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MAKING ROOM FOR A "STATELESS NATION"

For the first time in 60 years, the Palestinians have a presence at the Venice Biennale. Marisa Mazria Katz talks to all the players involved ...

Special to MORE INTELLIGENT LIFE

In 1947 a handful of Jewish artists living in Palestine erected a Palestinian Pavilion at the Venice Biennale. A "Palestine" flag waved in front of the simple structure, built with money raised from Italian Jews. Its presence at the Biennale was fleeting. The Palestine flag was soon traded for an Israeli one once the British Mandate expired and the State of Israel was established.

But now, over 60 years later and after quite a bit of negotiation, there is once again a Palestinian presence at the international Venice Biennale. Called "Palestine C/O Venice", this exhibition features six pieces by different artists and plenty of food for thought.

The Palestinians have never been granted a national pavilion, owing to their odd territorial status. Attempts to establish one have long been scuttled. In 2003 Francesco Bonami, the director of the Biennale at the time, announced his intention to establish a permanent Palestinian presence. This prompted heated accusations of anti-Semitism in newspapers around the world.

“I saw Venice as a platform to not only open up a discussion on Palestine, but also to see what could come out of such a proposition,” Bonami explains to me. But his proposal was mooted by right-wing Italian political groups and official stipulations that only countries recognised by Rome be allowed to participate (owing to the Biennale's state financing).

Undeterred, Bonami collaborated with two Bethlehem-based artists, Sandi Hilal and Alessandro Petti, to create "Stateless Nation" for the Biennale in 2003. This installation peppered the sprawling main Giardini exhibition centre with ten different oversized Palestinian travel documents (ie, passports and identification cards). These towering facsimiles (see above) signified both the Palestinians' dispersal throughout the world and their necessary preoccupation with identification papers (owing to travel restrictions in Israel and the territories). One of the structures was provocatively placed between the Israeli and American pavilions.

“We asked ourselves, how can we represent Palestine, which in the context of the Biennale is considered a non-state,” says Petti. “We saw these travel documents as a microcosm of Palestinians’ world through their non-belonging to the nations surrounding them.”

Hilal and Petti also have a piece in "Palestine C/O Venice", situated in a monastery 30 minutes away from the main grounds and on view until September 30th. Called "Ramallah Syndrome", the installation consists of a padded cell in which visitors sit in darkness and listen to a soundtrack. For about ten minutes, the sounds of beating hearts mix with tractor hums, and heavily accented voices proclaim in English: “We are imagining stability… sometimes I forget there is an occupation…if you just go North, South, wherever there is a checkpoint…reality says we are under occupation...we absolutely need to be one people.”

“There is a massive over-exposure of images of Palestine,” says Petti. “And because of all these images you cannot hear anything. So we decided to produce something that is more linked to the people, which is interesting, crucial, and also self-critical. We are asking those who only know the news to listen to everyday life here.”

Salwa Mikdadi, a Palestinian-American art curator, organised  "Palestine C/O Venice". She spent six years raising funds for the show, adamant that it be financed solely by Palestinians. “Could you imagine the Americans asking the South Africans for Biennale funding?” asks Mikdadi. “I felt that if money comes only from Palestinian sources it is a symbol of independence, and on top of that I wanted to make sure the whole effort was purely Palestinian.”

The show includes videos shorts, performative projects and site-specific installations. Unfortunately the art of Emily Jacir, the pavilion’s best-known artist, fell prey to a mysterious set of internal Italian politics. Despite receiving Biennale approval to create "Stazione" (pictured above), an exhibit that attached Arabic translations to each vaporetti (water taxi) stop along a specific route, the project was quashed days before the opening. The precise reasons, says Jacir, remain unknown.

None of these works directly addresses Israel. “Just because we are under the occupation does not mean we have to respond to the occupation," explains Mikdadi. "We have the right to respond to any issues.” This show aims to reveal Palestinian art as a product of perceptions and obsessions that needn't be defined (and therefore confined) by the larger conflict.

Perhaps that is why overtures made by the Israelis to Biennale director Daniel Birnbaum to facilitate an artistic dialogue with the Palestinians were overlooked.  “We felt it was great there was a Palestinian presence,” says  Doreet LeVitte Harten, the curator of the Israeli pavilion. “We wished that we could have gotten together because the art world is the place where such a dialogue can exist. But it didn’t work. It never works. Maybe it was naïve.”

Shadi Habiballah, an artist whose multi-channel video and animation work ("Ok, hit, hit but don’t run", 2009) features a bird's eye view of playful (and occasionally naughty) black-and-white figurines (pictured below), is glad the show wasn't hijacked by "dialogue". This he felt would have been distracting and unproductive. “The only reason to speak with them is because of the conflict,” he says. “It's more of a spectacle without a purpose.”

That, it seems, is precisely what Mikdadi was trying to avoid. “People may come through here and ask ‘Where is the war?’,” she says to me. “We have the right to have a life and not always respond to an Israeli situation. We are quiet artists just like anyone else.”

Picture Credits: Jawad Al Malhi "The Gas Station", 2009. Courtesy of the artist © Jawad Al Malhi.

Emily Jacir  "Stazione"  2008-2009 Public installation on Line 1 vaporetto stops. (I)  Digital photograph © Emily Jacir 2009 Courtesy: Emily Jacir

 (Marisa Mazria-Katz is a writer based in New York. She has contributed to the New York Times, Washington Post, Financial Times and Time International.)