gallery
 
events and articls
 
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To Conserve is to Transform

To conserve the events of our lives in glass apparels means a chemical dealing with the idea of a health quarantine and recovery in the world of signs.

  

In this job, via imagination and letters of some prisoners in their forgotten cells in Israeli prisons, the artist attempts to give a clear image of the situation suffered by 3 million Palestinians. The light shed on this work through 48 glass cells, where the artist has managed to build his archive; the shadows fade away like the words-lines-life, and he transforms the scenarios and the most intimate spaces into a public library. This art project for Tayseer Barakat was born from the idea of an archive, which is also apparent in his previous work, based on the artist’s finding of a box that contained documents relating to the expulsion of Palestinians in the year 1948, which is part of his departure, Al-Nakba.

The glass cubes are the archive and at the same time the apparel in which through it requires a change of this dramatic situation, in which any of these scenarios justice could appear.
The materials used by Barakat in this work reflect the intention and the content. First the glass: fragile, transparent, well-closed, like the circumstances of daily life and its reasons. After that comes the wood, with shadows and symbols drawn with fire, taking us back to the tree, which carries the most symbolic meaning for Palestinians; the olive tree, the tree is synonymous to every Palestinian, because it is rooted to the ground and in life. Lastly comes the paper in a form of a letter defines the connection between the individual and the group, between the prisoner and his family, between isolation and freedom. Letters weave the collective consciousness towards the unjust pressure and the urge to resistance and recovery. Letters written in solitude to be read in utter solitude, despite the fact it seems free and open, exposing everything. Some of them are folded, others are rolled up and others form arches, so that the group attains a diverse individual configurations, allowing each prison cell, regardless whether they are all the same, to seem different with all its details, such as is the difference between the subject and the group.