Amid ongoing wars in many places, the Venice Biennale, currently readying for the curtain raiser, is rife with controversy. In the context of Israeli artists participating in the Biennale amid continuing violence in Palestine, and Russian artists participating against the backdrop of the Ukraine war, this article offers a reflective look at Palestinian artist Vera Tamari’s participation, highlighting her focus on exploring themes of displacement and cultural resilience in the new edition of the Venice Biennale.
Bio of Vera Tamari
Vera Tamari, born in Jerusalem, is a contemporary artist known for her uncompromising vision as a visual artist, Islamic art historian, art educator, and curator. She taught Islamic art, architecture, and art history at Birzeit University for more than 20 years. Between 2005 and 2010, she also developed and oversaw the Birzeit University Museum and Virtual Gallery. She created and oversaw the Cities Exhibition series there from 2009 to 2016. Tamari was a member of the New Visions Collective and the League of Palestinian Artists, and she actively promotes art and culture in Palestine.
Vera Tamari, who gained recognition for her delicate ceramics, landscape paintings, and avant-garde installations, embraced art as a tool of resistance and cultural preservation. As a teacher, she was instrumental in establishing fine arts programs at Palestinian colleges and in organising important exhibitions that highlighted Palestinian art and culture.
Art of Vera Tamari
In the article ‘Vera Tamari’s Lifetime of Palestinian Art’ written by Palestinian writer Taline Voskeritchian, Vera Tamari’s artworks are described as ‘Rooted in the everyday life of Palestinians under occupation, Vera Tamari’s art looks out to a violated landscape, to her ancestral seaport of Jaffa, on the Mediterranean, to centuries of Islamic art, to the invasion of her native land by successive armies, and more.’ Here, the phrase ‘everyday life of Palestinians under occupation’ deserves special attention, and the artistic activity in occupied areas can be said to be political even if it does not directly depict politics or resistance at that moment.
Vera Tamari creates her artworks using a variety of materials, including clay, paper, fabric, metal, plexiglass, wood, paint, stone, film, wire screen, and photographs. Alongside this, it is important to know about the activities of the Palestinian artist group ‘The New Visions group,’ formed in 1989 by Sliman Mansour, Vera Tamari, Tayseer Barakat, and Nabil Anani. This group has been carrying out a cultural resistance since the time of the First Intifada (1987–1993), conducted by Israel in Palestine.
The main focus of this group was the localisation of materials used for artworks. The idea that materials from Israel and the West should not be used for making art was regarded as an ‘argument’ and a very strong move of resistance. The use of locally available materials, including wood, clay, chalk, animal glue, straw, mud, leather, and natural plant-based dyes such as coffee, olive oil, henna, tea, and spices, replaces oil paints. They decided instead to produce works of art such as paintings, posters, mixed-media assemblages, and earthworks with only materials found or produced locally.
During this time, each member of this group produced artwork unrelated to protest, defence, or conflict, which is an undercurrent of them. Mansour and Tamari, for instance, improved the consistency of potter’s clay by adding hay. During this time, Tamari produced artwork featuring relaxing family groups and recreational pursuits such as chess and picnics. Barakat was a painter who mostly used fire and wood, a process called pyrography. As previously indicated, Nabil Anani used wood wrapped in sheep’s leather from a Hebron/Khalil business, which was subsequently stained using natural colours and household items. Drawing from Islamic art traditions and geometric patterns, all four artists used assemblages in their creations.
Art is not merely for doing; instead, by using the term ‘committed art,’ this group carried out a decades-long mission to transform it into a form of resistance and protest against power exercises and oppression. This movement and the political-aesthetic eye it produced are still more relevant and contemporary, against the backdrop of Israel’s ongoing attacks on Palestinian land. Vera Tamari is the major figure of ‘the New Visions group’, which localised art and thereby politicised it. One must also keep this in mind to understand Vera Tamari’s artworks and her presence at the Venice Biennale.
Politics of art
Vera Tamari has developed an art practice that shaped (or was shaped by) the activities of the New Visions group, and at the same time, she has created a new language that challenges both the aesthetics and the politics, which are challenged by Israel’s aggressions. In Four Seasons (2014), it is abstract. One of the works, summer, in this series, is described as: ‘Enwrapped by the warmth of the sun, the summer vegetation soars up to the sky in full fruition, as if in a prayer.’ Autumn is described as: ‘Awaiting the upcoming slumber, autumn stands in nobility and respect to embrace and protect the ageing of life.’ Politics is hidden in these highly poetic presentations. When art practice itself is political (whether or not it is, it is treated as such), the truth is that politics need not be forcibly injected into art. This is what happens in Vera Tamari’s art.
Amid Israel’s continuous attacks, including the two Intifadas, and the still ongoing situation, Vera Tamari participates in the curated show at the Venice Biennale. The documentation of the pottery and architecture traditions of Palestine, which began in the early sixties, continues to this day. It is also important to remember the numerous missions aimed at emancipating Palestinian women, such as training many of them to teach at an institute. One can see that Vera Tamari has carried out a remarkable mission by uniting multiple fields, such as artist/researcher/teacher, and by utilising them all for the survival of her people, as argued by Voskeritchian, Vera Tamari artist as an individual of many guises and roles, such as painter, ceramicist, installation artist, institution-builder, art teacher, curator, and community activist in a society under occupation.
In Vera Tamari’s series Family Portraits (1989-1996), we can see the august tradition of Palestinian family chronicles. According to Voskeritchian, the family in it is inhabited by a remarkable gallery of individuals, their stories grounded in calamitous events of expulsion, deportation, and returns, but also more everyday experiences of socialising, courting, and, of course, sitting in front of the photographer’s camera. Vera Tamari’s art practice spans a range of materials. However, ceramics have been her primary medium, through which she has mainly completed series such as Tale of a Tree (2002), Oracles from the Sea (1998), and Warriors Passed By Here (2019). When various still-life states, including photographs, are translated into ceramics, it cannot be seen as merely a change of medium. It is a transformation, a political statement. Voskeritchian reads it as ‘Without facial expressions, the figures acquire the universality of form, but also the anonymity of the universal, which is in turn complicated by framing it with the local craft of decorative tile’.
It is not a flaw that the artworks created by an artist who is also a representative of a constantly hunted people lack direct injury; on the contrary, it is an aesthetic assertion. An example given by Voskeritchian is that the olive trees that appear in Vera Tamari’s artworks serve as a direct representation of the Palestinian people, a symbol of Palestinian suffering, livelihood, and steadfastness; they also represent the Israeli policy of uprooting thousands of fruit-giving trees.
The observation ’embark on unravelling an alternative social history of Ramallah’ speaks about Vera Tamari. This, in particular, is also an indictment against Israel’s attempts to erase the Palestinian people. It reveals the fact that, no matter how much is destroyed, they will persist until the time they are manifested in art. Another aspect is presented in Jay Murphy’s arguments. From their very first exhibition in 1989, the group The New Vision reflected the efforts of Palestinian artists to create ‘a new art.’ Jay Murphy describes Vera Tamari’s artwork as ‘overt to the point of becoming cliché-ridden images of revolt.’ There are many layers in this artist’s creations: resistance against demolishing houses, defending those killed in attacks by transforming them into ceramic artworks, and so on.
According to Jay Murphy, Vera Tamari’s artworks are an attempt to recover the lost Palestinian past, which may never be recovered due to ongoing wars, and to connect it to art history and, by extension, to human history. There were efforts to destroy Palestinian art with the mission of eliminating rebellious exhibitions and, thereby, to eliminate the acts of rebellion themselves. Exhibitions that were active in the 1970s and the early 1980s were also lost during the 1987 Intifada. Vera Tamari and other artists worked simultaneously with many such factors. It is necessary to see Vera Tamari’s entry into the Venice Biennale as a continuation of these decades-long activities. However, alongside her presence, it should also be recognised that one should not expect a direct narrative of numerous suppressions resulting from ongoing war and resistance in her art.
Krispin Joseph PX, a poet and journalist, completed an MFA in art history and visual studies at the University of Hyderabad and an MA in sociology and cultural anthropology from the Central European University, Vienna.
