T he dead invade the space of the living and the living the space of the dead.”
This is how Reem Gibriel, a Libyan-American artist living in the United States, describes her contribution to the Visiting Gaza Exhibition currently held at Rawabet Space for Performing Arts which opened on Sunday.
Upon entering the art space, your eyes meet Hazem Harb’s “Empty Spaces and Erosion Factors”, a photo collection in black and brown with a texture of surrealistic paintings.
The highlight of the show is Gibriel’s installation piece, “The Samounies of Gaza.” The piece — a collection of cutouts of flimsy, black construction — is comprised of 29 figures, including two babies coddled in the arms of two of the cut-outs. These 29 figures represent the Samouni family whose members were all killed on the same day in the 2009 war on Gaza.
Gibriel told Daily News Egypt that experiencing the war while living in the west is different. When the Gaza war erupted in 2008, she realized that many of the people around her were “shut-off from what was happening in there.” Her initial response was that “you can’t be shut-off when bombs are being made in your country.”
Gibriel, at the time, embarked on a search of how many children were killed in the war in order to find a way to memorialize their deaths.
However, she explains, this made her stop and mull over her reasoning, “Does this mean it is okay to kill older people?” At that point, she decided to focus on the tragic death of members of the Samouni family, representing both the young and the old.
Gibriel, who knows the names of every member of the family, gradually formed a personal connection with the Samounis. Her choice of delicate paper was deliberate; a means to represent the “fragile void and shaky presence” the family had left. As for the color black, she said it gives an ambiguous sense of “approachability yet not being approachable at the same time.” All figures are facing forward, with an unmistakable ghostly air surrounding the piece. “I wanted them to invade us,” she explained, “to make us feel uncomfortable so that we don’t forget.”
In the written description accompanying her piece, she states that her “aim is to give the living a chance to speak of the dead, and to spur them to interrogate their conduct in the presence of the dead.”
The opening night also featured a screening of “Gaza Winter,” a collection of 13 short films produced by “Pomegranates and Myrrh” director, Najwa Najjar.
“Gaza Winter” was conceived as a reaction to the Israeli offensive on Gaza which left 1,417 Palestinians dead and over 50,800 displaced. The project came to life when the Ramallah-based Najjar and other local filmmakers started sending an announcement on social networking site Facebook, asking other directors from around the world to submit a short work that captures their conception of Gaza. The resulting works come from Gaza, the West Bank, the Golan Heights, Jordan, England, France, Spain and Iceland.
Not all the films are accomplished, and some work better than others. A few are somewhat amateurish and ill-conceived, but the majority of the films are tremendously imaginative and deeply poignant, offering diverse impressions of Gaza that range from the poetic to the shocking. Among the notable segments of the documentary is Fahad Jabali’s “Far Away War” from Iceland. The film centers on a regular day in the life of an Icelandic family juxtaposed with life in Gaza realized through images superimposed on the walls of schools, car windows, and a variety of other surfaces, comparing how the same activities vary in both environments.
Another impressionable moment takes place in Ismail Habash’s “Midday Phone Call” when an answering machine accepts a call from someone saying, “We want to shell your house, you have 10 minutes to evacuate. Thank you.”
Suheir Hammad’s poem “When I Stretch Forth Mine Hand” is evocatively recited in the UK-based Omar Hamilton’s film of the same name. Hammad’s verses punctuate footage from Gaza as a voice over delivers lines from the poem telling of “the casting of lead upon children.”
A long table offering some tasty Palestinian dishes in their “Resistaurant,” a laptop projecting Gaza War photography, and a desk with a friendly volunteer ready to tell you about tourist attractions in Gaza, wrapped up the opening of the Visit Gaza exhibition.
And as Mohammed Abdallah, the Culture Resource’s program manager, explains in their pamphlet, “Visit Gaza is an invitation to forget, for 10 days, that Gaza is still distant from Cairo.”
“Visit Gaza” runs in Rawabet Theater till May 21. Address: 3 Hussein El Meamar St. Downtown, Cairo. Tel: 012 390 3834, 010 553 7188. Open daily from 11:00 am to 10:00 pm
