The spirits of people look at Palestine in Rula Halawani’s work.

Muhammad Yusuf, Features Writer

Ayyam Gallery is presenting For You Mother, a solo exhibition featuring Rula Halawani’s most recent body of work (Jan. 11 – Feb. 23, 2023). It includes Chapter I and II of this series. “When I finished the For My Father series,” says Halawani, “I showed it to my Mother, told her that it was in honour of my Baba (Father), and asked if she liked it. She replied: “Yes, of course, darling, I like it very much! “Then she asked, “Rula, are you going to make a series for me when I leave this universe?” I said: “Do not mention death, Mama.

I will honour you now while you are still with us.” The For You Mother series is split into two parts, the first chapter, which was worked on in 2018-2020, and the second, which was completed in 2022 after Halawani was chosen as a recipient of the 2021 Sheikh Saoud Al Thani Project Award in partnership with the Qatar Foundation. Chapter I reflects and depicts Halawani’s Mother, Asma’s, words, while the second is a homage to her teachings, beliefs, and lifestyle. The artist relates to mother, motherland, and mother nature.

Reconnecting with her childhood activities, Halawani examines how the Palestinian landscape and natural environment have changed. It is an effort to not only revive souls and spirits but also wildflowers and even ancient stone chains - ‘Salasil’ - the people and natural environment that disappeared and still disappear. Chapter I comprises eleven photomontages, a marriage between archival images of Palestinian families before the 1948 mass diaspora and the Palestinian landscape captured through the artist’s lens. Chapter II is the result of treated and damaged photographic negatives.

 Rula Halawani focuses on the changing Palestinian landscape.

“As I grew into adulthood,” Halawani says, her Mother’s words echoed with her. “Even when we die and leave this world, our spirits remain, floating in the skies of our county, Palestine.” Her Mother referred to the tragedies that befell Palestine - the 1948 war, the Nakba, and the June war of 1967. “I didn’t understand what she meant for a long time, but while devoting this project to her, I understood after visualising her thoughts and feelings through my experimentations.

Throughout my conversations with Mama, she spoke about how Palestine has lost its beauty,” Halawani says. “We’ve lost the unison and tranquility. The settlements and their constructions have altered and deteriorated the traditional Palestinian landscape. The suburbs and cities no longer fuse with the mountainous terrains and plans of the Palestinian landscape. “This took me back to my early years; while my Mother taught in a suburban village outside of Jerusalem, she would take my siblings and me to the villages after school or on weekends to have picnics.” Palestinian wildlife always held a dear and near place in Mother’s heart, Halawani recalls.

Her Mother was “talking to us about the different wildflowers and herbs, Anemones, Blue Iris, Chamomile, Sage, and Thyme, explaining that one shouldn’t pick them unnecessarily and that one should respect the environment and nature. “These memories brought me to Part II of the series - the vanishing wildlife is an omen to the disappearing Palestinian landscape, post-1948. I was hoping to discuss the developments of this project with my Mother; but as the series progressed, she was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease.”

Unfortunately, the disease is aggressive, and Halawani’s Mother is now completely paralysed. But Halawani says she never gave up on our discussions and she kept showing her the series’ progress. Here is her report: “She looks and listens but keeps silent, just like the souls in my photographs; they too are silent witnesses to the changes in the landscape, refusing to leave the skies of our beloved Palestine.”

As a native of occupied East Jerusalem, Halawani began her artistic career by registering the difficulties of living under a protracted political conflict. Her early works capture the many aspects of this reality, from the hardship moments of attempting to perform even daily tasks under the restrictions of military occupation, to the cyclical onset of violent siege that transforms Palestinian neighbourhoods, towns, and cities into overnight war zones.

After several years of photographing the stark imagery that defines the everyday lives of Palestinians, Halawani increasingly focused on occupation by documenting its built environments and structures: the system of architecture that serves as one of its central mechanisms. Recently, she turned her lens towards the traces of lives and history that can still be found in the material culture of Palestinian society or the changed landscapes of her childhood.

Born in 1964, she holds a Master of Art degree in Photographic Studies from the University of Westminster, London (2001). She is based in Jerusalem, where she was the founding director and an associate professor of the Photography programme at Birzeit University. Her exhibitions include the Venice Biennale (2019); Palestinian Museum, Birzeit (2019, 2017); American University Museum, Washington DC, USA (2018) and Al Hoash Gallery, Jerusalem (2009), besides others.

Her photographs are housed in the international collections of the Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris; Institut Valencia d’Art Modern, Valencia and Victoria & Albert Museum, London, among others. Founded in 2006, Ayyam Gallery is an arts organisation that manages the careers of diverse established and emerging artists. The gallery fulfills its mandate through a blue-chip art space in Dubai, a series of collaborative projects in the United States, Europe, Africa, and Asia, and a multinational non-profit arts programme.