HAZEM HARB Hazem Harb 20 February – 14 March 2012 Have a Good Dream! 2012, Digital Photo Mounted on Aluminium Frame, Light Box and Neon, 200 X 150 X 30Cm Hazem Harb
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HAZEM HARB Hazem Harb 20 February – 14 March 2012 Have a Good Dream! 2012, Digital photo mounted on aluminium frame, light box and neon, 200 x 150 x 30cm Hazem Harb I can imagine you without your home In Black Skin, White Masks, Frantz Omar Fanon presents the reader with a complex analysis of what it means to live with one’s self as a colonized figure. Ziauddin Sardar argues in his introduction to the 2008 re-print of the book that Fanon’s text is preoccupied with the tension of ‘being oneself’ with all the diverging contradictions that this entails when existing under an occupied regime. The text defines a paradigm or process whereby dignity is sought and reclaimed by the writer. This key text later appropriated for post-colonial studies, can be used as a means to examine a number of Palestinian artists whose visual arts practice has adopted a highly political fabric. Vera Tamari, the significant Palestinian artist, historian and theorist substantiated this when she noted in a personal interview in 2010 that many Palestinian artists such as Nabil Anani and Kamel al Mughanni during the 1970s grew to produce what was dubbed as ‘committed art’ – creativity whose impulses were rooted in a struggle of resistance and identity. This changed after the Oslo accords of the mid-nineties when a newfound criticality came to the fore. Artists from Sharif Waked, to Mona Hatoum, and Elia Suleiman were stimulating figures whose work used parody and subversion to address these issues of so-called colonization. The inspired Gaza-born artist, Hazem Harb, extends and stretches the confines of these historic paradigms to their fullest extent. The artist’s creative output is a complex formation. It is neither a political firsthand account of conflict, nor does his work reveal a singular perspective or struggle for the political recognition of the Palestinian people. Rather, Harb’s multi-media works, which span the gamut from large-scale photographs, paintings, sculpture and installation, bear an ethereal and poetic resonance. Born in 1980 in Gaza City to seven siblings, Harb was educated in Europe, and spent much of his childhood in the occupied territories preoccupied with literature, drawing, and other forms of creative expression. A keen and conscious observer, some of Harb’s most recent works relay a visual and literal quietness through the medium of photography – observations of scarred and tainted surroundings enfolding into a beautiful painterly tapestry. Raised during a time that saw the dominance of the neo-conservative ideology that consumed the global community and the misplaced anger surrounding the “War on Terror”, Hazem’s visual manifestations hold none of the overt anger and frustration of his generational peers. In his latest body of work, I can imagine you without your home, 2012; the artist looks at Gaza with half the eye of an anthropologist and half the eye of a native returning home. In the Remains series, instead of the expected furious crowds who gather in torment, protest or mourning, the artist’s photographs present the viewer with an unoccupied physical space. We find desolate homes, empty, unmade beds and a roof that has enfolded unto itself. Each printed in black and white, hand-painted, bleached in ink, re-formulated and printed again in large scale. At first glance, the images of the infamous and tortured Gazan landscape seem gentle and serene, in opposition to the region’s identity as the most troubled site on earth. The black and white nature of the images leaves the eyes decentered. The individual gaze scrambles as it follows the shape of each photo print – revealing the physicality of each room, which Harb has mediated and imbued. As the eye lingers, the twinge of grief begins to settle in. The stark emptiness of the artist’s scenography begins to pulse with sadness. We are bereft, with unanswered questions. Where is the owner of this home? Is she displaced or sleeping? Does her home still exist now, or has it fallen to rubble as the years have ensued? Devoid of breathing civilization, the artist’s environments still boast the remnants of human occupation, or rather, lived experience. One will find mattresses with the stains of human life, or an open tube of lipstick that looks like it was abandoned halfway through its application. The uncertainty persists. By juxtaposing the faceless violence of ruins against the homely qualities of these environments, Harb denotes a desire to capture fragments of an undocumented time and place. Each photograph, like a dream, pulsates. Yet, unlike conventional documentarians, these multi-layered prints bear more of a resemblance to the mise-en-scène of Italian neo-realist cinema. Like generic neo-realism, Harb’s works are characterized by a mixture of documentary and fictive motifs, and are obsessed with the conditions of everyday life, in some of the most impossible situations. Indeed, these photographs were captured in severe conditions -- first in 2008, after the last major attack on Gaza, and again in 2010. Harb’s process is also quintessentially unique in how we begin to understand his work. Each photograph boasts an uncanny materiality. The aforementioned technique of hand painting and overlaying photographs has been used by artists such as Youssef Nabil, to beautify both dissident and celebrity identities, but for Harb, this process is much more about catharsis. The artist’s desire to tamper with, re-write and re-articulate each image through a process of physical contortion can be interpreted in many ways as an attempt to take ownership over the ‘in-between’ space that his birth land must adopt. The grueling and time-consuming process relates to Harb’s desire for each work to boast an individual narrative trajectory, so as to create what Roland Barthes refers to in Camera Lucida as semiotic formations of meaning. Much of this, it can be said was inspired by the narrative which brought Harb to the series. While wandering the post-traumatic urban landscape, the artist became consumed by the silence of the uninhabited homes that he had come to observe in Gaza. Subsequently, he began to question the identities of those who had lived in the derelict homes that encompassed him. His images of ‘home’ in turn, foster an ‘imagined’ sensibility of what could have been. The modular elements of Harb’s latest exhibition are tethered together through the pursuit of homeliness. This returns me to a reading from Location of Culture in 1993, where Homi Bhaba states that ‘one is not homeless’ (P. 9), but rather that one cannot easily be accommodated into the familiar divisions of social conditioning. As such, this point suggests that a sense of home can be an ideological or a nostalgic pursuit, as opposed to the pragmatic consideration of a ‘roof over one’s head’. This critical framework is useful for helping define a model by which we can analyze I can imagine you without your home. For in reality, Palestinians or more appropriately, natives of Gaza, may have never legally shared a sense of national identity, yet, they are tied to an ideological cultural sense that has grown out of a shared physical experience, as well as dialect and language. Simultaneously exiled and erased, the statelessness of these individuals has fostered logic of ‘home’ and ‘cultural unity’ among its people. This sense of uprootedness is manifested in the physical elements of Harb’s installation that gives his most recent exhibition its title. Here, we find a five-piece mattress installation that is representative of the remains of a group of Palestinians who have fled their country of birth and origin. Transposed to a state of perpetual and roaming exile, Harb recalls how one would traditionally observe people rolling up their mattresses when fleeing conflict. This, the artist believes, represents the simultaneous feeling of instability and mobility. It can also be said that this desire to maintain objects of comfort throughout periods of severe trauma is a desire by everyday Gazans and Palestinians to carry a sense of ‘home’ with them, regardless of where their displacement may have taken them. The artist’s installation sees the mattresses rolled up – occupying a physical gallery space, yet, on this occasion, without the human figures to carry them. The bare objecthood of the mattresses in a gallery or museological context loads the sculptures with poignancy. Is all that remains of home a piece of rolled up foam? Stripped of their agency, and of their comfort, these mattresses sit like relics of a discombobulating social condition. Beyond the figurative and the nostalgic, there is also noirish humor at play in Hazem Harb’s outlook. In Have a Good Dream! 2012, the artist juxtaposes his optimistic title with a light box that is filled with the harshness of war. A half moon effervesces in neon light on the surface of a photographic light box, which reveals a room in post- conflicted tatters. The estimation of irony here can be attributed to the contradictory vernacular often associated with the whirlwind that is international relations and cultural brokering. In this work, the artist is wishing his people a sweet and carefree moment of peace, knowing wholeheartedly that this is an allusion that they will never be able to attain in their lifetime. Likewise, it can be deduced that the circle of peace talks that encompass the modern Middle Eastern condition eschews any sense of rationality to the impossibly convoluted Palestinian condition. In another video, Untitled Until Now, 2012, the social history of Palestinians after the ethnic cleansing of the Nakba of 1948 is revealed. Utilizing found images from the Nakba Archive, New York; Harb has re-conceptualized the conventions of archival or documentary film.