{"id":28873,"date":"2023-10-16T09:08:54","date_gmt":"2023-10-16T07:08:54","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/themarkaz.org\/oldmarkaz\/?p=28873"},"modified":"2023-10-16T09:08:54","modified_gmt":"2023-10-16T07:08:54","slug":"vera-tamaris-lifetime-of-palestinian-art","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/themarkaz.org\/oldmarkaz\/vera-tamaris-lifetime-of-palestinian-art\/","title":{"rendered":"Vera Tamari’s Lifetime of Palestinian Art"},"content":{"rendered":"
Vera Tamari and I met in college, in 1964. After graduation, our paths took us separate ways, hers back to Palestine and mine to the US. We stayed in touch through infrequent meetings in Amman and Ramallah. Beyond our friendship, Vera Tamari\u2019s work has always made me wonder: How does she create such powerful works in such delicate, almost enigmatic ways? My writing is occasioned by this question, in an amateur impulse, with the original sense of that word in mind.\u00a0\u00a0<\/span><\/h5>\n

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Taline Voskeritchian<\/span><\/h4>\n

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Rooted in the everyday life of Palestinians under occupation, Vera Tamari\u2019s 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. She uses clay, paper, fabric, metal, plexiglass, wood, paint, stone, film, wire screen and photographs to create a body of work which is as varied as it is defiant of political and aesthetic categorizations. It questions artistic boundaries and symbols and marries local traditions with larger movements and art practices.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Over a lifetime spanning the 1967 War, two Intifadas, and innumerable Israeli incursions into the West Bank and Gaza, Tamari has also been witness and chronicler, educator and engaged artist, observer and creative force. Since the mid-1960s, she has researched and documented the pottery and architecture traditions of Palestine; founded and directed two museums at Bir Zeit University (BZU), one physical and the other virtual; helped establish art associations and galleries and planned exhibitions; trained young Palestinian women to become art teachers at the UNRWA Women\u2019s Training Center; and taught architecture and design students at BZU.<\/span><\/p>\n

All this and more is documented in two recently published books: <\/span>Intimate Reflections: the Art of Vera Tamari<\/span><\/i> (A.M. Qattan, 2021) and <\/span>Returning: Palestinian Family Memories in Clay Reliefs, Photographs and Text<\/span><\/i><\/a> (Arab Image Foundation AIF and Educational Bookshop, 2022). The essays and commentary by fellow artists and art professionals in <\/span>Intimate Reflections <\/span><\/i>place Tamari\u2019s achievements in their political, local, and familial contexts. They offer a view of the artist as an individual of many guises and roles: painter, ceramicist, installation artist, institution-builder, art teacher, curator, and community activist in a society under occupation.\u00a0\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

In <\/span>Returning, <\/span><\/i>Tamari is the author of the book\u2019s ten chapters, each dedicated to one specific terracotta bas-relief panel of her series <\/span>Family Portraits<\/span><\/i> (1989-1996). The book belongs to that august tradition of Palestinian family chronicles, and is inhabited by a remarkable gallery of individuals, their stories grounded in calamitous events of expulsion, deportation, and returns, but also more quotidian experiences of socializing, courting and, of course, sitting in front of the photographer\u2019s camera. Tamari tells these stories in a style which is as light as it is sorrowful. Hers is the malleable voice of the writer who appears and disappears and appears again somewhere else, in some in-between place, weaving a sustained narrative, chronicling habits, describing the intimate culture of pre- and post-1948 Palestine.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

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In <\/span>Intimate Reflections<\/span><\/i>, the painter Samia Halaby<\/a> points out that Tamari\u2019s method is that of \u201cgathering parts,\u201d and has its sources in the \u201cArab art of geometric abstraction that flourished between the eleventh and eighteenth centuries,\u201d the \u201cliberation artists of Beirut during the 1970s,\u201d and the \u201cintifada artists of the 1980s,\u201d plus Cubism and Mexican muralism. Halaby says that Tamari challenges the conventional ways of containing these assembled parts; her works, especially the bas-reliefs, question the delineations between the art object, everyday life, and experience. Conceived and given shape under conditions of a long, brutal military occupation, this gathering of parts is a generative metaphor for Tamari\u2019s entire artistic project. The principle is evident in this portfolio too, which Tamari herself chose for this writing.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n