Made In Palestine – Andrzej Lawn

Mary Tuma, Homes for the Disembodied. Fifty continuous yards of black silk.

First exhibited in 2003 at the Station Museum in Houston, Texas, Made In Palestine has found a new venue here in New York City. Drawing over 3,000 viewers in just three weeks, the collection of Palestinian artwork comes at a time when a Hamas-led government has taken over the Palestinian Authority, and calls to completely sever US Palestinian relations are heard throughout Washington. The timing for this exhibition’s debut in New York could not have been better.

Over politicized, removed and contained within such a small part of the world, the idea of something being Palestinian exists as a phenomenon outside of Western history and culture. It is easy to be seduced by the constant rain of politics and media that create a shroud of mythology surrounding Palestine and its people; however, there exists a reality beyond what we see.

Showing only a subset of the work originally shown in Texas, most of the artwork shown in Chelsea still reveals the explicit narrative of the Palestinian artists. Living in such a conflicted area of the world, politics is inextricably intertwined with life and art. In the words of Leon Golub, "Art by its very nature is political," and has the power to influence and bring about change. The artists in this show are clearly aware of this. Pushing the political economy of the signs they create, many of the artists walk a fine line between journalistic reporting, propaganda and art.

In Mary Tuma’s Homes for the Disembodied, 50 continuous yards of black silk netting are strung together creating five empty anthropomorphic entities. The bodies, although rooted together by bundles of silk on the floor, are hung from the ceiling hovering over the ground. The transparency inherent in the material allows one to see through the empty ghost-like figures highlighting the disembodiment of a people without a concrete place and identity. Tuma’s bodies have no static form or space, only potential. The act of walking by the installation causes a displacement of air, resulting in the silk netting of the forms to gently reverberate. This quiet movement of the silk in the installation is like an echoing of the boundaries of Palestine itself, consistently shifting and uncertain.

Standing out among the group are the black and white photographs of Rula Halawani’s Negative Incursion series. Printed in negative, Halawani’s photographs capture scenes from an Israeli incursion into the town of Ramallah. The high contrast pictures allow the surface details to fade away and lead the viewer to focus beyond the surface image, and into the scene as a whole. Halawani’s abstraction doesn’t deny the reality, but takes the fact of the moment to create something that is strangely familiar to the American consciousness.

The artists brought together for this show reveal a Palestinian culture that is alive with a deep history, and their work stands as a proposition to reestablish a critical dialogue and incite new ideas. It is always inspiring that no matter what the conditions in Palestine or elsewhere, artists refuse to be pacified and continue to assert their own humanity by making art. Because the fact of the matter is that the structure of art is everywhere, and no one country, class, culture or market has a monopoly or control over art.