On her visits to concentration camp sites in Poland, the Scottish artist Jane Frere explored the Jewish tragedy of the Holocaust.
This quest led her to the writings of the Israeli ‘New Historians’ such as Prof Ilan Pappe, whose research in the Israeli archives exposed the expulsion of nearly three quarters of a million Palestinians before, during and after the 1948 war, which the Israelis name their ‘war of independence’ and the Palestinians their Nakbah – the term used to describe their 1948 catastrophe.
Having watched Tahani Rached’s film Soraida: A Woman of Palestine, Frere decided she wanted to produce artwork that could encapsulate the Palestinian story which, she knew, was not a single event buried in the past, but a continuing source of catastrophe for Palestinians, the Middle East and probably the world. She decided to travel to Palestine and Lebanon to work with Palestinian refugees and listen to their stories.
In Lebanon she lived with families in the refugee camps and conducted workshops with the members of the second and third generation, who led her to the stories of their parents and grandparents. She then moved to Dheishe, the refugee camp outside Bethlehem in the occupied West Bank, where she recorded testimonies and continued her workshops. I saw the result of her enterprise in a fascinating exhibition, Return of the Soul: The Nakbah Project, at a small gallery in Edinburgh last week.
Because I am currently working on a book on Israeli Jews commemorating the Palestinian Nakbah, I was delighted to meet the artist in person and speak to her about her project – a series of wax figures suspended from the ceiling on invisible nylon cords, creating an image of a huge exodus.
The workshops Frere conducted began with a PowerPoint presentation about her own journey and concept, including her visits to the concentration camps, and went on to her working with Palestinian refugees and their children, teaching them to carve the figurines which she then dipped in wax – a visceral, emotional material, which gave the figures a uniquely poignant and melancholy appearance.
As she writes in the catalogue: “The sculpture reveals a people who had to depart from their homes in a hurry, leaving behind loved ones, the aged and the sick, animals and pets, photographs and other fragments of their lives… particular attention was given to Palestinian costume in the period 1930-1950 through the analysis of photographic images and books showing the clothes worn by people at the time.”
The students were then asked to interview their relatives, and the floating figures are accompanied by recorded testimonies that viewers can listen to in an adjacent room. Frere proposed her idea to several galleries and NGOs in Jerusalem and Beirut, and the exhibition, which opened in East Jerusalem, was subsequently shown in Ramallah and Edinburgh and will soon be taken to in Beirut and Amman.
Currently Frere has 3,000 figures, of which she shows only half – her hope is to extend the work in refugee camps in the neighbouring countries so as to ensure that the story of the dispersed people of 1948 Palestine is heard and represented. Although I often wonder whether the Palestinian narrative has been taken over by too m a n y w e l l - wishers who ultimately appropriate the Palestinian voice, making it their own, Frere’s project is a fascinating exhibit, one which I hope can be shown in Dublin.
