Jim Quilty
Daily Star staff
BEIRUT: During the 2004 World Economic Forum, held that year at a Dead Sea resort in Jordan, organizers commissioned Palestinian curator Jack Persekian to engineer a Palestinian Cultural Evening.
When the designer-branded WEF delegates assembled, they found a stage decorated with an installation made from thousands of bars of Nabulsi soap. Its curious design was comprised of a meters-high wall, punctuated by cylindrical towers topped with flood lamps.
When the event ended, delegates were invited to come up on stage and take a bar of soap from the wall. It would be a memento, they were told, of the ceremonies. Many did.
Persekian’s depiction of this incident was the climax of “Nablus Soap,” his illustrated talk at the Beirut Art Center Wednesday evening.
As his photos documenting the event clicked past on the screen behind him and chuckles arose from his audience – one photo finds Arab League Secretary General Amr Moussa inciting a small avalanche as he gleefully yanks down a soap bar – you couldn’t but speculate how many of the assiduously non-partisan delegates were aware of the politics of their gesture.
Persekian is a well-known figure in regional art circles. The Jerusalem native is the founder and director of that town’s Anadiel gallery and Al-Ma’mal Foundation for Contemporary Art, as well as XEIN Productions. In 2009, Persekian was made director of the Sharjah Art Foundation and since 2005 has been the artistic director of the Sharjah Biennial.
“Nablus Soap” was one of the side events organized by the BAC to accompany “Witness,” its exhibition of new and recent work by UK-based Palestinian artist Mona Hatoum.
The work in “Witness” is aesthetically and politically provocative without being parochial or partisan. Equally striking is the sheer range of media the artist manipulates – from sturdy works in iron, bronze, brass and stainless steel to pieces contrived from such fragile media as glass, tissue paper and hair.
So it’s no surprise to learn that Hatoum has also worked with soap from Nablus. “Nablus Soap” placed Persekian’s Palestinian Cultural Evening in the context of his relationship with Hatoum’s work. As such, it was as much a rumination upon political engagement in art as it was a genealogy of his own work.
The curator began talks with Hatoum to mount an exhibition at the Anadiel gallery in 1994. The show was an emotional experience for the artist, he said, since it was the occasion of her first visit to her country.
“Her exhibition was a turning point for the work we were doing in Jerusalem,” Persekian recalled. At that time, he characterised Palestinian art as being divided between “self-indulgent, idiosyncratic experimentation with form, and composition, color and modes of expression, juxtaposed with romantic, nostalgic, and sentimental references to heritage, tradition and elemented reality of lost glory and, in some cases, defeat.”
Hatoum was well into preparations for her Anadiel show when she sat down to examine a map of the 1993 Oslo Accords – which reduced the once-contiguous geography of the West Bank into a cluster of cantons, either completely separated from one another or else contained within bottlenecks controlled by Israeli Army checkpoints.
She was so moved by the absurdity of this map that she abandoned work on the original project. Instead she designed “Present Tense.”
The artist laid out a square comprised of 2,200 bars of soap (she favored the Al-Jamal brand), into which she pressed pomegranate seed-like red beads to create an outline map of Oslo’s politically segmented West Bank.
The medium was carefully chosen. Nabulsi soap was a symbol of resistance but it was also, by its very nature, ephemeral, and not simply because soap dissolves with use. At that time, the Al-Jamal factory was still operating. Later, in 2002, it was one of several Nablus soap factories to be destroyed during Israeli Army incursions into the town.
“Present Tense” wasn’t Hatoum’s last piece to work with the soap of Nablus. With her later work, called “Nablus Soap,” she seemed to pick up the ironic contradiction between the symbolic and practical utility of her medium. The artist washed her hands with the square bars of soap until their sharp edges were worn down. Then she affixed pins to them, points out, so that they resembled, for Persekian, porcupines with their quills out.
The curator related how the 2002 Israeli incursions into Nablus and the destruction of the city’s soap factories made him want to do something with the medium. The opportunity to do so arose when he was approached to organize a Palestinian Cultural Evening for the 2004 World Economic Forum.
At that time, Persekian explained, Israel had not only laid out the plans for the separation barrier but had already started building it. The curator wanted to take advantage of the World Economic Forum as an international stage to focus attention to the separation wall. This was inconceivable for Forum organizers.
“I explained to [them] that the design was wholly inspired by the way traditional factory workers stack up their produce in their factories and warehouses,” recalled Persekian, in which the square-cut bars are arrayed in cone-shaped columns. “It had nothing to do with any wall.”
“Guests were asked to come to the stage and tear down the wall with their hands,” he quoted one triumphant account as reporting. “The World Economic Forum organizers enthusiastically obliged their request!”
For the politically engaged public, Persekian’s discussion of the artistic utility of Nabulsi soap leaves an ambivalent taste in the mouth.
On the one hand it is amusing to see powerful figures – otherwise too weak to stand up for Palestinians on the political stage – implicated in an artistic gesture of political condemnation.
On the other hand, there is a sense that such gestures are tolerable because – confined to the realm of artistic practice, insulated from the practical world of politics – they are politically ineffectual.
A third reading is more optimistic. The powerfully ineffectual are sometimes happy to be implicated in an artistic gesture of political condemnation. You just need, first, to tell them they’re doing something else.
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