Fahed Halabi

2010-08-28T06:49:00.000-07:00

Condescending View
An exhibition by Fahd Halabi
Fateh al-Muddaris Center for Arts, Majdal Shams, Occupied Golan Heights, 23 July – 15 August, 2010

“Condescending view” is a term for the dialectical relation between art and life; it implies a critical attitude towards art and its condescending approach to life. The exhibition reflects this critical attitude in a visual form through focus on the relationship between the construction work site and the artist’s studio: the worker who counts hours in order to make a living and the artist who examines this complex relationship. The exhibition is a consciousness attempt at solidarity with the self in the first place; it is also an examination of emotional and psychological situations in their social and political dimensions. Through it a series of questions arise pertaining to art, its identity and role in the society, as inseparable dimension of life.
The exhibition contains scenes that look at first as absurd, passing, and secondary—scenes from empty times in spaces that are filled with rubbish, mixed with sweat and blood. It is a visual commemoration of selected memories and photographs taken over several years.
It is an attempt to capture the aesthetic dimension of a situation devoid of beauty, to talk about status and economic and political backgrounds in our society, which is linked to the colonial state asymmetrically, in a relationship that can be approached—bluntly put—as a master-slave relationship, despite its accord with the contemporary rule of market.
“Condescending View” tries to capture this relationship in a series of realistic paintings, in a two-dimensional, unbiased, and “beautiful” way without emotional outbursts in the style of painting and without including the human as primary invoker of emotional solidarity. The scenes appear as independent of the human being who created them, capable of self-representation, as an attempt to equate the value and the nature of the work in both the studio and the construction site.
The three videos included are based in their photography and editing on the logic of the documentary. They share the above elements and concerns, in addition to an attempt to raise further questions about the issue of identity in all its conceptions, and about the sexual dimension of the conflict imposed on us, as well as of any conflict between two nations or cultures.

To you with love

2009-12-05T13:43:00.000-08:00

A Portrait of the Artist as a Kitchen Worker

2009-12-05T13:25:00.000-08:00

The good-hearted gesture and optimism apparent in Fahed Halabi’s drawings,
like their seeming naiveté, recreate the protocol for unequal relations between
Arabs and Jews in the country.
In the guest book placed at Fahed Halabi’s solo exhibit, “Yalla Bye,” at the Midrasha,
friends and acquaintances wrote their impressions of the exhibit. When I visited, I took
the book and browsed through it. Some of the messages were in Arabic, a language that
I don’t understand. Those who wrote in Hebrew, among them poet Aharon Shabtai, were
unanimous in their praise, some of it for Halabi’s lovely solo exhibit: They ranged from
“a powerful, direct exhibit” to “brave” and “real.” The superlatives poet and journalist
Chicky Arad posted on his blog regarding the exhibit seem to belong to the same genre:
“Beyond the political aspect of the exhibit’s contents, what is interesting about it is
seeing an artist driven to create when everything is going against it, whose paintings are
really a crime that he commits with every brush stroke. It is more interesting than seeing
an exhibit by a girl whose rich parents sent her to study at Betzalel or the Midrashsa,
who sees herself as an artist…” It is so easy to once again label the Arab with the direct,
real and authentic stereotypes – and how ironic, as the exhibit deals with these stereotypes,
however indirectly, ironically and not free of pain. This is nothing if not symptomatic
of the Tel Aviv audience, satiated of emotions, running to crown an Arab artist, the
“Other,” and along the way missing his entire point.
There is no doubt that Halabi is a hit, at least now, in the summer of 2008. One of the
paintings featured in the exhibit, a flattering and intentionally naïve portrait of [former
Arab parliament member] Azmi Bishara, was featured on the cover of Ma’ayan magazine
issued this year (Arad is one of the magazine’s editors). Bishara’s portrait is featured
between those of two female Israeli parliament members, Limor Livnat and Tzipi Livni.
The colors are alive and flat, and the format is surprisingly large. Halabi maintained
Livnat’s facial features (her single dimple), but gave her authenticity and a deep look
that she must certainly wish that she had. He almost turned Livni into a sex kitten in a
suit, a beauty whose lips emote a sensual purr. The three paintings are part of a larger
series of flattering female Israeli parliament members, flattering almost to the point of
addiction. One can recognize in them, alongside naïve and professional painting, including
a curvy signature “Arab Work,” flattery and the need we feel to heap gifts on our Arabs,
the Israeli Arabs, like knafeh, on the house.
“Knafeh” is the name of another painting in the exhibit – a portrait of the artist as a
kitchen worker. The painting is realistic, large, and oddly optimistic. It should be viewed
in the context of two additional paintings in a similar format: In one an image of a man
walking on his hands and in the other a caricature of an Arab in a keffiyah, with his back
to us, looking at us over his shoulder, taking off his galabiyeh to expose his backside
and penis. So who is the Arab? The restaurant worker out of our sight, an erotic fantasy,
or a man whose ethnic identity forces him to juggle opposing, stereotypical identities?
At the very least, this threesome is meant to cancel out the direct hypothesis mistakenly
attributed to the artist.
Two video projects made by simple means (a style so embraced by the curator, Doron
Robina), accentuate the complicated message put forth by Halabi’s work. One was shot
by a video camera placed on a shelf in a restaurant where he works. We see Halabi and
another cook chatting while working, as Mizrahi versions of Purim songs blare in the
background. Halabi asks his Arab friend, who is busy preparing stuffed peppers, why
his name is Yehuda. The absolute assembly motif is repeated in the other video project,
in which the artist is seen placing phylacteries outside the central bus station in Tel Aviv,
instructed by a red-faced Ashkenazi Yeshiva student. In this instance as well, loud music
is playing and the south Tel Aviv noise increases the absurdity of the situation.

Fahed Halabi. Yalla Bye. The Midrasha.
Appeared in“Achbar Ha’ir” July 24-31, 2008.
Writen by Hemda Rosenbaum

"My Little Clown"

2009-12-05T09:34:00.000-08:00

Fahed Halabi's video installation - the first that deals with the "kitchen staff" - succeeds in confusing the
concepts of name, identity, impersonating and ideology in a fascinating way and reflects something new
about being an Arab artist.
Within the framework of his first solo exhibit, which includes drawings, paintings and two video installations,
the video project entitled "Yudah" stands out. It's a seemingly simple project, of an inconsequential recorded
scene, full of charm - a documentation of the almost archaic type. An video camera records a minor situation
- the kitchen staff in some restaurant, preparing food. The camera is on a refrigerator or cabinet, up above,
creating the image of a security camera. Plastic boxes are taken out of the refrigerator, onions are chopped,
a pot is set and peppers are stuffed. Halabi himself moves forward and backwards in the narrow area between
where they are preparing the food and the stove, bandages his lightly wounded fingers and annoys Yudah
with innocent questions. Why is he called Yudah. Is that his name on his identification card as well? Yudah
answers that this is the name his father gave him, but evades answering about the identification card, staying
silent. And then the radio plays Oriental dance-style Purim songs - "Let's Make Noise" and "My Little
Clown." Halabi sings along with the radio. That's about it.
One of the most moving things about the project is that it has no precedent, in the sense that an Arab artist
has never created a work of art dealing with his Arab identity from the perspective of his place in his socioeconomic
hierarchy in the political field. There are definitely works of art against the occupation. There are
projects that deal with searching and consolidating identity. There are projects that incorporate Islamic motifs,
interweaving East and West. There are those that use intensified metaphors and protest symbolism. There
are also general works of defiance on the "Arab situation" or on "Being an Arab in a Jewish Society." And
obviously there are projects that don't deal with these issues, but try to align with some sort of imagined
universal quality. It is interesting to consider why prominent Arab artists don't deal with, what Althusser
coined, their own depressing-exploitative conditions for creativity. Ideology is imagined, a "pure dream,
empty and vain, constituted by the ‘day’s residues’ from the only full and positive reality, that of the concrete
history of concrete material individuals materially producing their existence,” Althusser writes. Maybe the
Arab artists (and I'm thinking about Abu Shakra, Nubani, Azi, Boya and mabe even Sharif Waked) tend to
repress how hard it is to be an Arab artist not in the metaphysical sense of the term, but rather in terms of
communicating from far away about passing, as an imagined relation regarding the power of production.
Maybe that is why the critical among them talk about the "Arab image" and not about themselves. Their
work is easily sorted as "progressive" from the realm of Arabness towards the art realm. Therefore they
confirm that the realms are different and ratify the objects of discussion as different from one another.
Halabi's work demonstrates a concrete narrative about his shift work in kitchens, one of the last sectors not
yet completely overtaken from Arabs by foreign workers. The main precedent that comes to mind is that
Halabi doesn't transgress for a moment from the labeling of "being an Arab" through a specific, joint nature,
an imminent or mythical characteristic, not even through a unifying ideology. The Arabness is characterized,
separated and defined not through a shared worldview, language, habits and beliefs, but through the joint
history of being sentenced to work in kitchens. In this way he presents a political model that disallows
interpretation in terms of nation, race, religion or ethnicity alone, without linking them to considering
economic majority-minority relations or a nation of masters and their apartheid counterparts. Halabi creates
a new theoretical object - the Tel Aviv Arab. Hebrew poetry is familiar with him, as is the theater, and even
the television has held him closely recently. In art, though, it seems that since Reuven Rubin and Nachum
Guttman, he's been somewhat forgotten.
Precisely because the video displays the internal heterogeneity of the term "Arab," it succeeds in creating
the presence of injustice, even in a manner filled with faint, Jewish, black humor. Before our very eyes,
Yudah, who acts Jewish, becomes Yudah, who passes, who collaborates. Halabi, pampering himself with
the bandaids, is construed not only as the one at the height of learning to be an "Arab kitchen worker" who
can't do Arab work properly, but as a type of Class B Jesus, whose injuries are minor, and dealing with them
is more cosmetic than medical or hysterical, as someone impersonating a kitchen worker for modern art,
as someone who enjoys the hidden authorization (and gleefully hums "noise noise noise" after the line "let's
make some noise"). The seemingly simple conversation, about the name and the simple response, seemingly
about the father, creates in me, in a surprisingly absurd way, a debate on the name of the father, on the gap
between the name and identity, on ideology that doesn't miss its target and on these imagined relations.
In addition, the pepper filling with rice can't erase the wet eroticism of the action, from the comparison
between the metaphorical fuck and the various cooking shows prevalent here, which have castrated any
erotic sense from food and its preparation in favor of the eroticism of competition (between chefs, between
the number of calories in each dish, etc.). In this respect, we are destined to look with a colonialist view at
kitchen work, as lords peering at the amazing ability of the slave to take bread from the earth, free of magic
and speed, the lazy ability like the Levant itself, taking its time, like foreplay. The rubber gloves on Yudah's
hands turn the act into a form of safe sex, in a sense that they make him look like an impressionist girl
covered in gloves, a sort of Queen Esther.
Fahed Halabi's exhibit, Yallah Bye, is at the Midrasha Gallery, Dizengoff 34.

Appeared in Time Out Tel Aviv July 24-31, 2008.
Writen by Galia Yahav

JUDA

2009-12-05T09:01:00.001-08:00

The Eight Greats

2009-12-04T11:50:00.000-08:00

Just before the art season opens, and in honor of Time Out's annual art issue, we've decided

to select who we believe to be the most brilliant artists. Some presented their work at

countless exhibits this year, others haven't been active for quite some time and some are

no longer with us. What the eight artists before you have in common is that their art makes

us want to go to one of their exhibits tomorrow, and then talk to them a little bit. They're

sexy, sometimes funny and always moving.

By Galia Yahav

Fahed Halabi

Born in 1970. Graduate of HaMidrasha, HaMidrasha Gallery hosted his exhibit “Yallah

Bye.”

His belly dancing aroused us, his technicolor-primitive paintings of Knesset Members killed

us and his video installations depicting the Arab figure trying to integrate and get by in

today's Tel Aviv (“Shenkin-Melchett,” for example) moved us. Halabi joins a dynasty of

Palestinian artists in Israel who deal with questions of split identity, tensions linked to

location and the role that art plays in all of this, but there is no doubt that he is the only one

who does so with a great deal of humor, some of it self-deprecating. His caricatures of sort

complicate the seemingly obvious conceptual world of leadership and vulgarity, racism and

pornography, flattery and ridicule, art and commsioned drawing, and redefine the expression

“Arab Labor.” Mati Shmuelof wrote that Halabi “laughs and cries at the intersection with

Ashkenazi Zionism,” and it should be noted that this is mutual. He plays up the image of

the good Arab in order to make fun of work and we salute him, with our keffiyeh. Halabi's

work is currently featured in the “Men in the Sun” exhibit at the Herzliya Museum.

Appeared in Time Out Tel Aviv September 3-10, 2009.

Writen by Galia Yahav

I am political sex

2009-12-04T10:14:00.000-08:00

In a reality in which political change seems at least as far away as Mars, Knesset members

are like a certain type of model. If they can’t change anything, the most important thing

is their new haircut, if their make-up is effective and if their new suit fits. Fahed Halabi’s

portraits of female members of Knesset hit much deeper than on first glance. Frozen in

a ridiculous moment, their expressions are the only things ingrained in our memory,

mainly because the words they say don’t actually matter.

Fahed Halabi presents portraits of female Knesset members (Ruchama Avraham, Dalia

Itzik, Tzipi Livni and others), vulgar caricatures of a mustachioed Arab exposing his

buttocks, a magazine pinup wearing a bikini with the colors of the Palestinian flag and

video projects on Arab identity. According to curator Doron Rubina, the works of art

express rage and hilarity, bitter laughter and “despair that generates creativity.”

“For the Knesset members he creates flat portraits, free of consciousness, that empty

them of any symbolic capital. They are differentiated from each other by their haircut,

hair color and make up, before their worldviews distinguish between them – public

servants with a cosmetic agenda,” Rubina says. This is a series seeped in chauvinism

that complicates the paintings with issues of erotic desire, fantasies on authority, a series

conscripted to the libido no less than to questions of nationality. It is a position of

deliberate rudeness that examines the political reality through the most basic representations:

official government photographs, pornographic magazines and caricature books. Halabi

formulates a look at a complicated reality by using hollow images that reject out of hand

any possibilities for complexity. Any chance for political change, any hint of revolutionism,

is exposed through the painting as empty propaganda, as a visual slogan.

The Midrasha Gallery in Tel Aviv. Dizengoff 34. Open July 10.

Appeared in Time Out Tel Aviv July 7-10, 2008.

Writen by Doron Rabina