No Good Time for an Exhibition: Reflections on the Picasso in Palestine Project, Part I

Rasha Salti and Khaled Hourani, “Occupational Hazards of Modern Art and Museums,” A Prior 22 (2011): 42.

Henri Lefebvre, The Production of Space, trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith (Cambridge, MA: Blackwell Publishers, 1991), 29-30.

Slavoj Žižek, “Class Struggle or Postmodernism,” in Contingency, Hegemony, Universality, Judith Butler, Ernesto Laclau, and Slavoj Žižek (London and New York: Verso Books, 2000), 93.

Jean Genet, Prisoner of Love, trans. Barbara Bray (New York: New York Review Books, 1986), 119.

Helga Tawil-Souri quoting Edward Said in Jerusalem Quarterly. See →.

Rasha Salti and Khaled Hourani, ibid., 46.

When the crate in which Buste de Femme had traveled was opened forty-eight hours after first arriving in Ramallah (to give the painting time to acclimatize), Hourani insisted Sliman Mansour, whom he described to me as the “hero of using the woman as a symbol in Palestinian art,” be on hand to witness this historic occasion.

Considering the layout of the Van Abbe’s offices, it is more likely Berndes would have gotten up and walked the four meters to where Esche customarily sits, unless, of course, he happened to be out of town when Berndes received the letter, which is more than likely the case.

To date, Picasso in Palestine is the only project to be successfully realized under the new lending policy, although Charles Esche told me there are two other projects currently in the works—a long-term project with SALT in Istanbul and a collaboration with a Chinese artist who wants to arrange an exhibition in his home village in Hunan Province.

See Ethan Bronner’s article “Before a Diplomatic Showdown, a Budget Crisis” in the July 27, 2011 edition of the New York Times →.

Those interested in how Israel uses zoning ordinances to restrict economic activity in the West Bank would be well advised to consult the Israeli NGO BIMKOM’s report on the matter, “The Prohibited Zone: Israeli planning policy in the Palestinian villages in Area C,” available as a PDF at →.

Regavim’s complaint about the villa was also part of a concerted effort to clog Israeli courts with lawsuits to combat state-mandated settlement building freezes on the judicial level and to garner political support within Israel for settlement as a political/demographic project.

Petti also alleged to have heard that the PA possessed only a single second-generation copy of the map, the others having been destroyed in the assault on Yasser Arafat’s offices during the Second Intifada.

In my experience, to say someone is “Fatah” connotes something specific, but not a specificity readily comprehensible to an outsider. Prior to Oslo it indicated (broadly) loyalty to Yasser Arafat and the PLO and a brand of Palestinian nationalism possessing neither the religiosity of Hamas nor the socialist orientation of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine. But this distinction is not altogether helpful; both left- and right-leaning factions exist in Fatah, and neither camp corresponds exactly with similar political orientations in the West. Similarly, multiple splits have occurred following Arafat’s death: between leaders of the old guard, who returned from exile and came to power after Oslo, and Marwhan Barghouti, who, although imprisoned for life, initiated the Al-Mustaqbal Party (which in 2006 ran a slate of younger candidates), and also between different factions of this “Young Guard” which is itself prone to schisms. Thus, a Fatah loyalist, while actively committed to resisting the occupation and fighting for the nationalist cause, might be politically progressive, or he might be entirely comfortable with Palestine’s traditional class society in which a small group of clans based in the cities and towns controlled much of the region’s wealth and political power. (The function of clan power might conceptually be fairly opaque in the West. One might think of the Kennedy’s family as roughly homologous, although this analogy does not take into account that Palestine’s social structure predates that of Hyannisport by over a millennium, and may, accordingly, be more intricate in structure.) Being “Fatah” is also not a uniform designation. It can indicate rank-and-file party activists, armed members of the al-Aqsa Martys' Brigade (who, while remaining identified as the armed wing of Fatah, have maintained in recent years a somewhat shadowy existence, having been sidelined by the emergence of the PA’s security forces and a somewhat contentious amnesty agreement reached with Israel in 2007), or that elite group of families—often headed by politicians or academics—who returned from exile with Arafat in the ‘90s, and who have since reaped many of Oslo’s political and economic spoils. In the past, this has been one of civil society’s chief complaints with the PA, but following Arafat’s death and the resulting political vacuum, the fragmentation of political power has assumed a complexity that would require more space than this footnote allows. Suffice to say, after Fatah’s 2006 electoral defeat in the Legislative Council, power was assumed by a non-Fatah technocrat, Salam Fayyad, who is now seeing his tenure draw to a close in an atmosphere of general rancor. It could be argued, equally, that following the assumption of power by a technocratic elite, corruption and overt party patronage has diminished, or the opposite, that today’s PA is no less corrupt than its ‘90s incarnation. What is apparent is that the power held by an economic elite has increased, and that in various ways, this increase is connected to political parties.

AEK is an Amsterdam-based brokerage, research, and corporate finance company. It’s website states, “AEK Brokerage services consist of institutional sales, liquidity providing, and facilitating the ‘incourante markt.’”

In the Die Zeit article, Galit Eilat is portrayed as having the unenviable role of the heavy—first as the Israeli national who some of the Middle Eastern visitors to Charles Esche’s rotating roundtable discussion were reluctant to sit with, and then as the deliverer of bad news about the Academy’s lack of status as a museum; AbdulKarim is thus set up as the plucky Palestinian culture worker who perseveres despite Eilat’s pessimism.

According to AbdulKarim, the issue of tax liability was in itself irrelevant, since the Palestinian Ministry of Finance was ultimately responsible for enforcing the tax or not. This is what she related during our interview: “During my three hours at the Palestinian customs department, we discovered that paintings are tax exempted, and not even the staff members themselves knew this. They started looking and looking until they found out. It was illegal in the first place for the Israelis to ask for the money, but this is the benefit of the doubt for the Israelis that hope its coming through our borders. But there was a big discussion going on between Sabah Nabulsi, the lady I was working with at the customs department in Palestine, and her Israeli counterpart, [with Nabulsi] saying, ‘No, this is coming to Palestinian territories, it's end destination is Palestinian, therefore, the tax money is requested by us, not you.’ And they &leftbracket;the PA tax authority&rightbracket; were ready to overlook that.”

Esche is referring to a posting on the Zionist blog Israel Matzav from February 22, 2011, in which “Carl in Jerusalem” wrote: "Picasso in Palestine another occasion to bash Israel. Eindhoven’s Van Abbe Museum (sic) is lending the 1943 canvas Buste de Femme to the Ramallah international art academy, and the occasion is being used to bash Israel (original emphasis) once again. A film is due to be made of the painting’s journey, including the Israeli border and other checkpoints. And then international audiences will be shown how the “cruel Israelis” insist on inspecting an “innocent painting.” This is just another excuse to try to open the checkpoints so that weapons can be smuggled in. What could go wrong?"

Curiously, Van Abbe curator Galit Eilat also uses the term “gray zone” in her response to a question on the use of art in promoting tolerance in a conversation between herself and Zmijewski published in the issue of A Prior (#22) mentioned previously. Her notion of the potential political efficacy of art practice indicates a possibly homology between artistic constructions and the ambiguity of state functions described by de Blaaij. The pertinent passage reads: “Since art is considered autonomous, you can take even violent actions without being immediately labeled an enemy of the society. It still gives me a kind of gray zone to act in. This zone is never fully defined in political terms, that’s why it can accommodate change and be used as a tool for transforming the society.”

Another point where the official record is unclear involves precisely this question of how long Buste de Femme was left unguarded. In July, Hourani told me the following: “One of the scenarios was the Dutch transport company, Kortmann, would bring the work to Tel Aviv. From there, there would be an Israeli company – Globus – with security guards. They also have special security guards – not necessarily the government or the official police – like we also have some private security companies. Globus took care of the security of the work from there to Qalandiya Checkpoint. We had to change the car in the Jaffa road. We changed the car, and the van which would go to Ramallah, it arrived at Qalandiya, where there is a dead area in between Qalandiya Checkpoint and the area where the PA policemen can be with their guns. We had to create a very quick solution since the PA security men could not go next to the checkpoint with their guns. This is a very dangerous place. Thirty meters. We decided to protect the work with cameras. We invited the media, because the car had to go slow so the cameramen from different media were shooting the work coming to Ramallah or Palestine. This was the creative solution for how to protect the work.” Hourani and Salti, however, published the following account this past November in A Prior #22: “From Tel Aviv to Atarot, a private Israeli security company accompanied the van and from Qalandiya to Ramallah, Palestinian police. There was a three-kilometer section, a no-man’s land, where only civilians are allowed to passage, Israeli private security cannot tread, and neither can Palestinian national armed security. The van was unguarded by armed security, instead protection was provided by some twenty international media cameras that accompanied the van and broadcast its passage on that road live.”