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| Tel Aviv exhibition showcases Arafat as bridge to understand Palestinians
TEL AVIV, Aug 1 (AFP) - Gangsta rapper, terrorist or vampire, Yasser Arafat stars in a new Tel Aviv art show entitled "Guess Who Died" although its young curator insists he means no disrespect but wants to highlight Israel's obsession with the ageing Palestinian leader. "I wanted to reflect on Israel's obsession with Arafat. He is constantly defined as a problem but truly what do we know about him?" asks Ori Dessau, a 24-year-old, chain-smoking Israeli. BizVantage – When knowing counts: Business, Investing, Technology. "By extension, what do we know about the Palestinians? That is truly Israel's paradox -- we identify with the West when we live in the Middle East, sometimes less than 15 miles from the (Palestinian) territories." Whether the exhibition -- that only shows the works of Jewish Israeli artists because Dessau says there are too few known Arab Israeli painters -- helps understand the "other" is debatable but it surely raises questions, at least in Dessau's mind. A case in point is a 1997 marker on paper work by Avner Ben Gal in which Arafat is portrayed as a blood-thirsty vampire. "Don't forget who is Arafat" is handwritten at the bottom. Several anti-Israeli attacks perpetrated by the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) in the 1970s are listed on the righthand side and another penned slogan reads "PLO lies" which, Dessau explains, is a pun in Hebrew also meaning "Master of lies." "I chose to read it as we don't know who is Arafat. He is ... mysterious," muses Dessau. "Death Row" is a 2003 collage by Adam Rabinowitz in which a photograph of a young Arafat is stuck on the body of slain rapper Tupac Shakur. "I did not mean to insult Arafat by choosing this work or any other work here. This exhibit is very much about the hierarchy of death in both our societies, about whose death can be justified," he says. Israeli premier Ariel Sharon has publicly expressed his regret at not killing the Palestinian leader when, as the then defense minister, he led the campaign which ousted the PLO from Lebanon in the early 1980s. An unusual work, in this otherwise violent collection, is a large 2003 charcoal drawing of the veteran leader donning his traditional headscarf and military outfit. The artist, Eli Petel, stuck a photograph of Arafat's estranged wife, Suha, inside the wooden frame. Asked whether the small photograph of Suha is meant to belittle the role of women in Palestinian society, Dessau nods positively but immediately adds: "It's not for us Israelis to say. But the question can be raised." "How internal can Palestinian matters be when we Israelis, the occupiers, represent them?" he asks. The works chosen by Dessau are also intended to raise the issue of who is the victim and who is the assailant. In a 1998 painting by Avner Ben Gal entitled "Bleeding House", several dark-haired, bearded and sometimes bleeding faces appear in the foreground of an abstract house whose thin, bright-colored contours recall a work by Dutch artist Piet Mondrian. "Mondrian would have left the house empty but here the artist decided to fill it in with the heads of terrorists or maybe Jews," says Dessau. A 2000 oil by the same artist depicts a man whose bleeding head crashed into his car's windshield. "We don't know who's who. It could be the Israeli victim of a Palestinian attack or the other way around," he muses. When asked, he says the "artist is right-wing" and the son of Major General Avigdor Ben Gal, a man close to Sharon. "I only want to read the picture and not the biography of the author," protests Dessau. He says he had to pick several works by the same artists "because few represent Arafat". "But Israeli art, like everything else here, is linked to the conflict with the Palestinians. It's inescapable," says the young man, who is a proponent of "an immediate and unilateral army withdrawal from the territories". "We don't have to support the Palestinian ethos but we do have to end the occupation," he says. sc/co/kir/bm Lifestyle-Israel-art-Arafat
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