Stop
For God's Sake | 2008 | video installation| 13'07"
Suha
Shoman
Stop
for God’s Sake
2008
| video installation | 13'07"
Video Art:
Stop for God’s Sake
text by Sama Alshaibi
In this
year of 2008, on this anniversary of the 1948 Al Nakba, many
Palestinian artists, whose artworks may or may not usually
engage the Israeli Palestinian conflict directly, are in a
state of reflection. Where are we? Where are we going? And
what should one say, after 60 years? What else could an artist
possibly say about the 60 years of a complex, polarizing and
already massively documented case of the Palestinian’s
quest for independence?
Daunting
questions are best approached by direct means.
With honesty,
courage and deceptively simple tactics, artist Suha Shoman
takes only thirteen minutes to build that case in her video,
“Stop for God’s sake.” A hybrid of experimental
documentary and remixed stock footage for broadcast news,
the content is at times earth shattering and surprising and
at others as familiar as the national anthem; it just depends
on what you already know about the conflict. But it is how
the documentary footage is delivered, and (mapped/spaced)
in time that grips the viewer. Set to Mozart’s Requiem
in D, “Stop for God’s Sake” evokes the bitter
irony of using religion to justify violence, and Shoman’s
video is an appeal aimed particularly at people of faith.
Shoman
uses stock footage not only because she is unable to return
to Palestine to shoot her own video and images (most Palestinians
in the Diaspora are not permitted to enter Palestine since
Israel controls its borders), but also because it represents
a media that we are largely familiar with. Moreover, documentary
footage, including stock, are accurate moments not easily
dismissed. The footage then represents everything we have
ever already seen about the conflict in our daily news broadcasts,
not just what is presented to us in those thirteen minutes.
We recall the countless broadcasts, but in a different way.
The footage
is delivered in extended play, slowing down and even pausing
for contemplative effect. Presenting religious verses in the
form of title cards, Shoman intermingles passages from holy
books of all three monolithic faiths, reminding us that no
one can use faith as justification for the past 60 years of
violence and land-theft.
The slow
use of time promotes thoughtfulness, especially evidenced
in the full prayer of the Quran's Al Fatah Surratt with translation
in English provided. For a non-Arabic speaking audience, it
reveals the beautiful and peace promoting words of the Islamic
faith. In stereotypical Western media depictions, the takbir
of Allah Akbar (God is great) is normally followed by violence
and protest, not prayer as it usually does in the Muslim world.
Shoman provides much needed access to the Islamic faith, and
even for an already Muslim or Arabic speaking audience, watching
the prayer in extended play gives pause. Gazing upon the men
bowing in devotion, in intimate display of observance, can
overwhelm a sympathetic viewer. The men’s back to the
camera, their complete concentration in devotion to God, subjects
them and their faith to our gaze. They appear utterly vulnerable,
incognizant of what surrounds them, especially the harsh scrutiny
of a camera. The camera has historically deceived and betrayed
such men, used as an instrument of exploitation and serves
the agendas of those who wish to portray them as terrorists
and agents of a religion of a false deity. Shoman directs
the observers’ attention onto these men through her
camera but offers her audience a different relationship to
them.
Her prayer
scene presents a stark, yet comforting, contrast to what is
expected of a large gathering of men under the umbrella of
the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Not in combat, not in chaos,
not in a death “strike” march. It is simply men
as non-combatants, organized side by side in devotional prayer,
and prayer is not easily argued towards a propagandist end.
It should
be noted the men praying are not Palestinian men, nor is this
stock footage. Shoman captured the video visiting a mosque
in Singapore. The placement of this component of the overall
video is important because Shoman decidedly opens up the argument
beyond the Israeli-Palestinian conflict in the section preceding
the men’s prayer. A global discussion takes shape, targeting
faith, politics, war, resistance and activism in an international
perspective. It situates the first six minutes of the video,
which is decidedly building a case for the injustice of the
Palestinian people, within a larger context.
Sixty
years of injustice are honestly if not completely described
in the fist six painful minutes: a series of historical Palestinian
maps present massive land losses, aerial vantage points of
the ever expanding Separation Wall illustrates the segregated
and violated landscape, brutal and violent clashes shows the
disparity between an unarmed Palestinian civilian people and
the mightily equipped Israeli Defense Forces, massacres are
evidenced at the morgues, burial of Palestinian martyrs are
protested by massive crowds grief stricken and enraged and
finally, a still image taken from inside a church on Mount
of Olives, Jerusalem.
This photographic
still is an exercise in the visual semiotics of today’s
struggle; the foreground of the picture plane is the chapel’s
window adorned with the most iconic symbol of the Christian
faith, a large cross. The middle ground reveals the view from
that very window, the stunning gold of the Dome of the Rock,
Islam’s third holiest site. The background is simply
depressing. Behind the cross and dome loom two massive cranes
towering over the Old City, denoting the ever expanding settler
and Israeli presence in East Jerusalem, and triumphantly over
the other two religious icons in terms of visual power. It
brings to mind the countless settlement cities across the
West Bank, with the ever-present cranes arms striking conquering
poses.
After
the six-minute mark, a written verse from the New Testament
asks, “For what profit is it to a man if he gains the
whole world and loses his soul?” (Mathew 16:26). The
Requiem in D takes a short dramatic pause, and a faceless
voice answers, “These are the times that tries men’s
souls”. We watch a fighter jet take off and are privy
to his vantage point, a target of a site below, and his bombing
of it. A quick series of visuals follow such as a tanker foregrounding
a fiery blaze, an anti-war protest in Washington D.C. in front
of the U.S. Capital building and then a living room television
featuring the pope on the BBC, performing the politically
safe ritual of wishing an end to the injustice in Iraq, Tibet
and the non descript “" Holy Land." Shoman
follows with a still image of Muslims at prayer in front of
the Dome of the Rock, and then the long scene of the Singapore
mosque at prayer time. The juxtaposition insinuates the confusion
between the two worlds.
It should
be noted that Stop For God’s Sake is presented in an
installation. While it commands the large screen in the room,
a second video, small and discreet, hangs in the corner and
plays in a continual loop. It is simply a number counter.
Viewers are aware of the presence of time, with the counter
displaying the years going by starting with 1948 and ending
with 2008 before it runs in its loop again. The two videos
are in conversation, driving the profound meaning of 60 years
moving by and the situation remaining the same, if not much
worse. Violence has produced nothing except more suffering,
and Shoman asks her final questions: “Who started it?”
and “Who shall end it?”
Who could?
Not even the Pope according to the video. And, yet, the very
title suggests an end to the violence. The title of the video
demands us, every single one of us, to stop. Shoman demonstrates
the profound role of personal responsibility in any solution.
That is why she implicates the people of the three faiths.
We are all a part of it and must begin to work toward peace.
We all have to work to end it, for God’s sake.
Sama Shaibi
Assistant professor at the University of Arizona
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