There are several recent, notable news items about Palestinian arts.
The
New York Times published a short review of Annemarie Jacir’s film “Salt of This Sea,” which stars the poet, Suheir Hammad. Soraya is a Brooklynite who travels to her ancestral homeland to find herself, in a sense. She also tries to reclaim her Palestinian grandfather’s house and bank account, which Israel took in the 1948 war. The Times called the film, which opened in New York theaters on August 13, "a sad and engrossing look at a haunted landscape." Produced by famed thespian Danny Glover, the film had a good opening weekend turnout.
Activist groups are promoting it in hope of drawing further crowds. One such organization is pushing the film with a
strong endorsement from Michael Moore. He said it is "Brilliant, emotional, intense and fresh... the kind of powerful film that stays with you long after you leave the theater. It profoundly moved me."
Soraya (Suheir Hammad) and the two Palestinian men she befriends, Emad (Saleh Bakri) and Marwan (Riyad Ideis), spend much of the film negotiating both physical barriers — walls, fences, checkpoints, holding cells — and ritual humiliations to move about the rocky, scrubby country in which Emad and Marwan are trapped.
Photograph: Murdo Macleod for the Guardian
In the UK, a theater piece, "The Cry" portrays the the brutality experienced by the Palestinian poet Ghazi Hussein, who Israel imprisoned 23 times. The power of the performance is in some shock value -- the violence is not feigned. As
the Guardian reports, "the blood is real." Hussein (played by Steve Lambert, who also directs), is repeatedly held under water, held in a steel cage, and is roughed up. This forces the audience to ask themselves, "are you being complicit in what is happening on stage, or bearing witness?"
In the world of visual art, two projects
centered on the famous Nabulsi soap. Jerusalem native and artist, Jack Persekian, recently discussed his 2004 art installation, which occurred at the World Economic Forum, for an exhibit at the Beirut Art Center. After constructing a wall of thousands of bars of soap, WEF delegates were invited to
take bars away as mementos.
Persekian's presentation accompanied an exhibit by the UK-based
Mona Hatoum. For "Witness," she built "a square comprised of 2,200 bars of soap (she favored the Al-Jamal brand), into which she pressed pomegranate seed-like red beads to create an outline map of Oslo’s politically segmented West Bank."
Though published in 2007, "The Subjective Atlas of Palestine" is
available for download. This work, which won
a prestigious Dutch prize, brought together over thirty different Palestinian artists, photographers and writers who responded to the challenge to "map their country as they see it." It was edited by Dutch designer Annelys de Vet.
Roger Sheety recently wrote that one prominent theme in the book is "the search for normalcy and unity under brutal and endless Israeli occupation, ethnic cleansing and land theft."
Finally, if you have not seen the video, Zein El-Amine, the Assistant Director of Writers' House at the University of Maryland, spoke recently at the Palestine Center on the subject of
"Politics and Poetics: Palestinian Art and Culture as a Form of Resistance" [or read
the transcripts].
A Palestinian family man [who] unites rival parties Fatah and Hamas, Western activists, and even groups of progressive Israelis in a nonviolent movement to save his village from being destroyed.
