In 1948, three months after the declaration of the state of Israel, Pablo Picasso visited the Intellectual Congress in Wroclaw, Poland. It was a congress organised soon after the Second World War in a time in which Wroclaw was still recovering from being German.
After the Second World War, Wroclaw became Polish again as if for the first time, the communist party organised this Congress in a celebration of the triumph over the Nazis and the establishment of a new kind of Polishness.
At this conference, which was the first one in a series of many, Picasso drew his Peace Dove. Every other conference after this, claimed that the dove was drawn there, but in fact Picasso had used it already for some time as a symbol that he marketed within the communist party, reinterpreting it from the divine understanding of saving an individual soul in a Christian way, to saving a community in the best of Communist tradition. Today, we know the peace dove, specifically promoted by Picasso, as a universal symbol for peace.
But a symbol just does not become a symbol, or even an icon, overnight. It's not only talent or the 'right moment' in the market that will guarantee success. Something else has to happen, something that maybe translates as authenticity of spirit or real desire for change.
Picasso in Palestine articulates this desire but also brings out questions: are we only celebrating the 'special' here in a way that somehow tries to normalize an extraordinary situation? Are we discussing a project that is obsessed with proving its own success, or could it be positively a genuine attempt to do something, and something that could possibly fail at any time?
Slavoj Zizek, who visited the exhibition Picasso in Palestine, spoke in Ramallah about the danger of stressing the big events, the bombings, the terror, military incursions as it might detour us from what is really at stake. According to him, at stake is precisely not the big events that serve as shock effects for the media most of the time. Rather we should look at the procedures and bureaucracy that fill the everyday lives of people in the region. How do they effect and control what happens here, "what happens in Palestine when nothing is happening?”
Perhaps the same applies to the collection of the Van Abbemuseum, from which the Buste de Femme by Picasso is a part. What happens with a collection when nothing is happening? Is it simply a dull moment or can it show us a more authentic face?
It seems that in these moments of dullness, there is an amazing potential of showing the reason and purpose of organisations, and of showing the networks that stand at the fundaments of life. This applies whether it is the West Bank as a whole, Picasso in Palestine as a project, the museum and the academy as institutions as well, as also the motivations of everyone involved.
It took two years of preparations and discussions to get from Khaled Hourani’s wonderful idea of bringing a painting of Picasso to Ramallah to the final transport operation that took less than two days. Lot’s of time was spent waiting. We can wait a bit more until one or two states will become a reality, not speculating if any of this solutions is a good one by the way. We can wait until the Arab Spring becomes a Summer, Autumn and Winter and will blow to the West - a place that desperately needs some seasons too. We are, after this project, not too concerned about time, as the dust needs to settle to know what it has achieved or forgot to raise.
In bringing the texts and projects together for this publication it was important for A Prior to work in close collaboration with a team in Ramallah. Only together with them we can try to grasp all the sensibilities and full meanings and implications of the project and the discourse around it.
The first part of this publication focuses on how the context of occupation marks Picasso’s painting and how the journey invests Buste de Femme with a new ‘history’: Picasso in Palestine introduces new questions on the art history of objects rethinks the role of museums and reconsiders fragments of European art history in a progressive and non-linear way (Andrew Conio).
In a conversation between artist Khaled Hourani and curator and art critic Rasha Salti, the project is described at length and analysed in its multiplicity of meanings. Lynda Morris argues how Picasso's expressionist painting relates to the Spanish Civil War and as such is significant conduit to question the context of Ramallah.
But there are also pitfalls to projects like these; in a conversation with Renzo Martens, Eyal Weizman elaborates on the margins and possibilities of the journey, questioning the potentiality of art activism and the responsibility of the audience. Architect Yazid Anaani informs us on how the Picasso project was received by the people living in Ramallah and curator Galit Eilat discusses in a conversation with Artur Zimjevski (artist and curator of the 7th Berlin Biennial), at length the socio-political and cultural climate in Israël and Europe, giving us an insight on the margins of possible activism given the political situation in Israël and Palestine.
In the second part of the magazine, Khaled Hourani’s project is embedded into a broader artistic context. With his camera, Sander Buyck chaperons Picasso’s journey. The online publishing platform ArtTerritories (Ursula Biemann and Shuruq Harb) in collaboration with Nahed Awad, Ruanne Abou-Rahme, Basel Abbas and Inass, inspired by the energy of hope and anticipation in the Arab world, create a project that reflects back on moments in the 1960s and 1980s when Palestinians experienced a sense of departure, mobility and connectedness. Toleen Touq and Eric Gottesman report on their trip from southern Jordan to Istanbul along the historical Hejaz railway and other railways of the former Ottoman Empire. Along the way, they gathered personal stories and historical research about the railways, and, equally importantly, they followed the news; their trip began the day Zine al-Abedin left Tunisia for Saudi Arabia and ended the day before Hosni Mubarak fled Cairo. Author Stephen Wright researches the origins of conceptual art in the Mediterranean and artist Unni Gjertsen tells us in a most personal diary how she experienced her first visit to Jerusalem.
Finally there is one last art project included in this publication: Palestinian artist Khaled Jarrar stamped all the copies of this publication with an original State of Palestine stamp. Jarrar’s stamp does not only make each copy of A Prior a unique piece of art, in giving people the possibility of having also their passport stamped, he gives the audience a way to take it’s engagement to it’s full consequence.
Share this
Related Posts
What If Israel Attacks Iran?
By Michael Hirsh
National Journal
A barely perceptible but hugely important shif- America: Land of the Poor
Years ago, who could have imagined the appalling growing poverty level in the world’s ri
«All roads lead to Rome» how the Roman empire rules the world
My people are destroyed for a lack of knowledge…
“Your Majesty looked, and the