to the madness on the commerce around his figure, while making references to the same kind of questions people suffering from the ‘Jerusalem Syndrome’ are dealing with. Scarlett created miniature figurines of sheep and Jesus heads made from natural olive soap, utilizing the same traditional soap-making methods produced in the Nablus soap factory. Scarlett filled the entire Gallery Anadiel floor with these sculptures, distributing them in bundles throughout the gallery space and visitors were compelled to walk around and in between the flocks of sheep led by the Jesus heads. Restricted in movement, the visitor, like the sheep figurine, was also being ‘led’ with deliberate and effortless fashion, and by this means, the sheep and those visiting the exhibition merged together as being one in the same, metaphorically speaking.
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Zoe Leonard
Untitled-Images from Palestine
1999
Born in 1961 in Liberty, NY.
In 1992 she had her first solo exhibition with her New York gallery Paula Cooper and was included in that year’s Documenta IX. Since then she has had solo exhibitions of her work at Jennifer Flay Gallery, Paris; The Renaissance Society at the University of Chicago, the Vienna Secession, Gallery Anadiel, Jerusalem; the Kunsthalle Basel, and the Philadelphia Museum of Art, to name a few.
Zoe’s visit to Jerusalem was initiated by her interest in capturing the many layers of social, economic, and historical information visible in humble, everyday objects. She visited Jerusalem on several occasions, wishing to focus on the inescapable features of the multi-textured fabric of the city’s substance. In Images from Palestine, she set about taking photographs of the assembled display of objects throughout the old city market streets of Jerusalem. Steering away from deliberate calculation, Zoe’s images taken in Jerusalem explore the visual language on the streets, capturing incidental details, which might be systematic of a greater cultural whole. For Zoe, the East Jerusalem photographs are seen as a kind of ‘found’ still life where the objects and their arrangements seem to be portraits of a specific time and place, as well as revealing the beauty and tenacity of human expression in the midst of a larger drift towards corporate monopolies and a global economy.
Aside from the more directly socio-political implications, there is also a sense of the rhythm of our lives – from the stacks of shoes to the piles of eggs. Her photographs relate to our endless production and consumption, while displaying an intrigue situated on how information and ideas are exchanged and travel through the world in objects and their packaging and presentation.
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Beat Streuli
East Jerusalem
1999
Born in Switzerland in 1957.
Solo exhibitions include, The Stedelijk Museum, with Gabriele Basilico, Amsterdam; Galleria Civica d'Arte Moderna e Contemporanea, Torino. In 1999 he exhibited at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago and at the Kunsthalle in Zurich; in the Sprengel Museum, Hannover, and the Spiral Art Center in Tokyo, as well as at Gallery Anadiel in Jerusalem.
Group exhibitions include, The Fondation Cartier, the Museum of Contemporary Art; Gift of Hope, Tokyo; Quotidiana, The Castello di Rivoli, Turin (2000). Bondi Beach/ Parramatta Road, The Museum fur Moderne Kunst, Frankfurt (1999). Everyday, Sydney Biennale, Sydney (1998).
The powerful pulse that Streuli’s photographs aim for is the street realm of the ‘nobody’. In East Jerusalem, the title of the project he undertook during his visit to Jerusalem, Streuli directs his gaze at the city’s pedestrians, and the random circumstances of their lives, and it is in doing so that he expresses a continuing interest in the anonymous person in the street. For East Jerusalem, his subjects are young Palestinians, photographed by impromptu method, characteristic of Streuli’s style. The places and things that his subjects see and inhabit, love or hate are absent. They are photographed without their awareness, or preparation, frequently evading direct eye contact with the camera. Each photograph fixates on one individual at a time, transforming the anonymous person into an individual to whom to direct our attention to, and it is this consciousness that earns the characters recognition, as their everyday random gestures are identified with our very own.
A comparison of his works, carried out in diverse cities, reveals recurring patterns or links that unite the inhabitants of the sites in a manner of positive identification. In this sense, Streuli’s system of representation transcends the potential personal drama of his subjects; resisting to talk about one particular culture or city, relating the city dweller to an anthropological space, while inviting us to reflect on history without yielding to the pressures of social convention.
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Suzan Hijab
Paternoster
1997
Born in Jaffa in 1942. Lives and works in Germany.
One person exhibitions at The Patio Gallery (1991). Forum, Frankfurter Sparkasse (1989). Group Exhibitions include, Art-Aid, Frankfurt (1992). Patio Gallery, Neu-Isenburg (1989). Art in Frankfurt, Schaffhausen, Switzerland (1987). Artists from Frankfurt, Jedda, Saudi Arabia (1984).
Born in Jaffa, Hijab immigrated to Germany at a young age and it was in the city of Main that she studied Fine Art, choosing to concentrate on drawing and painting. Paternoster shows Hijab’s personal style, which oscillates between an abundance of diverse, self-contained images, which unite into a complete and whole artwork. Dividing the composition into several areas of various asymmetrical sizes by using charcoal outlines, Hijab accordingly fills each divided area with numerous images, in a way that makes each area an independent painting, while simultaneously forming a totality, a whole, a single and complete painting.
Like the Paternoster - the open elevator that is in perpetual motion- Hijab’s paintings are continuously narrating a number of tales, with the beginning and the end of these tales being difficult to locate, for the images move across the painting, as though in an animated movie, albeit requiring meticulous investigation similar to that needed in deciphering hieroglyphics. The graphic divisions of the Paternoster series with the multiplicity of images, areas, and “spaces” of which each painting is composed- the persistent use of upward and downward connecting lines imbue Hijab’s compositions with a characteristic energy. Paternoster is a term used metaphorically by the artist to point to the continuity and dynamics of life on the one hand, and to the speed of change of human images on the other; two concepts which occupy a prominent position in Hijab’s work.
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Mona Hatoum
Present Tense
1996
Born in 1952 in Beirut. Lives and works in London.
Solo Exhibitions include The Entire World as a Foreign Land, Tate Britian, London (2000). Art Pace Foundation for Contemporary Art, San Antonio, Texas (1999). Museum of Modern Art, Oxford and the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, Edinborough (1998). Galerie Rene Blouin, Montreal (1997). Present Tense, Gallery Anadiel, Jerusalem (1996). Group Exhibitions include: Vision and Reality, Louisianna Museum of Modern Art, Denmark; Between Cinema and a Hard Place, Tate Modern, London (2000). The Century of The Body, Photoworks 1900-2000, Culturgest, Lisbon (1999). Cairo Biennial, Cairo; XXIV Biennial Sao Paulo, Brazil (1998).
As a Palestinian born in exile, Hatoum’s visit to Jerusalem was of personal significance. The artist-in-residence program provided the artist with her first visit to Jerusalem. During her residency, Hatoum came across a map which showed the territorial divisions of the country arrived at under the Oslo agreement. The map was about dividing and controlling the area since Israel exercises a closure policy so that Arabs are completely isolated or denied access through various passages. In Present Tense, Hatoum constructed an installation in the center of the Gallery Anadiel floor by bringing together the map and merging it with local soap made from pure olive oil. She pressed tiny red beads into the soap drawing an outline of the map she was making reference to. For Hatoum, the soap was a symbol of resistance, and was utilized as well for its transitory nature, since it is produced by using traditional Palestinian methods. At the time of Hatoum’s visit, the soap factory in Nablus was still open and functioning, which unfortunately is not the case today, after Israeli forces saw to it’s destruction.
Through performance, video, sculpture and installation, Mona Hatoum creates architectonic spaces which relate to the body, language, and the condition of exile. She questions the barriers that keep us divided and enclosed, whether those barriers are described as physical, mental, ethnic, cultural, sexual, religious or economic. Hatoum imbeds the subject and meaning into the material she utilizes, choosing the material as an extension to the concept or at times, in opposition to it, to create a contradictory and paradoxical situation of attraction and repulsion, fascination and revulsion.
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Jean-Marc Bustamante
Something is Missing
1997
Bustamante was born in Toulouse, France in 1952. He lives and works in Paris.
Bustamante has had solo shows at the Timothy Taylor Gallery, London; Museo de Malaga; Art unlimited Basel; and Musee de Saint Etienne. His work has been exhibited at the Kunsthalle Bern; Museum Haus Lange in Krefeld; Musee d'Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris; The Renaissance Society at the University of Chicago; Documenta 8 and 9 in Kassel; The Van Abbemuseum in Eindhoven; Gallery Anadiel in Jerusalem, and the Jeu de Paume in Paris.
In Something is Missing, the installation Bustamante exhibited at Gallery Anadiel in 1997, the artist wished to relate to the political situation of the region, and reflect on the idea of borders and their life-extracting power. He built five metal sculptures of varying heights that each sheltering a live bird. His objective was to mark out territory, at once a prison and a vital space in which movement is simultaneously constrained but not forbidden. The frame of the cage encloses life but does not freeze it. In a kind of unacknowledged nostalgia for the living world whence these materials came, Bustamante's sculptures inherit a visual quality parallel to the medium of photography, which freezes life without stopping time.
As Bustamante has stated, 'what I want is to change the relationship between the work and the viewer. No longer does the work command, no longer does it teach. It must testify to the existence of s/he who gazes upon it, who then becomes responsible for the work.'
Produced by Gallery Anadiel.
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Jean-Luc Vilmouth
Cafe de I'Olivier
One of the first artists to exhibit at Gallery Anadiel in 1994, Vilmouth expressed an acute awareness regarding the political situation of the region in the work he produced. In Café de l’Olivier, Vilmouth installed an olive tree within the gallery space, similar to those uprooted by the Israeli army during punitive actions against the Palestinians, coupled with an image on a tabletop of an enlarged olive being surgically dissected. The political associations evoked by the artist’s installation emphasize the feeling of loss, for the living entities that are shown appear more as surviving than as fully alive. In a civilized manner, and with great sophistication, Vilmouth and his visitors sit at the tables of the café and have their drinks. But while they are casually sipping them, they might notice that their tables are covered with representations of ‘frozen’ (photographed) organisms which have been ‘exposed’ or ‘uncovered’, as if real life were beneath the surfaces. When that is understood, the tables become altars and those seated transformed into a “brotherhood”; participants in a sacrificial rite.
In a discourse about the continuation of life after death, Vilmouth’s work is considerably involved in presenting images that include dialectical juxtapositions. He combines artificial articulations that refer to natural possibilities, creating installations where spectacular appearances present the state of non-appearance. Vilmouth relates to phenomena of life only as they are presented in figures (tree, plants) that are offered outside of their usual life condition, almost ‘dead’, and it is in this case that one could identify his work in the context of ‘Resurrection’.
One person exhibitions include, Bar Séduire, Spiral, Tokyo; Bar de l’Amazone, Galerie Artra, Milan (1997). From the Amazone to Vienna, Galerie Hubert Winter, Vienna (1996). Channel Fish, Waterloo International Station, Londres (1995). Café de l’Olivier, Gallery Anadiel, Jerusalem (1994). Group exhibitions include, L’Empreinte, Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris (1997). Artsites francais de A à Z, Galerie Gabrielle Maubrie, Paris; Art Document 96, Hiroshima (1996). Winter of Love, PSI Museum, New York (1994). June, Galerie Thaddaeus Ropac, Paris (1993).
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Samir Srouji
Family Fortune
1994
Born in Nazareth in 1961. Lives in the United States.
Coming from an architectural background, Srouji has exhibited his art in Jerusalem, Nazareth, Tel Aviv, Boston and Tokyo. Samir has also worked as art director in Film productions.
A good friend to Al-Ma’mal since the foundation was first established, Srouji, an architect by profession, revealed his creatively artistic side in Family Fortune. Working in multiple disciplines, from found object sculptures to installation, Samir utilizes his experience as an architect to create “architectural sculpture”; work that is meant to be experienced spatially, attempting to embody moments of independence, in a vivid vision.
“In the haze of everyday events, in the swirl of historic discourse, the true moment is silent. The absence of reference is independence.”
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Jananne Al-Ani
(work in progress)
Al-Ani was born in Iraq in 1966. She lives and works in London.
Al-Ani earned a fine art diploma from the Byam Shaw School of Art, BA in Arabic at the University of Westminster and Photography MA from the Royal College of Art. The artist's solo exhibitions include: 2005 The Visit, Tate Britain, London. 2004 Jananne Al-Ani, Norwich Gallery, Norwich. 2002 The Body as Territory, Les Rencontres de la Photographie, Arles. 1999 Constructed Identities, Smithsonian Institute, Washington DC; Jananne Al-Ani, Imperial War Museum, London. 1998 Margaret Harvey Gallery, St. Albans. 1997 Harriet Green Gallery, London. Group exhibitions include: 2006 Regards des photographes arabes contemporains, Institut du Monde Arabe, Paris. 2004 DisOrientation, Haus Der Kulturen Der Welt, Berlin. 2003 The New Shehrazades, Centre de Cultura Contemporania de Barcelona. 2002 Biennale di fotografia, Prato and Florence; Fair Play, Angel Row Gallery, Nottingham. 2001 Attitude: A History of Posing, Victoria & Albert Museum, London.
Al-Ani's personal experience of displacement provided the inspiration for her work. She reexamines the personal relationship to her Arab background that developed when she rejected her Arabness upon leaving Iraq for Britain early in life. Working in photography and video installation, Al-Ani's early work explores issues around sexual and gender politics. Studying the literary and visual representations of Middle Eastern women by late 19th and early 20th century Europeans, Al-Ani focused on the representation of women, in particular, the fetishised oriental woman in western art and photography, issues at the heart of the differences between east and west.
Al-Ani's recent work focuses more abstractly on the ways in which memory, games and other rituals integrate their participants into a single entity - the videos are meditations on the relationship of cooperation and dependency involved in cultural practices. For Al-Ani, the work is also a way to deal with the gap between personal and historic narrative, as instilled from the idea of the structure of memory and word games. In filming herself, mother, and sisters in a kind of group performance, Al-Ani makes use of simple black and white film technique to present a dialogue that interrogates the subtleties and ambiguities of the past and present, while maintaining her own personal sensibility.
Al-Ani came to Palestine in 2003 as an Al Ma'mal artist-in-residence to initiate a project. She researched the Nativity route that Joseph and Mary took from Nazareth to Bethlehem.
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Alban Biaussat
The Green(er) Side of the Line
2006
Born in Paris 1970. Lives and works there.
Earned an MA in Photojournalism and Documentary Photography at the London College of Communications, University of the Arts, London. Educated at postgraduate level in business studies, and in international relations in Bristol. Eleven years experience working for government in international development and political affairs, including approximately five years at The European Commission Representative Office in Jerusalem.
Exhibitions include: The Green(er) Side of the Line, at Al-Ma'mal Foundation, Jerusalem (2006); Birzeit University Gallery, Birzeit; Zara Gallery, Amman, Jordan; La Lettre Volee in Brussels, Belgium.
Having studied political science and worked in Jerusalem as a political analyst of the Israeli/Palestinian conflict, Biaussat approaches the photographic medium to express political as well as along the demarcation border carrying a 12-meter long green ribbon in personal concerns. Focusing on the Green Line border for his project, Biaussat traveled order to make the green line visually appear. A central political reference, Biaussat's The Green(er) Side of the Line photography project produced by Al-Ma'mal Foundation aims to raise awareness and understanding of border issues, generating critical thinking and a 'healthy feeling of doubt' to promote potential alternative solutions.
'In the Middle East, new political concepts, initiatives and slogans are plenty, supplementing each other month after month as the previous ones exhaust themselves. In this part of the world, enduring abstract thinking tends to lose vision. But there is one reference that has borne a sustained potential for visualization, if not for political vision: the Green Line.
It is, it seems, well enshrined in people's minds, whether they like it or not, as a valid political reference. Since the Oslo years of the 1990s, the 1967 'border' has become the orthodox reference for negotiating the final contours of an improbable 'viable' Palestinian State, or, as some would probably prefer, of a viable continued Israeli occupation. Consistently represented in green on a series of geographical maps, it has emerged as the Green Line, attributing also political and legal in/correctness to a series of issues, such as Israeli settlements.
Informed professionals and scholars would claim that the Green Line refers to the 1949 Rhodes armistice agreement between the newly established Israel and its neighboring Arab countries, reached in the absence of a peace treaty, not to the 1967 confrontation line showing the position of opposing forces before they went to war. Still, most people would probably assume that the 1949 line has remained the same till 1967. This overlooks the fact that the line has moved during this period. Its position has been continuously affected by the military and economic tactics of the parties and their desire to push the real 'line' to the other side of the armistice 'zone' where there was one, as is particularly the case in the Golan and near Latrun. By looking today only at the little short-cuts taken by the legally contested separation Wall and fence around or behind the Line, not to mention its obvious deep intrusions into the West Bank in some areas, one could easily believe there had already been past attempts at pushing the limits!
As I became tempted, like so many others, by a career as a messiah in this Holy Land, I decided to make the Green Line appear. Photography would be my magic wand. Later, as I was considering the various shades of green for my 12-meter long ribbon and painted balls to be placed in the landscape as an artificial allusion to the line, some people questioned my initial choice. 'This is not the green of the Green Line', they said, as if they had actually seen it for real!
Traveling during Spring and Summer along the line, it looks green indeed. Often, it also appears pale and blurred where there is a motorway interchange, a traffic intersection, inaccessible agricultural fields, empty hills or valleys, un-cleared minefields and military zones around the sections of wall and fence that make up the gently called 'separation barrier'. But its enduring political validity has been saturated by various, and sometimes contrary Israeli and Palestinian popular discourses.
For all these reasons, the Line is blinding but it is also artificial and blurred. This is sometimes represented visually by the project, either by creating a movement effect, or by placing a virtual line in the landscape made of large green balls: the path between two points can indeed take an infinite number of courses, a straight line being only one of them.
This project thus intends to instrumentalise the visual nature of this political concept and wants to be a gentle, yet absurd, kick in the big green eyes of the so-called solution of 'two States living side by side in peace and security along the 1967 border.' By doing so, it intends to communicate, with a smile, a sense of absurdity when envisaging the likelihood of establishing borders in this landscape, if such a thing is possible at all. More interestingly, it is about showing the physical landscape of possible political separation, as was the case in the past, and about generating critical thinking and a healthy feeling of doubt to keep the door open to alternatives.' (Alban Biaussat)
Photography; Lambda print on aluminum prospects.
Produced by Al-Ma'mal Foundation for Contemporary Art.
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Rineke Dijkstra
(work in prigress)
2004
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Our sincere gratitude to The Ford Foundation, The Khalid Shoman Foundation, the Jerusalem Unit, and the Belgian Consulate in Jerusalem for their continuous support and partnership.
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