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Over 160 People Attend AIC Exhibition on Naqba Commemoration Day: The
Right of Return through the Language of Colours
On 15 May, over 160 people attended the grand opening
of Good Morning Yafa, an AIC Culture of Resistance exhibition of paintings
by Palestinian artist Yousef Katalo. The exhibition, held under the patronage
of and officially opened by Bethlehem Mayor Dr. Victor Batarseh, is an
innovative way of commemorating the Naqba, the Palestinian exodus from
the land upon which Israel
was created.
May 15 is the annual commemoration of the “catastrophe
(Naqba),” during which more than 700,000 Palestinians were forced to leave
their homes and see their villages destroyed or occupied following the self-proclamation
of the State of Israel. All those who fled were declared absent and their homes
and belongings expropriated by the nascent State of Israel: some of them escaped
to locations outside what became the 1949 armistice lines, while others fled to
areas that remained inside Israel.
From that moment, the issue of the refugees and their
right of return has been one of the most sensitive and problematic questions of
the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Those 700,000 Palestinians became over the
years more than four million refugees, located inside the Occupied
Palestinian Territories
and in Lebanon and Jordan.
This year, the 59th anniversary of the Naqba,
the Alternative Information Centre collaborated with the Cardinal House, the Jadal Center
for Culture and Development and the Bethlehem Peace Centre to organize an exhibition
entitled Good Morning Jafa of paintings by a contemporary artist from the
Hebron District, Yousef Katalo.
Katalo was born in 1959 in the Dura village (Hebron district) to a
poor family. Without any kind of artistic student career, he became one of the
most famous and important artists of contemporary art in Palestine. His art can be simultaneously abstract
and real, with continuous reference to the feelings of the population, but also
to their practical difficulties in daily life.
Katalo is
member of the Palestinian Artists League, Deputy President of the Ibda Centre
of Culture in the Dura village and a member of the Al Anqa Cultural Center in
Al-Khalil, Hebron District.
Attending
the Good Morning Jafa exhibition in the Bethlehem Peace Centre were numerous
representatives of the Palestinian Authority, including the Mayor of Bethlehem,
Dr. Victor Batarseh. The exhibition opened with speeches given by Dr. Batarseh,
the painter himself and Nassar Ibrahim for the Alternative Information Centre.
After this brief presentation, the audience went into the main room to see the
exhibition.
Looking at the exhibition, the first impression is channelled
inside the diaspora of the Palestinian people through an explosion of pastel colours,
from the red of Palestinian traditional clothes to the yellow of a new sunrise
in Palestinian history, from the blue of the sky to the brown of the earth. The
exhibition of Katalo leaves the viewer flowing inside of the Palestinian
struggle, going from the past to the future, from hope to suffering.
“These paintings express the ongoing Naqba of all the
Palestinians, not only of the refugees, and the hope to come back to our
villages, towns, to our land. But at the same time these paintings are a clear
message to the world; if they don’t have blind eyes and deaf ears, they cannot
ignore our screams of help: through this exhibition we are asking the world to
support our struggle for freedom and our right to return,” said Saleim Abu
Hawwash, member of the General Assembly of the Badil Association.
“In every picture here I can see a different idea, a
different side of the same thing. These images remind me of my home, my history,
my land, my culture. All these colours are the practical expression of the beautiful
hopes we have and at the same time of the bad situation we are living since the
Naqba in 1948.” Sheffa Amlah, from the Biology Department of the Hebron University
has only one remark: “If I had so much talent to do something like that, I
would like to do it with my hands, using real colours and not a computer, using
my body entirely, expressing feelings also through the texture of the paint and
the effort of my hands. Anyway this exhibition is wonderful”
The General Director of the Ministry of Culture in Hebron has a lot to say
about the Katalo: “The suffering that you can see in these paintings is that of
all the Palestinian population expressed by colours and shapes, feelings that
Katalo feels inside him and is able to transform in powerful images through his
paintings. Katalo has choosen this theme for all his art and is able to express
the struggle of all the Palestinian population, but always with the means of growing
and developing toward the future. Each of these points here can express a different
feeling, like the sufferance expressed in the one with the cross that compares
the suffering of Jesus to the suffering of our people, or the keys, present in
a lot of those works, that are the keys of our houses, to which we are waiting
to return.”
Each individual painting, each single particular in
Katalo’s exhibition is a scream of injustice, is a political and cultural claim
to the unity of the Palestinian population, to the resistance but also to not losing
the hope in a better future. On this day to remember the Naqba here in Bethlehem, more than 160
people decide to make jump in a coloured non violent world in which past and
present are strictly connected and the Palestinian history creates the path for
the Palestinian future.
The exhibition
will remain open till the 4th of June, every day from 10:00 to 18:00
and everyone is more than welcome to
visit it. The hope is that this kind of non violent resistance that artists
like Katalo did can not only communicate the natural feeling of resistance that
the artist is able to express, but also let the world understand through the
art that the suffering of the Palestinian population is going on, and is
assuming the red colour of denouncement and resistance.
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