The Unseen in the Image: Palestinian Artists and the Challenge of Observation

The influence of constant surveillance and control by a dominant power undeniably impacts the trajectory of art creation, particularly in the domain of imagery.  

In a place as convoluted as occupied Palestine, the oppressive presence of this invasive spatial power is condensed by the staggering number of barriers blocking Palestinian roads. These barriers vary from the manned checkpoints, concrete roadblocks, and ditches obstructing Palestinian vehicles, to road gates, Apartheid Wall gates, and earth mounds. (Zureik et al., 75). Added to this surveillance matrix are the CCTV cameras facing the Palestinian houses ominously constricting movement and precluding any semblance of privacy such that they create a constant feeling of confinement. 

A nuanced extent of this surveillance apparatus is displayed through the panoramic oversight represented in hilltop settlements and military towers spread all over the West Bank around Palestinian towns and cities, establishing an insidious panoptic perspective. Collectively, these multifaceted manifestations of occupation coalesce, effectively engendering a pervasive visual disruption that has persistently afflicted Palestinian space since 1948. The interplay between this controlling force and the Palestinian artists' natural drive for expression is manifested in either creating aesthetic resistance or potentially transforming the political landscape into art.

A significant phenomenon of artists' interaction with disruption and visual violence is the 2002 Israeli invasion of Palestinian cities. During this period, Palestinian cities were subjected to an unprecedented level of surveillance, control, and confinement.

Furthermore, the invasion of 2002 caused widespread destruction where Palestinian artists bore witness to war scenes, including civilian casualties, vehicle destruction by Merkava vehicles, airstrikes, and home demolitions.  Meanwhile, the Israeli Knesset approved the construction of the Apartheid Wall. But a crucial term arising from the 2002 invasion is “checkpoint,” now an integral daily practice. Checkpoints are now a constant in Palestinian life, where travelling between cities necessitates their passage. They have created “risk, uncertainty and dehumaniza[tion of the Palestinian body]” (Zureik et al., 30).  Numerous artists responded to checkpoints, some by staging photography exhibitions right at these sites such as Khalid Jarrar, who curated a photography exhibition featuring checkpoints at the actual Huwara checkpoint. Another noteworthy creation is the acclaimed Lebanese visual artist Mona Hatoum's performance piece"Under Siege" (1982) (Boullata, 295).

In her book, Visual Occupation, Gil Z. Hochberg analyzes the domination of the Israeli militarized gaze in relation to the Palestinian body at checkpoints. She focuses on the visuals created at checkpoints by studying the film Chic Point: Fashion for Israeli Checkpoints (2003) by the Palestinian Israeli artist Sharif Waked. This seven-minute film revisits the visual field that occurs during body searches at checkpoints, concentrating attention on the violence of “the meeting of the eyes of

the soldiers and the bodies of Palestinians” (Hochberg, 80). These meetings do not occur anymore, since Israel has replaced the traditional body search process with apparatuses made of security cameras, biometrics identification system, and X-ray scanning machines, which conceal “the monitoring gaze of the Israeli soldier and his gun, and thus create an illusion of normality” (qtd. in Hochberg, 81).

In Chic Point, Waked blurs the imaginary and the real. The film is two parts: The first one is a vibrant checkpoint fashion show with male models donning clothes featuring strategic openings for swift undressing, and a second segment displays black and white images of stripped Palestinian men from different uprisings, underscoring the violence of scrutiny and humiliation, while also highlighting the erotic undertones of body searches.

Hochberg further explores the dynamics of power in the gaze, questioning who possesses the right to observe, whether Palestinians can reciprocate gazes, and referencing Foucault's notion “The gaze that sees is a gaze that dominates,” (120)

In Jarrar's and Waked's work, the artists turn checkpoint actions into art, employing meta-art within the political landscape and experimenting with reality, illusion, and the physicality of the space. In This is not What I Want to Tell You, presented at CARTA 2024, the audience sees the creation of the scenery while the story unfolds. The difficulty in recounting the story prompted the creation of meta-art, blending the reality of the story within the theatre space and fictional images. 

As the political situation evolves, so do the strategies employed by artists to carve out spaces of dissent and imagination. Artistic disruption, be it in the form of provocative street art, daring live performances, or avant-garde theatrical productions, becomes a harbinger of shifts in the political climate, encapsulating the pulse of political spatial transformation and imagery importance in the absence of the individual performer, like in This is Not What I want to tell you.

Another term that emerged in 2002 is the demolition of houses, the created an absence in the landscape and sometimes a chaotic deconstruction of the landscape and a clear absence of the individuals who lived in that house.  Palestinian artist Kamal Boullata adds that the physicality of space was tinged in the art, whether the artist remained in exile or at home. He sees in some of the Palestinian artwork that, “the physicality of space was often measured by a temporal distance between what is manifestly present in an image and the absence it represents” (257); this is identified strongly in Abdei’s painting House Demolition. The artists here represented the object to achieve a representation of the lost individuals who lived in the house. This concept aligns with the findings of Koch, Lars et al., leading them to assert that "the disturbance shifts from the level of the represented to the level of representation." (7-8) 

Crafting an image poses a weighty question for Palestinian artists: do I possess the right to observe? What is the toll of my gaze? In my doctoral research with visual artists from Hebron, who revealed that their strategy to navigate issues at checkpoints is to avoid direct gaze, I highlighted that, for an artist, the emphasis lies not only on what they observe but also on what remains unseen within the image.

Works Cited

Boullata, Kamal, and John Berger. Palestinian Art 1850-2005. First edition. London: Saqi, 2010. Print.

Hochberg, Gil. Visual Occupations: Violence and Visibility in a Conflict Zone. Durham: Duke University Press, 2015. Web.

Koch, Lars, Tobias Nanz, and Johannes Pause. Disruption in the Arts: Textual, Visual, and Performative Strategies for Analyzing Societal Self-Descriptions. de Gruyter, 2018.

Zureik, Elia, David Lyon, and Yasmeen Abu-Laban, eds. Surveillance and Control in Israel/Palestine: Population, Territory and Power. Routledge, 2010.