[Digital Poetics 4.10] In the Shade of the Sun at The Mosaic Rooms by Hannah Hutchings-Georgiou
Hope, humour, resistance and strength are found in abundance in the Mosaic Rooms' latest exhibition to spotlight four Palestinian artists, In the Shade of the Sun.
What does it mean to work with an aesthetic of ‘radical softness’ when exploring the difficult and traumatic position Palestinians across the diaspora hold today? What does it mean to laugh when tears are usually shed? To smile and hope, when fury and dejection are frequently felt? In the digital, textile and visual artwork of Xaytun Ennasr, ‘radical softness’ means to hold an olive leaf to utopic visions of regeneration. It means to plant a tree in the troubled soils of their homeland. It means to look to nature for recuperation and political liberation. And it means to cherish ecological connections to their ancestors whilst planting seeds for future generations.
The Mosaic Rooms’ latest exhibition, In the Shade of the Sun, dwells in this vision and aesthetic of ‘radical softness’. Bringing together four Palestinian artists working across a range of disciplines, the show celebrates the multiplicity of experiences and expressions of life in the Palestinian diaspora today. Using Ennasr’s concept of ‘radical softness’, In the Shade of the Sun evokes the hope, humour and indomitable character of Palestinians in the face of continual persecution, displacement, loss and violence. It evokes such optimism and capability not through obvious visual metaphors and trauma-laden narratives, but through pixelated trees sprouting on a touch screen, as seen in Ennasr’s installation; through birdsong, communal singing and poetic films of fugitivity, as evinced in Dina Mimi’s dual single-channelled film, and through the darkly comic melodrama of parental multi-play in Mona Benyamin’s work. Positing the cultural and political possibilities open to Palestinians today, In the Shade of the Sun poetically and gently asserts that there are more ways than one to confront the reality of ‘now’.
Revolution is a forest that the colonist can’t burn, Xaytun Ennasr, 2023, Installation view at The Mosaic Rooms. Photograph by Andy Stagg, courtesy of The Mosaic Rooms
Xaytun Ennasr’s installation is not the first work to pose the potentiality of this current moment, yet it remains the ethical and affective core of the entire exhibition. Revolution is a forest that the colonist can’t burn (2023) literalises their theory of ‘radical softness’ by centring a 120-year-old olive tree on an embroidered and hand-painted navy tapestry. Taking their cue from the work’s revolutionary name, Ennasr plants a literal forest before us in the form of diminutive fig trees and almost hallucinogenic drawings of arboreal forms fantastically flourishing across the gallery’s interior. The result is a moving scene of hope and optimism, community and care, but also ecological and geological reclamation. Olive trees have existed for millennia in the Mediterranean basin; they remain symbolic of peace, fecundity and provision, and are indicative of a land’s resources and history. So intrinsic is this shrub to Palestinian life and national identity that its leaves are the central motif on the keffiyeh, a scarf important to the Palestine resistance movement. By placing a tree that predates the occupation of Palestine before us, Ennasr at once invokes and revokes the ecocide – in particular, the uprooting of trees and agricultural areas in the name of settler colonialism – occurring in occupied Palestinian territories. In this single tree, Ennasr actively lives out his radically soft politics: plant trees, plant seeds, plant hope, they implore.
Planting, not plundering, will lead the way, and to illustrate this further Ennasr has us plant trees by way of a game. Employing their video design skills to envisage this revolution, Ennasr softly leads us into the redevelopment of the Palestinian diaspora. The regeneration of trees – and the political revolution via the protection and cultivation of the environment – is not confined to the original territories of Palestine alone. No; what Ennasr gives us in abundant colours and poetry, whether on screen, paper or cloth, are samples of hope, saplings of opportunity, branches and leaves and canopies of healing that are of the mind as much as they are of the land. From the digitally rendered to the manually drawn, the trees they want us to plant and cultivate are ones of ideas and emotion, a forest of the imagination that will foster genuine growth and change across the diaspora and outside of it. For Palestinians who have been displaced or undergone forced migration, such philosophical seedlings regenerate the fertile soils of their home.
The melancholy of this useless afternoon, Dina Mimi, 2023, Installation view at The Mosaic Rooms. Photograph by Andy Stagg, courtesy of The Mosaic Rooms
In the basement gallery, Dina Mimi addresses issues of displacement and fugitivity, and the loss and grief both entail. Unlike Ennasr – whose interactive work moves forward into new potentialities and futurities for the displaced or home-situated Palestinian – Mimi’s videos exist in the state and situation of the fugitive. Using two single-channelled videos (structured into separate chapters) projected opposite each other, Mimi creates an overlapping sonic and visual dialogue about the attempts to retrieve a sense of home when existing from afar. The melancholy of this useless afternoon chapter 1 (2023) has the speaker recount a lost connection with a former friend when being uprooted, and the disconnection felt during their attempts to reconnect. Told over mottled solarised footage of condensation and outdoor scenes, the speaker’s grief – their subdued shock and sorrow when recalling a once familiar friendship grown coldly unfamiliar – captures the minor jolts of rupture in the major breakdown that is forced migration. Songs of resistance and liberation that follow do not so much as lyrically absolve painful memories and losses, but bring in a counterpoint of feeling, another rhythm and tone to the retelling of past melancholic moments, to the revolutionary ideals both friends alternately hold.
Chapter 2 (2023) similarly literalises this situational politics of revision, resistance and reflection concerning the realities of forced migration. Featuring footage of male smugglers releasing or hiding small birds in Palestine and Jordan, alongside bird song competitions held in the Netherlands, the second chapter conveys this dual affective response to the forced removal and survival of vulnerable peoples. It is, however, all too easy to see the birds purely as signifiers for the migrant or occupied individual. Mimi goes beyond this simplification in stressing the proximity, as well as the similitude, between bird and man. Smugglers conceal birds under their clothes, in the lining of their trousers and the soles of their shoes; in this, there is a counter-narrative and politics of reclamation akin to that found in the multimedia work of Ennasr. Like the men, the delicate birds are from Palestine, and like their ‘smuggling’ owners, they, too, are re-tethered and reconciled to the bodies, if not lands, of their former homes. Carrying these birds on their person – creatures who embody not just their flight and fight, but their determination to exist on their own terms – the smugglers perpetuate a culture, preserving its traditions beyond the boundaries of Palestine. They recreate, in a more overt sense, radical softness in the care they have for these creatures and the seriousness with which they take this role. A fig, an olive, a branch, a feather to recall and rebuild a home far from one’s country.
Tomorrow, again, Mona Benyamin, 2023, Installation view at The Mosaic Rooms. Photograph by Andy Stagg, courtesy of The Mosaic Rooms
Dislocation rather than relocation, however, marks Mona Benyamin’s surrealist film, Tomorrow, again (2023). Operating from the fragment, Benyamin provides a sequence that repetitively folds on itself. Segueing together snippets of fictional news and weather reports alongside interviews, all of which border on the absurd in their heightened melodrama, Benyamin bravely centres the exhaustion, dejection and painful absurdity of a country caught in a cycle of violence. Newsreaders weep to excess, weathermen laugh hysterically, a discussion panel descends into discord: exaggerated to the point of hilarity and fatigue, Tomorrow, again highlights the nadir of such suffering while laughing at the bewildering repeat of it. What renders the montage of everyday colonial violence, repression and occupation concurrently tragic and comic is the artist’s parents, both of whom play most of the characters in the film and bring the mimicry of national trauma back into the personal again. Through its doubling and multiplying over mediated “news” from occupied Palestine – there is mock footage of a man supposedly putting an explosive on a coach or, when replaying the film, disappearing in the smoke of this sensationalised nonstory – Tomorrow, again, exposes how the real testimonies, the real events and real persons of interest go unknown and unreported. Sitting on a sofa reminiscent of that used in the film by her parents, we, too, become implicated in this consumer frenzy of crippling and emotionally exhausting news, unable to see the people from the headlines, or comprehend their actual circumstances from afar. ‘I saw everything…’, ‘I saw nothing’, say two men of the explosive supposedly left on the coach. It is in this between state – the everything of the nothing, the tragic of the comic, the pain of the hope, the shade of the sun – that Benyamin’s film positions us.
Benyamin’s film comes at a time when Netanyahu has presented the UN with a map erasing Palestine from the Middle East, and when the IDF have been at their most persistently violent to the Palestinian people. The cycle of conflict and abuse could not feel more real nor the situation appear more hopeless. But these interdisciplinary and multimedia works allow us to think through and with the next generation of young, actively resistant Palestinians. Their radical softness – expressed through notions and tokens of peace and ecological prosperity, embodied connection and customs, and humour at the bleakest of times – give us multiple methods through which to listen, support and solidly assist in the building of new futures and new worlds across the Palestinian diaspora. In the Shade of the Sun gives us new collaborative forms of optimism, new languages in which to express the ‘nothing’ and ‘everything’ of it all, and new personal visions through which to understand and take hold of the political. Planting a tree, proffering care, holding a bird close to one’s own beating heart, the soft is the new force in the radical artistic output of Palestine.
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Coda: in the unceasing glare of the sun, we sow hope.
Since September 5th, a day has not gone by without me thinking of Mona Benyamin’s film, Tomorrow, again. ‘Why September the 5th?’ you ask, ‘surely you mean October 7th?’. On September the 5th, In the Shade of the Sun opened to a bubbling flow of bodies joyous and contemplative of the work around them. The three artists unassumingly mingled amongst us, talking to friends, generously greeting new admirers, the glow of their films still visible on our faces. I remember quietly slipping in and out of the rooms, typing notes on my phone, listening to the comments made by those around me, sensing the mood palpably shift with each and every viewing of Mimi and Benyamin’s films. I remember joining in the extreme delight expressed when beholding Ennasr’s olive tree in the centre of the main gallery: a green miracle in a white-walled museum. I remember being aware of my own body on an unseasonably hot day; being aware of the comfort in which I could move through this space, one which was charged with the discomfort of past narratives and poetic testimonies about the forced movement of a people who have long had to reckon with mass displacement and ethnic cleansing. I knew something of this too, but this third generation knowledge was nothing in comparison to the impressions and expressions shared here: bodies ripped from the land like a deep-rooted tree from the earth; feathers like shrapnel netted in flesh; bitter seeds from a pomegranate still evincing the sweet taste of home.
September the 5th stands out to me – though it is but one moment, one gentle occurrence in what we, now more than ever, need to see as a continuum of suffering and resistance by Palestinian people. September the 5th is not ‘before’ the storm, nor ‘after’ the past chaos. It is a calm captured and caressed in the palm of the artists’ hands; it is an opening where hope coexists with doubt, joy with mourning; where radicalism is softly and clearly appreciated in the sprouts of a fig tree, the branches of an olive long used to bearing fruit. On the night, I had the luxury of writing the above review and complacently enjoying these sentiments, picking them ripe from the limb of the proverbial tree before their actual originators were blasted from sight.
But Benyamin’s film stayed with me, unsettling my sense of comfort, the ease with which we will consume images of a ticking clock warping the laughing face of her father, of real footage of Palestine under siege. Her film haunts my relationship to the ‘before’, the ‘after’, the ‘now’. It convicts me not because of the futility of the current moment – or what feels crushingly futile – but because of its true representation of time. In reality, nothing began or ended on September the 5th or, for that matter, October the 7th, despite what western mainstream media outlets and government representatives present. There is a long and ever continuous yesterday flooding into tomorrow, again, as Benyamin’s title announces. There is a series of atrocities that historians title and catalogue as ‘events’, that people bury, the nakbas of yesteryear which are still painfully felt today and will be revisited with fresh strikes tomorrow. Benyamin’s film, for all its parodic play, confronts us with the trauma, the ‘Catastrophe’ of this truth.
Tomorrow, again, Mona Benyamin, 2023, still.
It also mirrors something of the trauma we, in the west are not only willingly perpetuating but consuming, on a daily basis. ‘Tomorrow, Tuesday, we predict a certain instability to take over Palestine and the region,’ Benyamin’s father, dressed as a weatherman, announces against an apocalyptic skyscape, before his agonisingly extended laughter breaks the frame. We laugh at this bathetic mocking of perpetual trauma and conflict, only to realise that we, too, are foretellers of daily ‘instability’ in the ‘region’; that we, too, are watching, consuming, some even laughing and welcoming, images of extreme trauma and torture and destruction. Yet how can we bear witness without engaging in these images, especially when mainstream media outlets continue to suppress the daily accounts of the horrors visited on those in Gaza and the West Bank? When leaders around the world give the greenlight for Israel to fulfil Netanyahu’s mapped out fantasy of erasing Palestine forever? We too, are playing a game of ‘I saw everything’, ‘I saw nothing’, as genocide is committed right before our eyes, in real time, in screen grabs, tiktoks, facetime interviews and tweets. ‘I saw everything’, ‘I saw nothing’, ‘I saw everything’ – but when will we see it no more?
Can we, after being implicated in this unceasing cycle of trauma, after witnessing the murder of thousands – the damning nothing of everything realised in homes, towns, families and the bodies of babies: obliteration complete – still act out of soft radicalism? Can we still hold an olive leaf to the belief of a free Palestine? Can we still radically hope in this most hopeless of times? Can we still hold onto everything even when we feel all we hold in our hands is fast becoming nothing? Ennasr’s aesthetic, their theory, their vision of radical softness, is needed now more than ever.
And it is present in more places than we would dare to hope: in the marches, protests, fundraisers, talks, strikes, articles and tweets around the world calling for an immediate ceasefire and end to occupation, standing in solidarity with Palestine. But more radically, more movingly, more courageously, we see it in the stories of those Palestinians coming together whilst being under continuous barbaric assault. Those Palestinians still breaking what little bread is left with each other – the man passing a stranger in the street who stops to share his pitta, the father giving his child water first after queueing for hours. Radical softness is to be found in the hellish death trap that Gaza has become in families giving shelter to other unknown families, in doctors working round the clock by the blue light of their phones in order to treat the injured, in the journalists whose own children have been murdered by Israeli bombs still choosing to get up, face the camera and report on what Gazans are going through, minute by minute, moment by moment, tomorrow, again. These are harrowing realities but ones where radical softness – resilience, courage, perseverance, strength, love, care and hope – is still abundantly felt and bravely shown.
Right now, we are in the unceasing light of the sun, in its interminable glare; tomorrow, again, we hope to find shade. Consider the olive tree. Believe it will bear fruit again.
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In the Shade of the Sun is showing at the Mosaic Rooms until 14 January 2024.
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Hannah Hutchings-Georgiou is a writer, the founding editor-in-chief and general arts editor of Lucy Writers, and is currently writing up her PhD in English Literature and Visual Material Culture at UCL. She regularly writes on visual art, dance and literature for magazines such as The London Magazine, The White Review, The Arts Desk, Plinth UK, Burlington Contemporary, review 31, 87press’ the Hythe, The Double Negative, Worms Magazine, and Art Monthly. From 2022-2023, Hannah will be managing an Arts Council England-funded project for emerging women and non-binary writers from migrant backgrounds, titled What the Water Gave Us, in collaboration with The Ruppin Agency and Writers’ Studio, which has already resulted in an anthology of the same name. She is also working on a hybrid work of creative non-fiction about women artists and drawing, an extract from which is published in Prototype’s 2023 anthology, Prototype 5. Read her work https://linktr.ee/hhgsparkles Follow her on Twitter @hhgsparkles and Instagram @hannahhg25
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The moral right of the author has been asserted. However, the Hythe is an open-access journal and we welcome the use of all materials on it for educational and creative workshop purposes.
