Darat al Funun currently on

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.

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.

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).

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."

Kaelen Wilson-Goldie

The Daily Star, Sept 17th, 2005