PHOTO:Rula Halawani -For My Father
Rula Halawani was born, grew up and still lives in the Mount of Olives district in East Jerusalem. Growing up under occupation and working as a photographer in an intensely political environment, Halawani’s work demonstrates a strong relationship between art and politics. Rula Halawani shoots and produces images of the changes taking place daily on the Palestinian territory. She is the founder and director of the photography department of the Birzeit University.
By Dimitris Lempesis
Photo: Ayyam Gallery Archive
Rula Halawani started as photojournalist and worked as freelance journalist for many newspapers and magazines. Her subjective view of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict pushed her to cease this activity and to turn exclusively to visual arts since 1988. She explains “I am an artist, a photographer who lives and works in an intensely political environment (…) the question of making political art does not arise in the Palestinian context. Our existence is entirely defined, at all levels, by political circumstances”. In her new exhibition “For My Father”, Halawani’s latest body of work is a photographic record in remembrance of her late father, Halawani revisits several sites throughout historic Palestine, specifically the scenery that shaped her childhood memories. In the ghostly images of the series, the rolling hills, seashore, and traditional neighborhoods of the artist’s youth are distorted through the lens of her camera as she struggles to identify what was once familiar. Invading industry now defines the horizon. Abandoned homes are shown in a gradual process of deterioration, overgrown with weeds that sprout from crumbling facades. Once popular beaches now host solitary figures whose silhouettes are fogged at the edges as though slowly disappearing with the diminishing sand and sea. In a letter to her father that accompanies the series, Halawani describes the transformed environments with disbelief and apparent melancholy, acknowledging the disappearance of the serene settings that were integral to her familial experiences. Rula Halawani’s photographs enable the viewer to enter the Palestinians’ nightmare and experience aspects of the destabilizing and dehumanizing pressures imposed on that society by the ongoing Israeli occupation. Rula’s photographs always transcend the documentary tradition of photography by depicting a seemingly surreal and improbable world that should only exist in a terrible nightmare. Yet, nothing in her work is invented or imagined. Her images depict traces of a culture being pushed, before our very eyes, into oblivion by its occupiers. A Palestinian culture that although is perpetually stressed and tattered, refuses to break or disappear.
Info: Ayyam Gallery Dubai, Unit B11 Unit B12, Alserkal Avenue, Street 8, Al Quoz 1, Dubai, Duration: 18/1-3/3/16, Days & Hours: Sun-Thu 10:00-18:99, Sat 12:00-18:00, www.ayyamgallery.com
