Drawing the Kafr Qasem Massacre

Samenvatting

The massacre that took place on 29th October 1956 in Kafr Qasem was not the only massacre Palestinians have experienced in their long and painful history. Unlike the massacres that are associated with the Nakba, it was perpetrated after the Israeli state was established. It was deliberate, planned, calculated, a cold blooded murder against workers returning from their fields not having heard that a curfew was imposed over their village. After the massacre, Kafr Qasem was subjected to military cordon and media prohibition, which imposed debilitating isolation after the massacre. No one was allowed in or out of the village and a tight gag order was placed on the news. Twenty-two days after the massacre, news finally reached the world. As a visual artist, Samia Halaby always set herself high ... standards. She has aspired to \'do the mostadvanced painting possible\'. But this was not the full extent of her ambition. Her credo, soeloquently expressed there, is that she also wanted through her art to "support the ambition ofPalestinian liberation." The evocative drawings in this book document the atrocities of Kafr Qasem. To capture these events on paper she gathered data in every form possible: oral testimonials, photographs, media reports, anything she could lay her hands on. Not only did she carry out archival research, she also managed to meet with survivors and conduct face to face interviews and field visits. These testaments are also included in the book. The drawings in this book provide superb examples of Halaby\'s skill and artistry at figurativedrawing. The emotions of anger and fear spring out of the pages and enable the viewer to relive the terrible suffering endured by the inhabitants of this small Palestinian village that found itself inside the border of the newly established Israeli state in 1949. Born in Jerusalem in 1936, Samia Halaby is a leading abstract painter and an influential scholar ofPalestinian art. Although based in the United States since 1951, Halaby is recognized as a pioneerof contemporary abstraction in the Arab world. Influenced by the abstract movements of theRussian avant-garde, Halaby works with the conviction that new approaches to painting can redirect ways of seeing and thinking not only within the realm of aesthetics but also as contributions to technological and social advancement. Her work has been collected by international institutions since the 1970s, including the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum of Art (New York and Abu Dhabi); Yale University Art Gallery; National Gallery of Art, Washington D.C.; Art Institute of Chicago; Cleveland Museum of Art; Institute du Monde Arabe, and the British Museum. Samia Halaby is represented by Ayyam Gallery.