Art Under Fire: Bantry exhibition shows work of Palestinian artists

Mon, 18 Nov, 2024 - 21:30

Kate Demolder

To be a Palestinian in the diaspora today is to miss one’s home, one's family members left behind, and to simultaneously enjoy the privilege of distance while also mourn for a place that’s being hurt. It, too, is to possess a luxury that is missing from the land itself: that of choice.

A new exhibition set in Bantry, Co Cork, attempts to depict what this tension does to a person, with work full of sharp contrasts –– sorrow, light; the past, the present ––reminding the viewer of the ongoing nature of Palestinian activism, and indeed that it wasn’t always like this.

The result is Art Under Fire, an exhibition organised in partnership with the Palestine Museum US, a building located a short drive from Yale University in Woodbridge, Connecticut. Founded in 2018 by Faisal Saleh, a Palestinian businessman who left the West Bank for Pennsylvania at 17, the museum’s mission is to “tell a Palestinian story to a global audience.”

Saleh’s family were originally displaced in the aftermath of the establishment of the state of Israel in 1948, an event Palestinians refer to as the ‘Nakba’ (catastrophe). “In 2018 the Western Hemisphere did not have a single museum dedicated to Palestinian art, so it was significant that Palestinians had a voice in this part of the world, particularly as it’s a place where mainstream media seems to be unsympathetic to Palestine and Palestinians,” says Saleh.

One of of the pieces from Art Under Fire, a Palestinian art exhibition currently in Bantry.

The free exhibition currently on at Marino Church, comprised of 14 canvasses, four watercolours and over 30 prints, came together from the museum’s own collection which began touring earlier this year. “Since October 2023, you can’t get anything out of Gaza,” Saleh says. “We have held onto what we have, while also making prints of originals, to ensure they wouldn’t be completely destroyed.”

Also shown at the Venice Biennale and at the P21 Gallery in London earlier this year, the works are in the West Cork town thanks to a collaboration with the Bantry group for Palestine and the Cork Palestine Solidarity Campaign.

One such artist shown is Mira Shihadeh, a Cairo-based Palestinian painter who has been struggling with creating amid the Israeli onslaught. Shihadeh who has relatives in the West Bank, makes work centered around the conflict to provoke thought. “This travelling exhibition is very important to me. I’m not painting something to hang it in someone’s living room. I want non-supporters to feel uncomfortable,” she says.

Dr Khalil Khalidy, who is a doctor living and working in Gaza, also has work in the exhibition. “Art is my escape,” he says. “Because words fail us sometimes. Here in Gaza, it has been a challenge to get art supplies we’ve had to be resourceful; people are using the ashes of burnt homes as charcoal, and I have used blood as paint.

"The importance of art is that it has no boundaries, it cannot be censored. It’s a universal language that transmits feelings directly with other humans, not only limited by culture and language. It also shows that there are many versions of the story, and can convey so much hidden behind the lines and beneath the brushstrokes. I encourage people to look into those details as much as they can.”

Of the paintings and prints in the exhibition, many contain reminders of war, but they are often in the background, and the pieces seem intentionally serene. To Palestinians, many details may bring up nostalgia: close-ups of fresh prickly pears, hazy terracotta landscapes and women dressed in embroidery breaking the fourth wall.

Yet alongside this familiarity is the dispiriting realisation that such images are not seen in the news, which tends to instead favour showing Palestinians with war in the foreground, reducing them to their trauma. This, Salah insists, is the reason for an exhibition like this to be made.

“We want people to understand who Palestinians are,” he says. “What are they like, and that they are human beings just like everybody else. You know, we have artists like everybody else. We'd like people to gain an appreciation for that and kind of understand the people behind that art. Basically, we just want the world to know that we are human beings, and we are not to be trampled on and killed without consequence. And that's what's happening now.”