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Dangling man By Kobi Ben-Simhon Tags: art, Druze A book of poems by Mahmoud Darwish lies on a table in the living room. Next to it is an ashtray stuffed with cigarette butts. It's evening in Jaffa, and the street is visible through the half-open blinds. Hanging on one wall is a small portrait of Che Guevara. "I admire him," says artist Fahed Halabi, from the Druze village of Majdal Shams on the Golan Heights. "He was a revolutionary who fought for the freedom of a nation, an intellectual who paid the highest price for the justice of his cause. I feel a deep connection with him. Even at the age of 37, I am moved by his image - I guess I am still occupied with revolutions." Many eyes peer from the huge paintings on the walls of Halabi's apartment. The women's veiled faces express a certain bewilderment, tinged with an aspiration for freedom. "I painted them two years ago," Halabi says. "These paintings are part of a series that deal with the sexuality of the Druze woman," he explains, pointing to three paintings of nudes. "Some of the paintings place the women in bluntly pornographic poses, but that is not what interested me," Halabi says, moving to the balcony. "The idea in these paintings was not to be provocative just for the sake of being provocative," he says. "I wanted to talk about something important," he adds after taking a few puffs on his cigarette. It is important for him that his work be understood. "What interested me was the place of the Druze woman in regard to religion and tradition. In my mind's eye I saw my mother, and the hard life she led. These works are a type of identification with my mother. They are a critique of the religion that discriminated against women like her, that viewed them as women with no identity. The veil is a type of mask; to me it represents a form of distortion of the woman's identity, a cover that hides and obscures the true appearance and becomes a disguise that is fraught with social, normative and class elements. I exposed the women in the way I know; I left the veil but bared the genitals." Advertisement Halabi, too, is imprisoned by social and class frameworks. After two years of living in Tel Aviv, he is holding his first solo exhibition. Entitled "Yalla, Bye," the show, which opened last week at Hamidrasha Gallery in Tel Aviv, includes paintings and two video works. "These are works I have done in the past two years, a kind of summing up of my period in Tel Aviv," he says. "Usually I do whole series of works, but this time I will show individual paintings. I would say that their connecting link is the question of where I stand in regard to what is happening around me." His answers are always gloomy, but accompanied by an almost childlike wink. A black-and-white drawing shows an Arab man exposing his buttocks to the eyes of the beholder. "This is a very stereotypical representation of 'the Arab,'" Halabi notes. "He has a small mustache and is wearing a kaffiyeh. He exposes his bottom either out of despair or rebelliousness. You can understand it in both ways. It is not sophisticated. I don't know exactly why I am in such a hurry to disrobe the objects I paint, but maybe the undressing is meant to radicalize the paradoxes inherent in the story." Mental journeys Halabi has turned his small balcony into a studio. The floor is covered with thick gray cardboard. A painting is propped next to the window facing the flea market, which is now closed. Tubes of paint are strewn in every corner, brushes thin and thick are jammed into glass jars. It is from here that he embarks on jarring mental journeys between two cultures - the Druze culture from which he comes and the Israeli culture in which he lives. He is immersed in questions of Arab identity within a Jewish-Israeli milieu. One of the video works in the exhibition shows Halabi putting on tefillin (phylacteries) at a Chabad stand next to the Central Bus Station in Tel Aviv. "I did not intend to be provocative. This is only another case of taking to an extreme the question of how far an Arab living in Tel Aviv can escape and fall into confusion," he explains. "I bring about a change in my religion, which is a very important element in my identity. It is a symbolic act, but one that contains an element of betrayal. I am betraying the place I come from in an attempt to belong to the new place." The exhibition will include portraits of female Knesset members and ministers such as Dalia Itzik, Ruhama Avraham and Tzipi Livni. "Halabi's works generate an odd political posture," says Doron Rabina, the curator of the exhibition. "They are simultaneously angry and bemused. It is a stance of bitter laughter, of despair that foments creativity. He holds a critical position that seems to wear a face of sycophancy, of ratifying the ruling authorities, a position that begins with kowtowing to the ruler - as expressed in the tradition of portraits of leaders - and ends with irony and mockery. For the female MKs he does a flat portrait, devoid of consciousness, that robs them of all symbolic capital. They are differentiated by hairdo, hair color and makeup, ahead of the worldviews that set them apart - elected representatives with a cosmetics agenda." That's a bit chauvinistic, isn't it? "The series is immersed in chauvinism, which complicates the works by introducing erotic desire and fantasizing about powerful women. The works address the libido no less than nationality. We also show a painting of a magazine cover girl whose bikini top is decorated with the Palestinian flag. Fahed, I would say, creates a trilateral rhetoric of nationalism-racism-chauvinism. It is a posture of deliberate vulgarity, which views political reality through the most basic representations: official government photographs, magazine porn, comics. He is articulating a view of a complex reality by means of hollow images, which a priori reject any possibility of complexity. Every potential for political change, every hint of the revolutionary is shown to be empty propaganda." "For a teacher to be able to teach his pupil properly, he must also learn something from him," adds the well-known artist Yair Garbuz, the director of the School of Art - Hamidrasha and Halabi's supervisor there. "I feel that art expresses humanity, place and time. Fahed taught me a great deal about place. I think that is something Arab artists have. His paintings tell the story of a person. They are distinctive. They are not just anachronistic folklore. I see in his paintings authenticity in the sense of verity. His work combines humor and sadness, a fusion I find moving. That is why even people who do not understand contemporary art will enjoy his exhibition: his work communicates with people." Winter work Halabi was born into a farming family, which earned its living in traditional agriculture, such as sheep breeding and small cherry and apple groves. Amid the hardships of daily life his father also wrote books on religion. "Dad had beautiful handwriting and he made part of his living from writing and illustrating religious texts. That was his winter work," Halabi relates with fond longing. "I remember him sitting in his room and copying for hours on end. I loved to watch him work and see the decorative elements, the way he bound the books. I think it was from him that I acquired technique and artistic sensitivity." The artistic impulse accompanied him throughout his childhood, though it was not until the age of 25 that he decided to study art. "I lived with an inner conflict for years," he says. "I wanted to study art, but because I had no support for this at home I kept putting it off. In the end, I couldn't bear it any longer and decided to go ahead even without my parents' support. That was an exceptional decision. My parents wanted me to work, no matter where, in any profession, and then marry and have children. That is the whole track they envisaged for me - that is life, from their point of view. That is a primitive approach, and it took a great deal of courage and energy to oppose them. I did not want that limited life. They were dead set against the idea of my studying. I remember my father asking me, 'What's the point of learning how to scribble?'" Nevertheless, Halabi enrolled in Tel Hai Academic College in Upper Galilee. "I told myself that I would give this story a year's trial, and that year turned out to be three years. I was swept up in a tremendous experience. It wasn't just that I learned the language of art at Tel Hai - the main thing that happened to me there was that I was exposed to the world. It was leaving my village, the transition from the little world to the big world. That was a very meaningful step in my life." His graduation exhibition at the college was his first breakthrough. Halabi showed a series of realistic paintings from the life of his village and was awarded first place in the exhibition. "I wanted to talk about the social psychology in the village," he says. "I chose scenes from my personal and collective life. It was something different in the landscape of the students' works. Today, though, looking back, I am somewhat critical of those works. I think I painted unsophisticated narrative situations. It might be a landscape with a farmer who seems to be suffering from his work. It was an unsophisticated depiction of life, a type of documentary painting. It was not until later that I started to look at painting as a medium for self-expression, through which I talk about what I think." At the conclusion of his studies, he returned to Majdal Shams. He and a friend established an art center to provide enrichment groups in painting, sculpture, theater and music for the village children. "It was the first time there had been cultural activity on that scale in the village," he says. "There was nothing like it before. Even though we had no financial support from anyone, we kept the groups going for three years. It was a riveting experience, but in the end, I felt stuck. I felt I had exhausted myself. I did very little painting in the village, nothing meaningful, and I wanted to go on." In 2003 he enrolled at the Midrasha art school in Kfar Sava. "Again I discovered a new world, one that was more complicated," he relates. "In the first exhibition at the Midrasha I understood immediately that I was no longer the star of Tel Hai, that there were a lot of talented people around me. I soon got some cold, harsh criticism, and I kept a low profile and got down to work. Art became more substantive, the themes grew sharper and also more and more defiant." In a trap The further he got from home, the more political his work became. The experience of growing up under Israeli military rule left scars that continue to reopen. "The political statement in my work comes from my life," he says, lighting up another cigarette. He blows out the smoke in the form of a taut arrow, which quickly dissipates. "The place I grew up in continues to haunt me. I am not one of those Druze who was brainwashed and became more Zionist than the Zionists. The situation of the Druze on the Golan Heights, those who have been under occupation since 1967, is very different from the Druze who were occupied in 1948. The 1948 Druze are different from me, even though our roots are almost identical and we draw on the same culture. But being under Israeli occupation for 40 years has an impact. I live only an hour north of them, but for me the occupation started in 1967, not 1948. That is a tremendous difference, which leaves us worlds apart." There is also an ethnic difference. The Druze of Israel, he says, are Palestinian Arabs, "but their past has been forgotten: the sophisticated Israeli policy shifted them. Israeli rule reclassified their identity and made them more Druze than Arab. 'Druze' became a nationality in Israel, which is wrong. What the ruling authorities dictated to those people was to internalize the fact - and declare it in every nook and cranny - that they are first of all Druze." And you? "I am first of all an Arab. After that, a Syrian who has been under occupation since 1967. People here forget, but my village was under martial law until 1981. I was in a situation in which the military governor was omnipotent, a place where there was no judicial system or regional council. We had neither Israeli nor Syrian ID cards. It was a no-man's land." A place hostile to Israel? "Absolutely. I came from a place that is hostile to Israel and to the occupation. There used to be 135 Druze villages on the Golan Heights - 150,000 people who moved to Syria. We live that lacuna. The only thing left of everything that existed there is ruins, and four villages. After the 1967 war there were 15,000 Druze left on the Golan Heights, who did not want to be Israelis. That was forced on us. I remember, for example, a six-month siege of our village because the people refused to accept Israeli citizenship. Every day there were clashes with soldiers. There were riots in the village. I remember the soldiers entering our house, standing there with the ID cards and my mother throwing on the floor the forms she was given to fill out. Finally, the confrontation ended in a compromise: we took the Israeli ID cards, but under 'place of birth,' our cards say Golan Heights, not Israel." Were you raised in the Syrian culture? "There was an atmosphere that felt Syrian at home. So I feel that inwardly I am cut off. I was never in Syria. I define myself as Syrian, but I don't know what that means, because, you know, I am not like a Syrian from Damascus who is continuing a thousand-year culture. I live in a trap, living an Israeli life but carrying a culture from which I am cut off. I am dangling in mid-air: I do not want to blend in and integrate, but I cannot communicate with my cultural background, either. "The move to Tel Aviv only aggravated the difficulty. I came to Tel Aviv in order to paint; I gave up my continuity, family, friends, a family of my own. The continuity of an artist who comes to Tel Aviv from a northern kibbutz is not snapped cruelly the way mine was. I was uprooted and came to a different world. And I remain a stranger in the new world." Moments of crisis All the answers Halabi comes up with amid the complexity of his situation reflect his anomalous position. He feels that viewers of his works find it culturally difficult to digest them. "In recent years some galleries have refused altogether to accept works in which there are images that evoke Arabs," Halabi says. "The feeling is that people do not want to talk about the conflict, about politics. As though what they want is to curl up in some quiet, comfortable, pretty bubble. Curators are fed up with Palestinians, with the [separation] fence, with the intifada. I think Israeli art is increasingly focused on the aesthetic. The galleries nod to the rich, the bankers, and look for pretty art that the buyers can hang at home." Artists and gallery owners also have to make a living, don't they? "It is clear to me that running a gallery is a business, and obviously they have to think about selling artwork, but I think it has all become cruder. The galleries prefer to show decorative objects. For example, there was a Tel Aviv gallery that showed paintings of flowers in all kinds of versions. That's very nice, and I like it, but pretty is not enough. A month ago, Minshar le'omanut [Minshar for Art, a school for art in Tel Aviv] had an exhibition about Hebron. I was there. People were scornful. The political has become ridiculous. It is sad that people are disdainful of such a harsh situation. What I find ridiculous is that curators don't want to show things that bug the public; that people are tired of the suppression and the suffering. That doesn't have anything to do with art, really: it is ridiculous on a human level." Do you feel that you are disdained because you are an Arab artist? "I was not accepted to the 'Fresh Paint' art fair held in Tel Aviv a few months ago. On the one hand I can understand that, because maybe I wasn't suitable, but what burns me up is that I know that some artists were accepted without going through the procedure, just with a phone call. Maybe it's not because I am an Arab, but it's clear to me that Israeli art, which is considered open and liberal, does not truly allow Arab artists to enter. As an Arab artist, I make a statement that does not exist in the work of other artists, and I find it sad that there is a tendency by curators to ignore artists like me. There are galleries that are run like a family: they show the work of members. I have no place there, I am an outsider. My feeling is that there is a block - not a direct one, but hidden. It is hard to penetrate." Despite the success of achieving a solo exhibition, he feels lonely. His family does not intend to come to the exhibition. "I experience my successes alone," he says with a shy smile. "I would very much like, for example, to see my mother take part in my happy event, but for her it is not a truly happy occasion. A truly happy event will be when I return to the village and get married." Twelve years on, Halabi has still not fully come to terms with his decision to leave the village at the age of 25 and make his way in the world of art. The doubts continue to gnaw at him. "It is not easy to make a living from art," he says. "I have a partial salary from teaching art at a Christian school in Jaffa, but it is not enough. I often find myself working as a home renovator. To make ends meet I even thought of doing decorative art. I tried, and I am good at it, but it is hard for me psychologically - I feel as though I am selling myself out. So the question of whether I made the right decision in choosing art doesn't go away. I go through many moments of crisis. I get up in the morning in my apartment and ask myself what the hell I am doing here."W Bookmark to del.icio.us   The bigger apple Study shows Tel Aviv is more expensive to live in than New York. When bedbugs bite After 40 years' absence, Israel braces for return of the bedbug.

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