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Jordanian
arts foundation unveils a new facade and a new acquisition
The grounds of Darat al-Funun - the 12-year-old arts foundation
where much of Jordan's cultural life takes hold - slide
down a steep hill on the eastern edge of Amman's old and
densely residential Jabal Weibdeh district. A labyrinthine
network of walkways, wildflower gardens, and stone stairwells
link three renovated buildings from the early 20th century
to the ruins of a sixth-century Byzantine church, thought
to be built on the remains of a Roman temple. |
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is a site that is steeped in history. The main building,
constructed around 1918, once served as the official
residence for the British commander of the Arab Legion,
then housed a British Officer's club, and played host
to a certain guest named T. E. Lawrence sometime in
between. A second structure was built by Circassian
workers for the former governor of Akka in Palestine.
A third provided a home for leftist Prime Minister Suleiman
Nabulsi in the 1950s.
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But
for the opening of the fall art season, Suha Shoman,
President, has placed two decidedly contemporary
brackets on either end of Darat al-Funun, known
locally as the "Darat." Last week, at
the top of the site, she unveiled new renovations
to the foundation's front facade, produced in
angular concrete and sleek steel by architect
and artist Sahel al-Hiyari. |
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the bottom, she curated an exhibition of 30 works culled
from the foundation's permanent collection, all of which
revolve around the themes of exile and alienation raised
in a single, newly acquired piece, Mona Hatoum's 1983
video installation "So Much I Want to Say." |
"I
knew Sahel as an artist, as an architect, and as
a person," explains Shoman. "I wanted
to do this restoration, he showed me a proposal,
and I loved it. We were conceiving it as a work
of art."
There is, indeed, a sculptural dimension to the
new wall and entryway to the foundation, with its
linear incisions and rectangular concrete protrusions.
Hiyari, who was born in Cairo and is based in Amman,
looked to the site's existing architecture and its
different materials and building techniques for
inspiration. In his practice over the last 10 years,
he has distinguished himself from many of his peers
by engaging rather than shunning the results of
rapid urbanization, apparent in the proliferation
of cheap and speedily done concrete structures throughout
the developing world. |
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So,
like etching another text onto that urban surface,
Hiyari's wall contributes a new layer to the Darat's
history. (The foundation, the name of which means
"home for the arts," was established
by Shoman, the granddaughter of Palestinian politician
Ahmad Hilmi Basha, and her late husband Khalid,
the son of Arab Bank founder Abdel-Hameed Shoman.
In addition to a regular schedule of exhibitions,
Darat al-Funun has, over the past decade, built
up a solid program of summer workshops, artist-in-residency
programs, films screenings, musical performances,
literary meetings, and more.)
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| "You'll
notice that the walls are the same height as those
next to them. Part of that is to make good neighbors,"
explains Hiyari, "and part of that is to provide
continuity." As an independent, nonprofit arts
foundation in the Arab world, Darat al-Funun's mission
is tightly bound to both the idea of keeping historical
links alive and the importance of pushing the arts
ahead. "The project became a hybrid,"
adds Hiyari. "The result is a new entity that
relates to both." |
In addition to the exterior facade, Hiyari has also
constructed a black room inside the foundation's
upper-most building to house an installation of
his work. With backlit drawings and austere maquettes
representing various building projects in Jordan,
Yemen, and Kuwait, the installation makes a fine
mesh of architecture and contemporary art. The vibe
of Hiyari's work echoes again at the lower end of
the Darat complex, in a darkened room where Hatoum's
video is screening.
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| "So
Much I Want to Say" was recorded as a
satellite transmission of a slowscan exchange
between Vancouver and Vienna in 1983. A voice
repeats the title line at regular and consistent
speed, while the image on screen, of a woman's
face being gagged by a man's hands, freezes
still and then updates in a top-to-bottom
sweep every eight seconds. The delay between
sound and image reinforces the work's strong
sense of dislocation, of communication breaking
down, failing to connect, or getting stuck
in the throat, the words too numerous or overwhelming
to ever be fully expressed. |
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| To
support Hatoum's piece, Shoman has selected
a number of paintings, sculptures, and installations,
all of which address conditions of living
in exile. This may be most trenchantly seen
in Swedish-Iraqi artist Ibrahim Rachid's painting
"What About My Garden," most obliquely
in Syrian artist Basil Saadi's sharp modernist
sculpture, a new commission for one of the
Darat's outdoor spaces. |
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| Many
of the artists on view - such as Iraqi sculptor
Ismail Fattah, Syrian painter Marwan, and
Egyptian sculptor Adam Henein - have been
shown at the Darat before and are well known
to the Ammani public. |
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None of Hatoum's work has ever been exhibited at
any place or at any time in Jordan. In fact, although
she is likely the most well-known contemporary artist
of Middle Eastern origin - Hatoum, who is Palestinian,
was born in Lebanon in 1952; though she was never
granted Lebanese citizenship, she got a British
passport in large part because her father worked
for the embassy in Beirut; she went to London for
what was supposed to be a quick vacation in 1975
and never returned due to the outbreak of Lebanon's
Civil War - her work has traveled to region only
rarely (to the Cairo Biennial in 1998, the Istanbul
Biennial in 1995, and for a solo show at Jerusalem's
Gallery Anadiel in 1996).
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Like Ghada Amer and Shirin Neshat, Hatoum has been
subjected to something of a local backlash, whereby
well-heeled, well-informed art critics, collectors,
and curators who are aware of her work here often
criticize her there for capitalizing on or exoticizing
her "otherness" for the sake of a western
market. To what extent that criticism may hold can
only be tested by making her work more physically
available to a wider public. This is, in effect,
exactly what Darat al-Funun is doing.
Shoman,
who is a painter and a video artist herself, has
been slowly priming her public for work like this.
Last year, she exhibited her own ambitious, moving,
multi-screen installation "Of Time and Light"
at the Darat, and it was by all accounts the first
instance of video art being shown in a Jordanian
art venue. In addition to "So Much I Want
to Say," Shoman has added Hatoum's rather
more challenging "Measures of Distance"
to the Khalid Shoman Private Collection, along
with other, younger video pieces by Egyptian artists
Amal Kenawy, Moataz Nasr, and Wael Shawky.
Shoman admits that the Darat's new ultra contemporary
facade, as well as its emphasis on video art piece,
may be difficult and initially misunderstood.
"The
exhibition as a whole, for the public of Amman,
it will shock them a bit," she says. "There's
still this idea that you go to an exhibition to
see something beautiful."
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Kaelen
Wilson-Goldie
The Daily Star, Sept 17th, 2005
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