Umm El-Fahem Art Gallery

The gallery's main goal is to be a home for Arab artists and Art and to create a meeting point for a meaningful dialogue between cultures

800 Years to Umm el-Fahem Art Festival – “Location/Home” Exhibition

 

19.5.2012   -   20.7.2012

 

Curator: Yael Argov Hacmun       

Assistant Curator: Adham Gbareen

Participating artists: Lea Avital, Liat Elbling, Anisa Ashkar, Oren Ben Moreh, Huda Jamal, Sharon Glazberg,  Hinda Weiss, Nirit Zer, Raafat Hattab, Shadi Yasin, Buthina Milhem, Avraham Ben Hur Palgi, Lialy Khawesh, Nimrod Reuveni, Ayelet Kestler, Assa Bigger and EIiya Beany.

Anisa Ashkar, Come to Visit, 2010

On the occasion of the 800 Years to Umm el-Fahem Art Festival, we invited both local artists and artists from all over the country to be guests in various locations and homes around the city to exhibit their works of art.  The exhibition “Location/Home” raises questions about belonging and estrangement, local boundaries and rules, hospitality and invitation, and seeks to examine the interaction between the hosts and their guests in the various locations of the exhibition in Umm el-Fahem.

The exhibition is not being held in a traditional museum display area; it is space-dependant art that seeks to enter a strange home, observe and become familiar with it.   

We examined the unique conditions of every location, those that enabled us to bring in and display works of art that produced a dialogue with the place. The connection that was created between the works of various artists in each location, as well as the accumulative connection from among all the sites together raises issues and different perspectives about home and environment. The works of art are engaged on different levels of the term “home”. Through their biographical experiences, the artists attempt to formulate or create a new, non-associative place or engage in more symbolic imagery.  The works act in the gap between past and present, reality and imagination. Sometimes they evoke nostalgia, yet at the same time attempt to abandon it; others are loaded with the tensions between the concepts of identity, belonging and alienation. The exhibition places these different perspectives in a location which is not their natural environment, but rather the home/location of someone else. 

As part of the preparations for this exhibition, the Umm el-Fahem Art Gallery redecorated two old houses in the city and converted them into alternative show rooms. In addition the homes of two families, The Khawesh family and the home of artist Fouad Agbaria, host various artists to exhibit in their rooms. The “Al Basha” coffee factory was as well temporarily converted into display area. The home of Abu Ayed, on the border with MeiAmi will be a fascinating lookout spot on the city and a display in the open. 

            

The exhibition “Location /Home” asks the viewer to stroll through and “get familiar with” the various sites. This wandering route invites contact, acquaintance, study and hospitality. The people of Umm el-Fahem open their homes and businesses to the visitors of the exhibition. This meeting will re-enact how the curators and artists worked leading up to the exhibition (and as such the visitor will re-enact the act of creation itself). This is art that has been created out of the desire to host and be hosted. Simply come and meet.

The exhibition "Location /Home will be open for the public every Saturday from May 19 until the beginning of the Ramadan month, on July 20th

The gallery will provide minivans for visitors of the e exhibition.

The tour cost is 20 NIS.

For further information please contact Umm el-Fahem Art Gallery:  04-6315257

The exhibition is accompanied by a map that details all the sites and views. 

 

Between Vision and Reality

Between Vision and Reality

By Said Abu Shakra, Director of the gallery and the creator of the concept of future Umm el-Fahem Museum of Contemporary Art

 

The city of Umm el-Fahem, an Arab city in Israel, lies on the slope of Mt. Iskander and the adjacent hills, overlooking the important historical route that once connected large and distant regions of a war-torn land. Many people and various cultures wound their way along the Wadi at the foot of the mountain, thus making it a pivotal crossroads and a major link in the development and future of the entire region.
Fifty thousand people reside in this now fast-growing community, destined to become a central cultural meeting place for the large, dense concentration of Arab population in the Wadi’s surroundings by virtue of its location and unique qualities. For centuries the local residents have cultivated the land that became the source of their dignity, pride and livelihood. This persistent connection with the land has given rise to a diverse and fascinating culture encompassing fashion, poetry, pottery and building, as well as various customs and traditions.
The war that broke out tore the rich, delicate cultural fabric. In its wake, the large settlement became a place of gloomy corners and dark alleys. Families were scattered, leaving years of hard work and a devastated culture behind. The once rich and sprawling town was now poor and struggling to survive. Its residents were no longer masters of their own faith; they became persecuted refugees. Poverty, unemployment, and an identity crisis brought about one of the worst battles for survival the city has ever had to face. Under difficult social and political circumstances the community forged ahead with a clear message of protest, becoming the vanguard of the entire Arab population in Israel.
It was into this harsh and complex reality that the Umm el-Fahem Art Gallery was born. Within a short period of time it became a center of culture and activity for the whole region. A sense of commitment to the past as well as to the future of the place motivates the people who continue steadfastly and lovingly to operate the Gallery. The mission is clear. Whatever was destroyed by the war should be rebuilt. This should be done at once, without compromise, and with a great effort. We realize that it is our heavy and long-term responsibility to rebuild, collect, study, commemorate and present all we can pertaining to the Arab and Palestinian culture that was crushed. The output of this work will be incorporated into a large building, the first ever Arab museum to provide a bridge between past, present and future, a home to a vision that will reinstate people with happiness, pride, and a sense of belonging.
The idea to establish a museum was born in a vast and anguished void, a devastating lack of professional staff, of resources and infrastructure. The Gallery started operating out of a sense of awareness and responsibility for the future, aiming to pave a new way in a new direction. The means are meager and the road is long and arduous. With only the existing means we have embarked on several different activities. Artists, curators and other professionals from different countries and cultures have been invited to take part in this joint collaboration. The Gallery has become an important social and cultural meeting place. The creative workshops, seminars, gallery talks, symposiums, the many art exhibitions and unique display spaces have turned it into a central place in the local and international culture scene.
The Gallery is now on its way to becoming the first Arab museum of contemporary art in Israel. This museum will be an inviting, embracing and enriching place, capable of bridging gaps and connecting different cultures that live side by side in the heart of a troubled, war weary region. We shall strive to raise a generation steadfastly true to its culture and identity, a generation that will take responsibility for its life and its future; a generation of proud and deep-rooted young people, committed to reclaiming the wilderness and to pursuing peace.

800 Years to Umm el-Fahem Art Festival – “Memory and Immigration” Exhibition

 

Curator: Dr. Esmail Nashif

Opening: Saturday, 19 May, 2012 at 11:00 At the Umm el-Fahem Art Gallery

The exhibition "Memory and Immigration" addresses anew the central issue of the Palestinian society today: the coping with the tragedy of 1948, and its consequences on the life of the society since then. The uniqueness of the exhibition is in that that it explores the subject of visualizing memory and immigration through juxtaposing two different layers. The first layer is the current deep changes that engulf the Palestinian society as part of the changes in the Arab World. The second layer is the developments in the technological tools that enable the registering and the storing of different aspects of the past events related to the Palestinian tragedy, such as documentations, photos, films. The juxtaposing of these two layers seems to shed light on the deep processes of re ordering the Palestinian socio-visual field. It seems that the previous socio-political order, mainly based on national grounds, is destabilized. The exhibition is based on the understanding that a new visual language is being shaped by these new inter-junctions of socio-technological nature. The new visual langue sees to push for more freedom for the artistic domain in treating the issues of memory and immigration that the political discourse had a monopoly on the manner of addressing them. The exhibition tries to register the aspects of these changes of the Palestinian visual filed and the manner of expressing them in the artistic field.

                In order to try and cover most of these aspects of change a wide range of artists were chosen to participate: five Palestinians artists, one Tunisian-French artist, and one American artist. All of them though, address the issue of the processes of re-visualizing memory and immigration on the documentary as well as on the artistic levels. The artists are: Osama Said, Zohdi Qadri, Mohamad Fadel, Anisa Ashqar, Mohand Yaqubi, Ismail Bahri, and Fazal Sheikh. Osma Said's work is four paintings from last year in which he visually explicates the moment right after the tragedy. It is the moment of constituting the victim as such. Zohadi Qadri brings his paintings from various periods that address the body and materiality of the work itself. By these interventions he seems to ask about the body and materiality of the Palestinian tragedy and the manner of their behavior. Mohamad Fadel exubits three paintings from his recent series Honey (2011), in which he visualizes the unbridgeable gap between the reality of refugee-hood and its utopias . In these paintings we find that the honey-like color environment is in sharp contrast with the weapons and the militaristic figures who hover in them. Anisa Ashqar's video "Save the date: Afternoon" (2011) takes us for a walk in the remnants of the Palestinian city. She exits Haifa Musuem buildings and roams the alleys of Wadi Nisnas as if looking for her lost city only to fail to find it. She closes the roaming by going back to the museum. Mohand Yaqubi's video "The Bridge" (2012) reconstructs the story of the Palestinian exodus via Allenby's Bridge in 1967. He took different scenes from seven films on the Palestinian tragedy, and used them to rebuild the exodus un a very slow motion tempo. By this intervention, the viewer is obliged, in sense, to cross the bridge again with the Palestinian refugees. Ismail Bahri's Orientation (2010) is a video that documents the artist filming his walk around Tunisia with a glass full of ink. Each two to three minutes the artist stops and puts the glass on the ground the camera zooms in the image reflected on the surface of the ink. We see ephemeral images of the up-side-down Tunisia. The Arab post colonial city is a kind of a future mirror in which the lost Palestinian city could be seen and inspected. The photographic work of Fazal Sheikh Erasure (2012) focuses on collecting and registering the traces of the displaced Palestinian communities in general. In this exhibition, he introduces the part related to Umm el Fahem communities. The portraits, the old family photos, and the abandoned house are the traces of a lost community that Fazal register anew to tell the story of erasing the whole communal life in 1948.

                The different artworks of the exhibition examine the object memory and immigration by using a visual metaphor based on two principles. The first is that of the walking and roaming in the ways of return, as with the works of Anisa Mohand and Ismail. The second principle is the weight of the body of the tragedy of 1948, as with the works of Osama Fazal Zohadi and Mohamad. It seems that the interrelations between the heavy weight of the body of the tragedy and the walking in the ways of immigration/return will continue to organize the manners through which the Palestinian view themselves and are viewed by others.

Curator: Esmail Nashif. 

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