When the Palestinian visual artist Rula Halawani embarked on an ambitious photographic project, she wanted to pay tribute to her late father, and to the sites of historic Palestine which she visited with him throughout her childhood. When she returned, it was a trip back in time and through memories, as she witnessed how the beautiful countryside where she enjoyed picnics with her father and siblings had been transformed utterly, ravaged by the conflict with Israel. She says that she felt like a stranger in her own home, a dislocation that is palpable in the haunting black-and-white images that feature in the resulting series, entitled For My Father.
Ten of the images will be exhibited as part of A Matter of Time, a major new exhibition at the Crawford Art Gallery. The work was selected before the current conflict erupted in Gaza and features alongside images from 25 Irish and international artists, including Amanda Dunsmore, Sara Baume and Patrick Scott, all exploring the many facets of time.
Halawani speaks to me from her home in occupied East Jerusalem. She teaches at Birzeit University on the West Bank, where she founded the photography department. She says her father, who died 12 years ago, was very much invested in teaching her and her siblings about the history of their homeland and the significance of the landscape.
“When we were little, my father used to take us all over the country and explain to us about the political side of the country and the importance of the land. He would talk to us all the time about his childhood in Palestine, how it was very different. He told us many times that when he was little there were Jewish boys in his class. He taught me everything and I wanted this piece to be for him. He was a very wise man and he worked hard in his life,” she says.
Halawani explains how her pictures show not only the changes in the landscape of her childhood but also how much of it is now closed off to Palestinians. “Many of my students at the university, they have never seen the sea because they are not allowed to leave their areas. Some of the pictures you see, when I was little, I used to go those places and they were filled with Palestinians from Gaza and the West Bank. Now you just see Israelis and a couple of Palestinians.”
While life goes on in East Jerusalem, getting to the university is a fraught experience, she says, and the conflict is taking a huge psychological toll on students. “I remember when I taught at the university in 1996/97, it used to take me 35 minutes to get there. Now it can take up to four hours because of the checkpoints. It’s crazy… the West Bank is going through a different kind of war than Gaza. It is hard. And it is so hard to see the students; they are depressed because of what they see. I have really smart students who always got straight As, they are not working the way they used to. I sit with them and I talk to them. We are going through very hard times.”
As a child, Halawani spent her summer holidays in Gaza and later worked there as a photojournalist. Her father also lived there for a time, before going back to live in Jerusalem. “He wanted to choose the most beautiful place to live in, and he and his brother lived in Gaza. Every summer when I was a kid, we used to go to Gaza on vacation. What happens to the people in Gaza is happening to us, like a member of our family. It’s hard. We pray for better days, especially for Gaza.”
Halawani’s work is inextricably bound up with the politics of her environment but she sees her art as a form of storytelling, communicating the lives and experience of the Palestinian people.
“All the stories I do, it is about what I am seeing, what I am experiencing. I am telling it in a story. I am not a politician…but at the same time, the story I am creating is part of the bigger story.”
Halawani came to her vocation by accident, or ‘destiny’ as she describes it. She was studying for a degree in maths and physics in Canada but after taking a course in photography over the summer, her life went off in a completely different direction. “The teacher asked me if I had a camera, if I knew how to develop film, if I had taken pictures, I said no. He let me enrol in the course and I got the highest mark in class. He told me ‘some people have it and some people will never have it, you have it’.”
Halawani completed a degree in photography at the University of Saskatchewan and then did an MA in London. When she returned home, she worked as a photojournalist but found it difficult to separate the job from the suffering of her fellow Palestinians. “I became an artist. Art is what I want to do in life,” she says.
While Halawani’s father was initially disappointed with her pursuing photography as a career, she says he eventually became reconciled with her choice.
“He did not want me to become a photographer. I remember coming back from a long day, I was really tired. He looked at me and said: ’You are the smartest kid I had, why did you do that? You could have become a doctor or an engineer.’ But he was proud of me when I started teaching at the university. In later years, we used to sit together and I would show him my work. He liked that.”
Halawani’s work is held in many collections around the world, including in the British Museum and the V&A in London and Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris. She says that it means a great deal to her to have her work exhibited in Ireland, and all going well, she is looking forward to visiting Cork for the exhibition.
“People here love Ireland because they feel like Ireland understands their story,” she says. “I have always wanted to visit and exhibit in Ireland and in Barcelona in Spain. Now I am exhibiting in March in Barcelona and I am coming to Ireland in April — they are happening together, it is fantastic.”
- A Matter of Time runs at the Crawford Art Gallery in Cork from Feb 17 — June 3. The exhibition will include work by 25 artists, including Dorothy Cross, Brian O’Doherty, and Patrick Scott.
