Fahed Halabi's Page

A Portrait of the Artist as a Kitchen Worker

The good-hearted gesture and optimism apparent in Fahed Halabi’s drawings, like their seeming naiveté, recreate the protocol for unequal relations between Arabs and Jews in the country.

In the guest book placed at Fahed Halabi’s solo exhibit, “Yalla Bye,” at the Midrasha, friends and acquaintances wrote their impressions of the exhibit. When I visited, I took the book and browsed through it. Some of the messages were in Arabic, a language that I don’t understand. Those who wrote in Hebrew, among them poet Aharon Shabtai, were unanimous in their praise, some of it for Halabi’s lovely solo exhibit: They ranged from “a powerful, direct exhibit” to “brave” and “real.” The superlatives poet and journalist Chicky Arad posted on his blog regarding the exhibit seem to belong to the same genre: “Beyond the political aspect of the exhibit’s contents, what is interesting about it is seeing an artist driven to create when everything is going against it, whose paintings are really a crime that he commits with every brush stroke. It is more interesting than seeing an exhibit by a girl whose rich parents sent her to study at Betzalel or the Midrashsa, who sees herself as an artist…” It is so easy to once again label the Arab with the direct, real and authentic stereotypes – and how ironic, as the exhibit deals with these stereotypes, however indirectly, ironically and not free of pain. This is nothing if not symptomatic of the Tel Aviv audience, satiated of emotions, running to crown an Arab artist, the “Other,” and along the way missing his entire point.

There is no doubt that Halabi is a hit, at least now, in the summer of 2008. One of the paintings featured in the exhibit, a flattering and intentionally naïve portrait of [former Arab parliament member] Azmi Bishara, was featured on the cover of Ma’ayan magazine issued this year (Arad is one of the magazine’s editors). Bishara’s portrait is featured between those of two female Israeli parliament members, Limor Livnat and Tzipi Livni. The colors are alive and flat, and the format is surprisingly large. Halabi maintained Livnat’s facial features (her single dimple), but gave her authenticity and a deep look that she must certainly wish that she had. He almost turned Livni into a sex kitten in a suit, a beauty whose lips emote a sensual purr. The three paintings are part of a larger series of flattering female Israeli parliament members, flattering almost to the point of addiction. One can recognize in them, alongside naïve and professional painting, including a curvy signature “Arab Work,” flattery and the need we feel to heap gifts on our Arabs, the Israeli Arabs, like knafeh, on the house.

“Knafeh” is the name of another painting in the exhibit – a portrait of the artist as a kitchen worker. The painting is realistic, large, and oddly optimistic. It should be viewed in the context of two additional paintings in a similar format: In one an image of a man walking on his hands and in the other a caricature of an Arab in a keffiyah, with his back to us, looking at us over his shoulder, taking off his galabiyeh to expose his backside and penis. So who is the Arab? The restaurant worker out of our sight, an erotic fantasy, or a man whose ethnic identity forces him to juggle opposing, stereotypical identities? At the very least, this threesome is meant to cancel out the direct hypothesis mistakenly attributed to the artist.

Two video projects made by simple means (a style so embraced by the curator, Doron Robina), accentuate the complicated message put forth by Halabi’s work. One was shot by a video camera placed on a shelf in a restaurant where he works. We see Halabi and another cook chatting while working, as Mizrahi versions of Purim songs blare in the background. Halabi asks his Arab friend, who is busy preparing stuffed peppers, why his name is Yehuda. The absolute assembly motif is repeated in the other video project, in which the artist is seen placing phylacteries outside the central bus station in Tel Aviv, instructed by a red-faced Ashkenazi Yeshiva student. In this instance as well, loud music is playing and the south Tel Aviv noise increases the absurdity of the situation.

Fahed Halabi. Yalla Bye. The Midrasha.