2023-09-22 08:30:00
– Palestinian Khaled Jarrar heals his wounds with art
Former bodyguard of Yasser Arafat, the visual artist uses multiple mediums to heal his own wounds and evoke his damaged native land.
Published today at 10:30 a.m.
Khaled Jarrar in his maze of cans at the Wilde gallery. The installation is titled “One Thousand and One Tins”.
ERIC BERGOEND/COURTESY OF THE ARTIST AND WILDE
When you push the door at Wilde, the reception is as dark as it is monumental. A rampart of printed cans has been erected at the entrance, which forces the visitor to walk in a labyrinthine manner to the back of the first exhibition room. It took 1001 empty oil jerrycans to Khaled Jarrar to raise these fortifications – as much as the number of nights Scheherazade spent trying to save his life by telling tales to the Sultan.
“The political aspect is certainly present in my work, but more as a subtext. You can read my anguish and my frustrations there, without me having to throw them in the face of the world.”
Khaled Jarrar, artist
In the gallery space, this numerous pile-up also evokes the walls and barriers which scar the Palestinian land: “Military operations, refugee camps and colonies torture the landscape,” says the artist born in 1976 in Jenin. For example, it is impossible to hike freely there. The situation there is so complex that I sometimes lose my ability to think.”
The cans are printed with a self-portrait of the artist, as he appears in the videos visible in the exhibition.
ERIC BERGOEND/COURTESY OF THE ARTIST AND WILDE
Anxieties and frustrations
Since a gunshot wound made him leave the army to enter art, the man who was Yasser Arafat’s bodyguard for eight years, between 1998 and 2006, has continued to denounce the violence inflicted on his native country – like all forms of brutality imposed on beings and territories across the planet. Sometimes using a certain radicalism: in 2015 in Geneva, he hit the headlines by firing 21 shots at paint cans placed in front of blank canvases during an opening.
No spectacular demonstration punctuated the inauguration of “All the Wounds to Close”, the exhibition currently presented on rue du Vieux-Billard. If Khaled Jarrar continues to explore the way in which state, economic and military powers are exercised on ordinary citizens, this time he uses the gentle method: “The political aspect is certainly present in my work, but more as a sub -text, he explains. You can read my anguish and my frustrations there, without me having to throw them in the face of the world. In addition to being an international language, aesthetic joy also soothes pain.”
Bra in 10 agorot coins.
ERIC BERGOEND/COURTESY OF THE ARTIST AND WILDE
In fact, the pieces presented are pleasing to the eye and you have to dig a little deeper to understand their scope. The subject is structured around two videos for which the artist filmed himself from the front on a green background, bare-chested and with a military beret screwed onto his head. Around his neck, a pair of army boots tied by their laces feels like a scarf. Or rather a bra. Because the first film replays a traumatic episode that Khaled Jarrar, then a young soldier, witnessed in 1998, against the backdrop of the endemic machismo that reigns in the Palestinian army, self-proclaimed “men factory”. .
I’m a woman
“The training sessions were hard and very aggressive,” he says. One of our comrades broke down and wanted to leave. Accusing him of crying like a woman, our superiors forced him, for three hours, to shout “I am a woman” in front of 20 recruits. Thinking about it, I really wondered how someone could put someone else’s body through such suffering.” The visual artist himself shouts these words louder and louder over the course of the eleven minutes of the video, while polishing his brand new boots, in order to point out the emptiness of the exercise. “It is also a way of claiming my part of femininity, which is very contrary to my culture.”
«One Thousand and One Tins Photograph», 2023.
ERIC BERGOEND/COURTESY OF THE ARTIST AND WILDE
Another significant element in his work are the agorot, Israeli coins. Imposed by the Jewish state on Palestinian territory, these gold undercoats are akin to a form of “coercion”, in the words of Jarrar, who collects them and makes holes in them. “Drilling these pieces was so rewarding,” smiles the forty-year-old who recently settled in New York. Holes for the two bullets, although banned from use by international law, that this sniper shot in my leg in 2002, for the disappearance of an ancestral memory, the loss of land, and the death of so many ‘friends.”
“Mask”, mask in 10 agorot coin, 2023.
ERIC BERGOEND/COURTESY OF THE ARTIST AND WILDE
From this material and historical burden, the artist creates scintillating sculptural works shot through with feminine grace. Gloves, socks, but also bra or panties, his compositions are like an ode to freedom at the heart of a system that oppresses individuals and identities. Note also that “Notes on Displacement”, the new documentary by Khaled Jarrar on the refugee problem, will be shown on November 29 at the “Palestine, to film is to exist” festival in Geneva.
“Belly Dancing Belt – Dark Blue”, oriental dance belt and 10 agorot coin, 2023.
ERIC BERGOEND/COURTESY OF THE ARTIST AND WILDE
Until November 2 at Wilde, 24, rue du Vieux-Billard. Tue-Fri 2 p.m.-6 p.m., Sat 11 a.m.-5 p.m.
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