Fair: Art-O-Rama 2023, Marseille

For Art-O-Rama 2023, Sans titre proposes a solo presentation by Palestinian artist Aysha E Arar comprising of a monumental installation covering the three walls of the booth.

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Aysha E Arar: An Amphibian Art
by Mohamed Amer Meziane & Anissa Touati

It is, first of all, the trajectory of Aysha E Arar that disrupts our conventional narratives of what an artist is. Far from the romantic myth of a genius given by God or nature to a sacred creator, E Arar approaches art like a break-in. There is no conversion to a fantasy demiurgic calling, no “revelation” when one is born Palestinian in Israel. A prosaic Google search led E Arar to art school. Inspired by the power of singing, E Arar renders the voice omnipresent throughout the smallest threads that weave an image.

Whose voice? Her own, but also that of the Palestinian people, living under occupation: silenced and forced to speak a language that is not their own. E Arar undoubtedly practices an art of resistance to oppression. But, despite constant references to the figure of the hero and the Messiah, this art of survival is not expressed in the conventional forms of the “political”. Far from any political art, her resistance is first expressed as an ability to breathe underwater - by switching worlds and elements through the power of images and voice. To breathe underwater when you can no longer breathe on land. Like a mermaid, she is a creature who is half human and half animal. Like an undersea being, she breathes and lives in worlds that remain inaccessible to oppressive forces who appropriate land. Instead of staging the recovery of land and dignity, E Arar takes us into a virtual world over which no colonial or patriarchal force would have taken hold.

Aysha E Arar’s drawings immerse us in another world, underwater and amphibian. They represent what she calls “creatures without identity.” Bodies haunted by a love that precedes their being, these creatures merge into one another, shattering the boundaries of identity with lines crossing their tangled bodies. Our techniques of visual identification are disrupted by what looks like simple children’s drawings to hasty eyes. These are lines below the drawing itself. Bringing us back to an infra-perceptual state, we reencounter the sense of vision as it functioned before our brain could even identify bodies by attributing human properties to them. Blurring the boundary between humans and non-humans, E Arar invents a code that creates symbolical bridges between colors, natural elements and human beings. This code links yellow to the sun, brown to sand: two elements that symbolize masculinity. Femininity is represented by blue which corresponds to water and green, the two colors of nature in E Arar’s work. These correspondences make the feminine and the masculine intertwine through the play of colors, bringing out, through their indistinction, an aesthetic and cosmic force.

They bring humans into a broader world, in which they correspond to other creatures, are doubled by non-human presences. But if a human being is integrated into a vast system of correspondences, it is always its inalienable liberty that is at stake. Another element of E Arar’s symbolism shows this: the omnipresent hands. These hands reach toward freedom: the beating heart of the artist’s aesthetic and political gesture. The reference is well-known: that of the hands in Michelangelo’s famous painting, The Creation of Adam. It is a sign that human freedom, for E Arar and in Palestine, is not incompatible with reference to the Divine. On the contrary, it has its source there. Through imagination, E Arar brings life to Palestinian folk tales again. She rebuilds a house in which it is possible to breathe another air than that of a lost land. Through the symbolism of colors and spirituality, Arar thus invents an amphibian art.

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Aysha E Arar (born in 1993) is a Palestinian artist. She received her BFA with honors from the HaMidrasha Faculty of Arts - Beit Berl College in 2018. During her studies, she won the Boaz Arad Excellence Award and the America Israel Cultural Foundation Award.

She has had solo exhibitions at Dvir Gallery, Tel Aviv & Brussels (2023); Beit HaGefen – The Jewish Arab Cultural Center, Tel Aviv (2023); Hayarkon 19,Tel Aviv (2022); Givat Haviva Art Gallery (2021). In January 2024, the artist will have a solo show at Sans titre, Paris.

Selected group exhibitions include: Edmond de Rothschild Center, Tel Aviv (2022); Sans titre, Paris (2022); Umm al-Fahm Gallery (2022); Alfred Institute for Art and Culture, Tel Aviv (2021); Kultur Forum Dresden e.V., Dresden (2021); Albertinum Museum, Dresden (2021); Artura Gallery, Kfar Monash (2021); Edmond de Rothschild Center, Tel Aviv (2019); Balkont Gallery, Tel Aviv (2019); Dvir Gallery, Tel Aviv (2018); Ethiopian Embassy, Tel Aviv (2017); Helena Rubinstein Pavilion for Contemporary Art, Tel Aviv Museum, Tel Aviv (2017); Tel Aviv Cinematheque, Tel Aviv (2016); Excellence Project of the Jewish Festival, Krakow (2016).

Aysha E Arar’s works are featured in the permanent collection of SMAK - Stedelijk Museum voor Actuele Kunst, Ghent.