Young Palestinian Artists (Part III) - French Cultural Centre

The French Cultural Centre has  been a friend and partner of Al Ma''mal from the beginning. This started in 1992 when they were neighbours of Anadiel Gallery on Salahuddin Street. On Monday evening the Centre was host to Part I of Uriel Barthélémi's amazing performance Exhaustion Triptych. The second part of the Triptych was performed at Al Ma'mal last night and the third and final part will be on Saturday 9th at the Padico building. Moire about Uriel Barthélémi later but now is the time for Ice Cream!

 
Throughout this Jerusalem Show the French Cultural Centre are hosting Mohamed Fadel who is another of the Young Palestinian Artists. His series of ten paintings, collectively entitled Ice Cream, is displayed throughout the building and each of the large and colourful works take the name of an ice cream flavour. I can't remember which painting is which flavour so you will have to guess but I do know which one is the self portrait...
 

Mohamed Fadel

Kafr Yassif//Haifa

Ice Cream, Acrylic on Canvas, (2010)

We eat the ice cream before it melts just like dreams and joy. In a moment in time we hold the ice cream in order to find our momentary joy in life, and we find it beautiful though for a few minutes. It is an extraordinary recreation and we race against time before it melts. Ice cream melts fast. It rescues us from old age and hurls us back to the time of our childhood, play and entertainment. Ice cream is a good and enjoyable thing especially for children. Who among us does not like ice cream? Who among us does not seek to enjoy that moment? We remove the garment of daily life's concerns and hardships and search for transient delight. It is the childish and spontaneous disarray caused by the ice cream, and it is a challenge to the bitter experiences of daily life whose ingredients are the blockade, terror, hunger and intimidation. It is possible to include these under the rubric of the “ice cream” war. A child’s cry reverberates, “Stop the war; stop the destruction. Let us play and feel joy. Let us taste the other flavor of life.” (Text (from Jerusalem Show IV Catalogue)

 

In the beginning there was Anadiel.

The Al-Ma'mal Foundation for Contemporary Art was founded in 1998 but the story begins six years earlier with the Anadiel Gallery. Going through the Anadiel archives is already throwing up some fascinating facts and images as well as the two most aesthetically pleasing funding proposals I have ever seen. This early period was before digital cameras so there are very few digitised archive images available, however this recent scan shows how the gallery looked.  

Anadiel launched on the 20th January 1992 on Salahudin Street in East Jerusalem as a partnership between Jack Persekian and Issa Kassissieh and was originally intended to function as a business.  They hoped they could sell contemporary Palestinian art to visitors but particularly to Palestinians returning in the wake of optimism generated by the onset of the peace process. Although, some sales were made, business was never good enough to completely cover costs so as a commercial enterprise Anadiel never took off. However, in the early years what began as the first and only independent gallery in Palestine took on an important life of its own. As well as being an exhibition space for local artists it quickly became a gathering place, not only for artists but for an emerging Palestinian cultural network. 

The list of names that exhibited in Anadiel in those early years is impressive and includes many now internationally renowned like Suleiman Mansour, Tayseer Barakat, Nasser Soumi, Nabil Anani, Vera Tamari and Jumana Al Husseini. Two more, Khalil Rabah and Samir Srouji (whose Family Fortunes from 1994 is shown right), were to become founding members of Al-Ma'mal. 

As more connections were made, the discussions developed and new voices were heard. It became very clear that exhibition space alone wasn’t enough and that opportunities and resources for making art and finding and promoting new artists needed to be provided. What also became clear in the political context was that the principal focus of the gallery space needed to be Jerusalem and Palestine.

Talking to local artists, organising shows and begging for funds became Persekian’s life for several years. He then began looking outwards to the Palestinian Diaspora and international artists, hosting a groundbreaking project by French artist Jean Luc Vilmouth in 1994.  Vilmouth temporarily transformed Anadiel into the Café d'Olivier (or Olive Café). Central to the transformation of the gallery space was the presence of one of the most potent symbols of the conflict, an uprooted olive tree. This engagement of international artists with the situation in Palestine was to become one of the founding principles of Al-Ma'mal.