A Swiss, two Palestinians and one disgruntled Egyptian: Iman Hamam reviews an exhibition What's the occasion? Could it be the discovery of more tunnels dug by Hamas in the Gaza Strip? The shooting of two members of the militant Palestinian Popular Resistance Committees (PRC)? Two children in Beit Hanuon in critical condition after an Israeli missile attack? Perhaps the fact that, even now, Israeli ministers are calling for a massive military attack on Gaza? Whatever next? As far as the CIC is concerned, the ongoing Palestine/Israel conflict calls for the shrill sound of art. Because, of course, art and resistance go hand in hand, like, erm, the gun and the olive branch -- or whatever... Palestine, now understood as the most widely documented conflict of the 20th century, has had a lot to offer the art scene in recent years. Over 30 years ago, writer- activist-intellectual Jean Genet commented on the possible contribution of art to the revolution: "The Palestinian revolution is right to make use of bourgeois -- and so virtually completed -- artistic forms. But at the same time this is a danger for the revolution, for it tempts it to exploit the same themes, the same images, the same clichés, and thus the same lies as those which support the bourgeoisie... An art that is at the service of the revolution is in danger of becoming entirely at the service of the political power of the revolution. I do not think this is a good thing..." Not much is bourgeois about Gaza, nowadays anyway. It's but a tiny strip of land of 360 square kilometres housing (or not, as the case may be) a population of, according the CIA's July 2006 population estimate, 1,428,757. In 1948, 200,000 Palestinians sought refuge there. There wasn't, much. The 80,000 residents found themselves cut off from their livelihood -- subject to overcrowding, water and food shortages, makeshift, temporary shelters and little prospect of support from the international community. Which is when Egypt, bless her, stepped in. Now, it's as if an art exhibition was designed to tickle the Gaza-Egypt bond in the most sophisticated of the nation's numerous armpits. The more-than-physical distance between Egypt and Gaza -- the latter being, in effect, an open-air prison -- remains vast. For the misfortunate and oh so bourgeois residents of New Cairo who have stabilised their vehicles at 90km per hour on the notorious Ring Road on a daily basis, this distance, and the overcrowding that frames it, will strike a familiar note. For others, Egypt has, has always had, it's own troubles and concerns. "No Holidays in Gaza" is the peculiar, somewhat awkwardly-phrased title of an exhibition, curated by Rayelle Niemann and made possible with support from Pro Helvetia, the Swiss Art Foundation, open from 14 January to 7 February at the Cairo Image Collective. The event has undergone its own fair share of conflict. But never mind that and let us, instead, recall the Palestinian issue, the most widely documented... At this point, with the festive season well behind us, Gaza does not seem too exciting a travel prospect for those looking for a holiday destination. Sinai is booming, as ever (just the thought of Europeans, AUCians flocking to "Sharm"...) But when it comes to getting across the border from our side, a process more often referred to as "the Philadelphi corridor crossing", border closures, shootings by soldiers or endlessly inane negotiations with men in uniforms are involved. The press release for the exhibition reads as follows: Gaza, the Gaza-Strip, situated at the Mediterranean with a 100km long shoreline, is a perfect destination for holidays -- light-coloured sand and rock formations provide a divers coastal area, restaurants along the seaside offer a big variety of local delicacies, plenty of fish and homemade dishes. Enriched back lands with fertile grounds, lush gardens, endless orange and mango groves, pomegranates, lemons, peaches, pears and huge fields with olive-trees and grains creates a sense of paradise. The air is saturated with the scent of herbs and spices, providing an excellent blend with the slightly salty seaside breath. Strolling through the old city of Gaza and its surrounding areas gives an insight into the ancient history, the historical heritage of this key strategic crossroad of the region. Beautiful ancient buildings, palaces, hamams and amazingly arranged gardens pay witness to a 3000-year old narrative, incorporating the period of the Pharaohs, Philistines as well as Hellenistic, Roman and Byzantine eras. If you are ready to spend some leisure time in one of the most interesting territories in the Middle East, rich in past and current history, come to Gaza, to indulge body and mind. Well, I don't know about that! Obviously what is being attempted here is to provide, through the mimicry of a travel agent's publicity text, a sense of the absurdity of the situation with even more stark ridiculousness. For the Gazans presumably, as much as those entrenched in the media bombardment of looped footage from the territories, the place is far from paradise, removed from any sense of ancient history, heritage or culture, perhaps power, with the seaside more of an enforced everyday passage for workers, donkeys and other vehicles. In the magazine, diplo: Design and Politics, a series of photographs by London-based photographer Mark Seager, present Gazans enjoying some time on the beach, engaging with the sea, with women's headscarves fluttering in the wind as their galabiyyas are drenched and sand-washed. This is not an idyllic sight, but for Cairenes missing the summer themselves, it's one to which many can relate. There is little evidence of the Gaza described in the exhibition postcard -- supposedly part of the wider project of disseminating art, but sadly, only reaching as far as electronic gallery invitations and perhaps marking the long acknowledged and tragic death of postal systems worldwide. The question remains just how well or ill placed an exhibition about Gaza is in a posh downtown Cairo gallery. It's all too conceptual, too complicated. Bring back the mutilated bodies of children, the screaming women and the bulldozed houses. I don't think Cairo's had quite enough. Initially exhibited in Switzerland during the June 2006 invasion of Gaza, the exhibition has that dimension ("Ooo, the news is so biased") that makes art so appealing to Europeans. Shortly after his arrival, I walked with Raoof Haj Yahia to the Townhouse Gallery of Contemporary Art to bask in the splendour that was the art scene in Cairo today. On the way, we tripped over many a bread seller sitting on the sidewalk as the traffic of people stumbled by. His work involves photographs of bread, packaged and destined for Gaza, one in a white envelope addressed simply: "To Gaza, with best bread" (a play on "with best wishes"), another with the words "Bread - express (delivery)" simply written on a piece of bread. One replaces medical pills with bread loaves; meanwhile Cairo is crawling with pharmacies. The idea came from an incident involving a friend sending a package to Gaza, only to discover that it arrived, needless to say in pretty bad shape, many months after it had been posted. On the occasion of the international suspension of aid packages to Gaza following the election of Hamas to parliament in January 2006, these are inside jokes made across borders within Palestine. "No bread in Gaza", out of the three works, is the most processed, ingenious, and humorous of the lot. "I don't know much about Gaza," confessed Raoof. I nodded (neither do I). Raoof has been quick to realise that the link between Egypt and Gaza leaves a lot to be desired. Never intended for gallery exhibition, Raoof sent the images to extended mailing lists, later insisting that the computers for the exhibition be brought over from Gaza personally. He had to settle for the Egyptian version, battling his way through the not so well-established Ramallah-Cairo connection. Through those eyes, Raoof is left, not surprisingly, in a state of bewilderment. The motivation behind this exhibit were clear from the start: this is about daily life; and what everyone understands, recognises, handles and consumes -- it needn't be existential. Again, Genet: "Simple people understand a new kind of art better than the theoreticians who are themselves immersed in bourgeois culture." Back in Ramallah, Raoof is involved in other things. To demonstrate, he took us to the web-page of Zan Studio: an, ehem, artists cooperative. The most important website in the Arab world, which is still, ehem, under construction -- watch this space, www.zanstudio.comwww.zanstudio.com(/togaza for this exhibit). Other websites are being built in the process. He and his team are just finishing off a documentary about the workshops Raoof leads in refugee camps around the city. Armed with pin-hole cameras made out of tin cans, children are instructed by camera-shy Raoof how to photograph whatever they please -- often themselves, immediate reality. If this is the most widely documented conflict in history, then it's not only because of digital cameras and telephones that take photographs. This is no imperial archive, no sir-ee. The idea of relating to the world through the formation of images might be unavoidable, but it nevertheless can become, given the Internet and depending on the context of course, either pretty damn shabi, ineffective or prohibited. (The same applies to Students under Occupation Take a Stand, a community project documented in a pretty powerful book published by Birzeit University in 2006.) Once again, it's a question of proximity and perspective. Taysir Batniji's work comes in two forms. The first, a series of photographs, laid out, almost scattered on the walls, is a simple print, with no frames or embellishments. According to Rayelle, the way in which Taysir's photographs are arranged on the wall is itself a reference to art history -- the exhibition of portraits in French salons. She made reference in particular to Peitro Antonio Martini, Exposition au salon du Louvre (1787). This kind of perspective, for Rayelle, is sobering, in that it puts the whole idea of art galleries in perspective. There were always mainstream institutions and those that were against them, who formed their own independent salons. The idea was to present something that was not sensational, but ordinary, and to place it in a different setting, lifting it out of its usual context and place it in a kind of frame made up in form from an even older tradition. Rayelle insists that this intervention needn't be seen as something entirely sophisticated, removed from cultures and societies. Nevertheless place becomes relevant. The photographs of framed portraits nestled in between shelves of groceries and shampoo, peeling paint, kettles, tiles, neon lights, wood panelling, kettles, irons, fuse boxes, make more sense with Raoof's computer table beneath, this presence being one of the few that ties the exhibit together, taking the edge off the stark white walls of the CIC and contributing a whiff of, well, bric-à-brac -- normality. The portraits of deceased, for want of a better word, patriarchs, intimating complex family structures, provide a portal, another tunnel perhaps, into a past that is understood in the almost redundant context of martyrs' posters -- themselves part of an earlier 2001 exhibition by Taysir. Taysir's short film, Transit, an example of the second form in which his work comes -- illegally recorded in Rafah among many a waiting traveller -- would have been entirely different had he obtained a permit. I did not see the installation in the gallery. It was Rayelle who offered a home delivery viewing of the series of stills, interspersed with slide-show sound effects, and followed by a short video recording of Palestinian "travellers" (or those in "transit" if you will) waiting to be let into Gaza, at the mercy of an Israeli-controlled border. Given the setup -- some benches, fences and a lot of waiting -- the rhythm and pace of the slides can be better understood. This is Dogma à-la mobile phone. Welcome in Egypt. Gaza is an open-air prison. Here, at least now, prisons are indoors. As far as conceptual art goes, the scariest thought is that out of the three works, Rayelle's is the most "unprocessed". A row of five images, comprising sections of the Erez tunnel between Gaza and Israel, take on the phenomenal sophistication of the wonder that is Israeli architecture. This is no primitive tunnel dug in secret, through which and weapons and people (or people and weapons) are smuggled across the Rafah border. And no, confirms Rayelle: "I did not manipulate the images, I did not change the colours." Almost, but not quite proud, that all she really had to do was walk through the now all-but- abandoned tunnel that used to carry people from Gaza to Israel. There is no evidence of the long and arduous process undergone in the past by day labourers from Gaza. "When I first went through Erez, I was so immersed in art that I thought: Ah! What a beautiful light installation!" Rayelle is aware of the privileged vision she has -- presumably workers don't make that abstraction or think that they are walking through a James Turrell light installation. Interested in the ways architecture can have an impact on the way people think and relate to one another, or even on a more psychological, perhaps sinister level, there is little doubt that there is sophistication and design at work here. "When you walk through these coloured tunnels they give you disorientation as to the width and the height of the space. Not entirely straight, it bends, so you cannot see where it ends. When it is hot, you get the feeling the walls are vibrating," she went on to explain. The news encourages people to become "military strategists", but for those who are still resistant to the issues raised by art, "you can ignore the message if you don't see", Rayelle comments, perhaps a get-out clause for any curator. No one here is likely to negotiate the Erez tunnel to anywhere, bread is in great abundance everywhere and, yes, there are portraits of deceased patriarchs on the walls. Then again, perhaps there is little harm in bringing Gaza into the consciousness of some stylish gallery attendees, a group of fine art students, a random Iraqi artist -- and an Internet café or two... No Sea In Ramallah By Amer Shomali No Sea in Ramallah and no bread in Gaza. And we wait. Ramallah : we all wear swimming suites under our clothes and live as butterflies. Morning : we look at the horizon, no sign of the sea; maybe tomorrow, so let's take a look at the newspaper. Horoscope : No sea today for those born in the sign of Ramallah. Crosswords : Palestinian Coastal city (four letters)!... R A M A... Ramallah has more than four letters. We give up and throw the paper away. Noon : we skim over an art exhibition done by one of the Orientalists; we leave as Westernists.* Evening : we make our pilgrimage to the bars, we chew on our projects and they on us. The Smiley Face pops in with ten cameras hanging on both shoulders and sits by me. Dude, I want to capture the state, and reach the post-image, the image to imagine the imaginary imagination of the imagery. Night : we drag our bodies to our holes, we smoke the pre- sleep cigarette, then remember our TV. A little Al Jazeereh freshens the soul. We accidentally run into a foreign woman. We impress her with our headline culture so she agrees to become a mandate state to one of the victims. Al Jazeereh : Breaking Closure. The border passes are closed, the sea is closed, and the sky is high and closed. Gaza, hungry city. Gaza, city of catastrophes. Gaza, after the break. Then we remember. We forgot Gaza! It's Gaza, then. A Palestinian coastal city (four letters). We smile and fall asleep, tomorrow we will continue with the crosswords. To Gaza With Love: Eat Humus by the spoonful because Ramallah lacks a sea and many other things. So I correct: Gaza is a Palestinian coastal city of four letters: br-e- a-d. *Translator's Note: In case you understood only 70 per cent of the text above, please don't be upset, because we also understood only 70 per cent when we read the English version. Due to discourse and cultural differences this text has lost some of its original connotations. Example: the word "Westernists" complimenting the rhythm of the word "Orientalists", is only one of the meanings of the original word in Arabic, with other meanings including "astonished". We hope that by the next time you will have learned Arabic so as to avoid this linguistic agitation. Thank you. - Reem Shilleh
