From the sixth
edition of the
Cities Exhibition
Lydda - A Garden
Disremembered
Lebanon and Syria, and through its airport, military and
civilian flights connected the city with the rest of the
world.
Lydda is now a demographically-divided urban area that
has gone through a systematically- engineered process
of displacement of its native Palestinian inhabitants,
especially during their dramatic and forced exodus in the
1948 Nakba.
“The Cities Exhibition began with Jerusalem, and later
examined Ramallah, Jericho, Nablus, and Gaza,” Anani
said, “This time, we decided to move away from the
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Al Ghadeer - Fall 2018
central areas of Palestine and analyze cities situated on the
coast, such as Haifa and Jaffa, but those had been studied
extensively- we wanted to include marginalized cities. As
such, we decided to examine cities not normally included
in the current local discourse, such as Lydda and Ramlah. In
the future, I would like to see the Cities Exhibition move to
cities in the Palestinian Diaspora.”
Bringing Kafr Qasim to Life
Earlier in 2017, the museum launched another unique
exhibition by the Palestinian artist Samia Halaby. Based
in New York since the 1970s, she has long been active in
the city’s art scene, mainly through independent and non-
profit art spaces and artist-run initiatives, in addition to
participating in leftist political organizing for various causes.
She also has advocated for Palestinians.
Her latest exhibit in Birzeit University focuses on the Kafr
Qasim Massacre, which killed 48 people on October 29,
1956. Documenting the Kafr Qasim Massacre in painting,
however, reflects the activist side of the artist’s work. In
the exhibition, Halaby uses illustration and detailed scenes
to document this painful and largely undocumented
historical event.
Halaby displayed 16 print reproductions of her drawings,
all of which now form a permanent part of the Birzeit
University Museum collection and the consciousness of
future generations. Halaby researched the massacre for
years, basing her work on stories told by the survivors
whom she frequently visited, the accounts of the family
members they lost in the massacre, and all the press
materials she could find. The village of Kafr Qasim, was
at that time, the de facto border between Israel and the
Jordanian West Bank. The killings were carried out by
the Israel Border Police, who gunned down Arab civilians
returning from work unaware of a curfew imposed earlier
in the day on the eve of the Sinai War. In total 48 people
died 19 men, 6 women, and 23 children ages 8-17. Certain
sources also give the death toll as 49, including the unborn
child of one of the women.
Halaby primarily works in abstraction but has also
utilized a documentary-style of figurative drawing in
more politically-oriented works, including the Kafr
Qasim series. She leads us to recognize the strong bond
between her art production and her political activism,
which has often pushed her to explore Palestinian art as
the art of liberation. The development of her work over
the past 50 years has been closely related to locating the
many principles of abstraction in nature while utilizing a
materialist approach. A number of her paintings have been
created by building upon the methods and forms of certain
historical applications of abstraction, namely that of the
Russian Constructivists and examples of traditional Arabic
arts and Islamic architecture.
The stones of destroyed villages and segregated cities hold
our history, the memories of our grandparents, and proof
of our right in Palestine. We are facing the occupation,
colonialism and settlers, but we are still able to imagine
and restructure our land, despite not being able to visit it.
Birzeit University
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