The Institut du monde arabe's current show of work by 19 Palestinian artists challenges preconceptions of contemporary Palestinian art, writes David Tresilian in Paris Intended, according to the show's curator, to suggest the components of a properly Palestinian aesthetic, Palestine, la création dans tous ses états is an exhibition at the Institut du monde arabe in Paris that brings together works by 19 contemporary Palestinian artists. Running until November this year and including works by established figures like Kamal Boullata and Mona Hatoum, both well known outside their native Palestine, the exhibition also presents the work of much younger artists, many of them at early stages in their careers. Diversity of approach and the use of new and mixed media are motifs of this exhibition, according to the notes provided by curator Mona Khazindar. The use of mixed techniques may, she writes, be a way for contemporary Palestinian artists to suggest that "every type of media, every possible [technique], should be summoned to describe a world in which landmarks, frontiers and reality are slipping further and further away from those trying to hold onto them." Certainly there is little painting on show in Palestine, la création dans tous ses états, and there is little of the kind of graphic work often highlighted in western exhibitions of modern or contemporary Middle Eastern art. One exhibition referred to in the present show, the British Museum exhibition Word into Art held some years ago in London, focused on calligraphy, for example (reviewed in the Weekly in August 2006). If there is one thing international audiences know, or think they know, about contemporary Arab art, it is that some of it emerges from a tradition of calligraphy, and exhibitions held in Europe have reinforced this idea. One of the merits of the present exhibition is that it allows audiences to see contemporary Palestinian, and Middle Eastern, art differently. Instead of painting and calligraphic work, there is a lot of challenging and interesting video and installation work on show in the present exhibition, expressing, according to the curator, ideas of traces of the past, displacement and memory. Some people may still prefer Arab artists to produce work drawing on calligraphy, but even they will probably admit that this stimulating and exceptionally well-curated show is all the better for challenging preconceptions of what constitutes contemporary Palestinian art. The exhibition is housed in the Institut du monde arabe's temporary building, usually used for selling souvenirs and Middle Eastern craft items, but now divided into a series of linked spaces by temporary walls. Each space has been given over to a different artist, and this arrangement, placing all the artists on the same level as it were, avoids any temptation towards narrative. There may well be a storyline at work behind this exhibition; there is certainly a bringing together of generations. The oldest artist with work on show here was born in 1936 and the youngest in 1977. However, if visitors are intended to notice influences across generations, these are discreet to the point of being almost undetectable. Instead, the curator has signaled her intentions through the choice of artists and artworks, leaving visitors to wander through the exhibition's linked spaces and draw their own conclusions. The show opens with Sherif Waked's Chic Point, Fashion for Israeli Checkpoints (2003), a digital video that transposes Palestinian daily life on the West Bank, an affair of perpetual checkpoints and security controls, with the rather different circumstances of a fashion show. The models wear a prêt-a-porter collection that reveals parts of their bodies, chiefly backs and stomachs, inviting audiences to check them over for concealed weapons. As the accompanying wall text notes, this material is potentially so overwhelming -- referring to the body searches carried out on Palestinians on a daily basis at checkpoints across the West Bank -- that the only way of dealing with it is to displace it into humour. Walking into the exhibition, visitors are informed that the often extreme difficulty of daily life in today's Palestine means that contemporary Palestinian artists, rejecting polemic and ideology, often have recourse to the kind of black humour evinced in Waked's work. Chic Point glamourises the humiliations involved in daily body searches by re-imagining them in the camp context of a fashion show, while Larissa Sansour's video piece A Space Exodus (2008), apparently showing an astronaut planting a Palestinian flag on the moon, is described here as an adaptation of Stanley Kubrick's 1968 film 2001: A Space Odyssey transposed to the Middle East. It is, the notes read, "a small step for the Palestinians, but a giant leap for mankind." Such pieces draw attention to life under occupation and to the fact of dispossession in effective and unusual ways, all the more so for translating such themes into apparently alien media and circumstances. However, sometimes the humour of the pieces is contradicted by the generally far more somber tone of the accompanying texts or the notes of the artists themselves. Raeda Saadeh's piece Who Will Make Me Real? (2005), for example, a large- format digital print showing the artist sprawled on a bed and wrapped in newspapers, has a similar jokey feel, but one that is severely qualified by the accompanying text. "Women, human beings living in the context of occupation," this reads, "find themselves becoming neurotic in everyday life, creating a kind of barrier against fear for themselves and for those that they love and protect." Viewing Chic Point or A Space Exodus, the one all bling- bling glamour, the other set on the moon, one is never allowed to forget the real circumstances of daily life in Palestine. Saadeh's piece, like many of the others on show, reminds visitors of the particular effects of occupation on Palestinian women, and eleven of the artists showing work in the exhibition are women, including Emily Jacir, recognised at the 2007 Venice Biennale, and Mona Hatoum. Jacir is represented by her piece Memorial to 418 Palestinian Villages which were Destroyed, Depopulated and Occupied by Israel in 1948 (2001), a sort of tent printed with the names of destroyed Palestinian villages, now in the collection of the National Contemporary Art Museum in Athens, while Hatoum shows a piece entitled Every Door a Wall (2003), a curtain of newsprint hung in front of a darkened doorway. Both pieces invite reflections on memory and loss, as does Rana Bishara's Homage to Childhood (2008), a memorable installation in which the artist has littered the floor of a room with translucent white balloons containing photographs of childhood. Above them are menacing halos of barbed wire. All these artists have had significant international exposure, as have Waked, born in Nazareth in 1964, and Sansour, born in Jerusalem in 1973. Waked exhibited at London's Tate Modern in 2006 and Sansour, having studied in Copenhagen, London and New York, has exhibited at the Guangzhou Triennial and the Contemporary Art Biennial in N"mes. Of the 19 artists exhibiting in the present show, a good many, perhaps more than half, trained abroad, and more than half seem to live and work outside Palestine. They bear out another feature of the present exhibition, and perhaps of contemporary Palestinian art more generally, which is its international character. As Mona Khazindar comments in her curator's notes, while Palestinian and Arab artists tended to spend increasing amounts of time abroad from the 1950s onwards, following the foundation of the first modern art schools in the region in Cairo at the beginning of the century, it has only been since the 1970s that Palestinian artists have really been able to widen their perspectives and enter the international art scene in their own right, rather than being seen, through western eyes, as the representatives of a marginal or ethnographic form of art. This internationalisation of contemporary Palestinian art has undoubtedly enlarged the iconography and transformed the media available to contemporary Palestinian artists, who are now at least as likely to draw on Stanley Kubrick as they are on the Palestinian landscapes or other subject matter dear to the earlier generations of artists detailed in Kamal Boullata's recent book Palestinian Art from 1850 to the Present, copies of which are on sale at the present show. Contemporary Palestinian artists are also at least as likely to work in mixed media, installation or video as they are in more traditional materials. However, besides a broadening of horizons and a rethinking of what might constitute Palestinian art, such internationalisation may also have had other effects, one of which is noticeable in the present show. Some of the work in Palestine, la création dans tous ses états seems to have been carried out with foreign cooperation, notably Fawzy Emrany's Counting Years (2007), an installation in which disembodied voices count off the years from their birth year onwards, and Sandi Hilal's Roofs (2008), a video piece exploring Palestinian women's relationships to space. The former work was made in a Palestinian refugee camp in Jordan in cooperation with Swiss artists Jorg Köppl and Peter Za�ek, while the latter was produced in a refugee camp in Hebron on the West Bank in cooperation with UNRWA and the University of Stuttgart. A theme debated in the work of earlier generations of Palestinian artists was the reception of foreign art practices, giving rise to the question of what could be considered properly "Palestinian art." In order to be considered authentically Palestinian, did a work need to draw on indigenous techniques, among them the tradition of icon painting or traditional craft practices, or was it enough for it to have Palestinian subject-matter, in which case was there not a danger of Palestinian art becoming imprisoned in an ever-narrowing circle of motifs? Contemporary circumstances, in which international contacts have almost immeasurably increased, may have made such national questions redundant, or they may have transformed them, as the present show suggests. According to this exhibition, contemporary Palestinian art, whether produced inside or outside Palestine, with or without the cooperation of non-Palestinian artists and institutions, and in whatever form of media, is always concerned with a set of recurring themes, the components of a Palestinian aesthetic. On the evidence of this exhibition, such themes include memory, dispossession and exile, and the pain of continuing occupation. However transformed and displaced into the unlikely contexts of rooms full of balloons, a fashion parade, or space exploration, these are expressed with stoicism and humour.
