Global Arab Network | Presence and Impressions - Rula Halawani’s first solo exhibition at Selma Feriani Gallery

Translate this article to your language:

GANPublications

e-Publications

Service Menu

Add Site to Favorites

Add Page to Favorites

Make Homepage

Share This Page

Presence and Impressions - Rula Halawani’s first solo exhibition at Selma Feriani Gallery

Edited by Hannan Taha

Friday, 27 November 2009 19:21

Rula_Halawani_exhibition_in_London_Presence_and_Impressions

Rula Halawani’s first solo exhibition in London Presence and Impressions, offers a compelling insight into the complex photographic world of the artist, and a moving insight into the transformation of the Palestinian landscape. Born and raised a Palestinian on the West Bank of the Jordan river, Rula lives through the changes to the Palestinian lives and landscapes that she chronicles. Amidst a nation under occupation, her photography acts as a personal survival mechanism, a way of preserving Palestine and her own sense of identity.

Presence and Impressions is Rula’s latest series of photographs, continuing to document the daily reality of the ever-transforming lives of Palestinians in the face of Israeli occupation. Made up of 9 diptychs, the work from this new series features nine Palestinian villages depopulated during the 1948 Nakba. Viewed in pairs, Rula has chosen an image of the thriving settlements prior to the exodus of its inhabitants, and matched it with her own contemporary black and white photograph of the same location as it is found today. Carefully chosen from historical image archives, each of her selected Palestinian towns are viewed as settled agricultural landscapes with numerous public places and homes prior to 1948.

Rula’s matching black and white image of each of the villages as they appear today, destroyed, barren and uninhabited; provokes a highly visceral response, matched by Rula’s own emotional investment in the series, which had always haunted her work: ‘For years I have been thinking about doing a project on these abandoned and destroyed villages.

Thinking about it is not the right word, I tried to forget it, I did other things, but it was like this idea kept insisting itself upon me, refusing to let me abandon it.’ These works capture the slight vestiges of what were clearly once bustling and thriving communities. They reveal that there is nothing left but mere impressions of the presence of these Palestinian villages today.

Presence and Impressions closely echoes a previous series of Rula’s works entitled Lifta. The Lifta photographs depict the cavernous interiors of the abandoned homes of the depopulated Palestinian village of Lifta, which despite dilapidation, collapse and ruin, still contain relics of their absent inhabitants. Similarly, Presence and impressions also portrays the remnants of deserted and demolished villages, but with a macro perspective illustrating the wider scale of the effects of depopulation.

This series succeeds in starkly portraying the true nature of the Palestinian transformation as the dislocation and erasure of a community and a culture. Using the landscape as her muse, Rula’s work rarely requires the human form. Her photography creates a poignancy and narrative which has significance beyond the image surface.

Rula Halawani trained originally as a photojournalist and worked as a freelance photographer. Her subjective involvement in the Palestinian-Israeli conflict led her to abandon this work, questioning its authenticity and value in the media domain.

Working as an artist since 1988, she has exhibited at prominent arts and culture institutions worldwide including the Arab Word Institute in Paris and the Khalid Shoman Foundation in Jordan. Rula’s artwork is now also part of the British Museum and the V&A Museum’s permanent collection. Rula is currently the founder and director of the photography unit at Birzeit University. She lives and works in East Jerusalem’s Mount of Olives neighbourhood.

Presence and Impressions was put together with access to and support of the following archival institutions: École Biblique (EBAF) in Jerusalem, the Institute for Palestine Studies (IPS), in Beirut and The Matson Collection. The project was funded by the Arab Fund for Arts and Culture (AFAC). Each diptych within the series is an edition of 5, archival artistic inkjet print on Hahnemuhle paper.

Presence and Impressions can be viewed at Selma Feriani Gallery from 14 January – 27 February 2010.

Global Arab Network