A metaphor for dispossession that works.

Byline: Jim Quilty

Summary: It's not hard to approach a show called "Return of the Soul" with some skepticism. The world-weary will be rewarded when they glance over the profile of this exhibition, presently up on the main stage of Tayyouneh's Dawar al-SHAM's cultural center. The "souls" in question are Palestinian.

Review

BEIRUT: It's not hard to approach a show called "Return of the Soul" with some skepticism. The world-weary will be rewarded when they glance over the profile of this exhibition, presently up on the main stage of Tayyouneh's Dawar al-SHAM's cultural center.

The "souls" in question are Palestinian. The destination to which they are meant to "return" is Palestine. The exhibition, as the copious program notes explain, was first mounted in Palestine and its world tour will halt there, in order to insure and emphasize the Palestinians' natural right to return.

You don't have to be a committed Zionist to be leery of this sort of thing.

Over the years, the commodification of "Palestine" and "the Palestinians" has made it a great commercial asset for some, artists and non-artists alike, while doing little to relieve the predicament of the Palestinians themselves.

"Return of the Soul" is a multimedia installation work devised by Scottish artist Jane Frere. As it is configured at Dawar al-SHAMS, the work is comprised of the central installation and five ancillary videos. Two of them greet spectators before they enter the exhibition, while the other three are lodged behind the central exhibit, in the backstage guts of the theater.

The central installation is comprised of 3,200 wax figurines, as you are informed by the program notes, each of approximately human shape, ranging from yellow-brown to off-white in color, each hanging from a length of nylon line.

Regarding the work from the front, the impression is one of a wave of humanity descending a naturally terraced hillside. Closest to the ground, the leading figures are the largest, while the stragglers up in the rafters are the smallest.

For anyone walking into this show it likely will be obvious that the work represents the displacement of the Nakba itself - indeed the program notes inform spectators that the figurines represent the displacements that began in 1948 and have ramified over the subsequent 60 years.

The installation's principal conceit lies in the artist's finding a strong metaphor for the condition it represents - the state of suspension experienced by the stateless - and the dissonance between the representation and expectation provoked by her deployment of the metaphor.

The ordered height from which Frere's rows of figurines hang creates the impression that they are solidly grounded. This illusory basis is "suspended," literally and figuratively, by the lengths of fishing line that bears them.

Consequently the figures move, as if the crowd were milling. On the air-conditioned stage of Dawar al-SHAMS, individual figures perpetually cast about, as if trying to decide whether to turn left or right, like a character in a Beckett play.

Given this piece's title, it wouldn't be difficult to cast an other-worldly interpretation upon it - as though it were suggesting that the people represented by these figurines are heaven-bound. Frere has avoided this reading by having all her figurines looking resolutely forward and downward, at the earth and their spectators.

Frere has said the metaphor of "suspension" that's at the heart of her piece was inspired by Tahani Rached's 2004 documentary "Soraida, a Woman of Palestine." In one scene, a character named Umm Ali recounts a dream she had the night before, in which she saw hundreds of Palestinians hung from laundry lines, like clothes being hung out to dry.

The figurines themselves approximate the human form - in her notes the artist discusses how her theater experience led her to the idea of working with wax figurines - but there is no pretence of naturalism. As the devisors of Madam Tousseau's and all of her numerous wax museum emulators testify, though, the medium has long been press-ganged into human representation.

If the effect is aesthetically pleasing here, it derives from the piece's sacrificing individual to group verisimilitude. This may well resonate with Palestinians whose individual identities have been subsumed by their stateless status - indeed for Lebanese whose individual identities have been submerged within that of sect and/or clan.

Frere is sensitive to her position as a foreign artist taking up the subject of the Nakba - making art from someone else's misery. As she takes pains to underline in her extensive notes, the work hangs at the end of a process that is part research, part humanitarian project, involving the artist, a number of Palestinian cultural organizations in Palestine, Jordan and Lebanon and the residents of Palestinian refugee camps in all three countries.

In fact, Palestinian refugees themselves did much of the work. The wax figurines are the product of a two-year-long workshop program involving Palestinian artists and non-artists living in refugee camps in Palestine, Jordan and Lebanon.

"The primary aim of the artwork," Frere said during the Edinburgh exhibition of the show, "is to give voice to those it represents and to create an awareness of the injustice of displacement in a non-didactic, non-political way through artistic expression taking both a humanitarian and spiritual approach ...

"It is the journey that the artist takes to arrive at a final 'product' or artwork that interests me most - the brief encounters along the way that are then [poured] over like bits and pieces gathered on a walk, investigated, discarded, maybe used."

Some of the ancillary videos surrounding the central work either issue directly from Frere's work in the camps or else document it.

The first of the five - an emotional-critical response to the Edinburgh incarnation of the show from Ghada Karmi, herself a Palestinian of the diaspora - serves as an introduction. The second shows images of the workshop process in the Palestinian camps where the wax figurines were made.

Backstage, the third and fourth videos document the Nakba itself. One of these is a handwritten list of persons displaced during the Catastrophe. The next projects the faces of the displaced, interspersed with photos of their documentation as residents of Palestine.

The final video is a soundscape comprised of testimonials from Nakba survivors, gathered by Frere's collaborators. The voices play against the ever-shifting video image of wax figurines suspended in fluid into which ink is released, diffusing the way smoke would diffuse through the air.

"Return of the Soul" is an interesting, at times affecting, artifact of the process that can grow from one artist's passion.

Jane Frere's installation "Return of the Soul" is up on the main stage of the Sunflower Cultural Center, Dawar al-SHAMS, in Tayyouneh, until October 3. For more information call [phone]

Copyright 2008, The Daily Star. All rights reserved.

Provided by Syndigate.info an Albawaba.com company