Standby 60
Hani Zurob

From the beginning, I learned that the artist is not a historian, nor a political analyst, and concluded that art is not a matter of talent but of adventure. As a matter of fact, my work of art and my own being have nothing to do with politics or editing; on the contrary, it is a simple view of my private life, being born and having grown up under the occupation thirty years ago, and having constructed consciousness and unconsciousness under the constraints of its rules, where occupation and its heavy repercussions have an impact on all details of anyone’s daily life in Palestine.

‘Standby’ is a term that may cross the minds of a few people quickly, or if worse comes to the worst, for the unluckiest, ‘Standby’ may represent just a few hours of ‘transit’ or ‘an outstanding situation’ in some airport or another; actually, in my personal situation, ‘Standby’ goes beyond the simple geographical or linguistic criteria to refer explicitly to the whole Palestinian people who have been placed under such a situation for nearly sixty years now, i.e. since 1948, with a focus on figures, because a large number of people mean to associate that with the creation of the State of Israel.

My own project, started in 2007, is part of a set of modern artistic works initiated into exhibitions since 2006; painting is the main guidepost of my works, with difficulties related to the material tools since I have moved to Paris. I face a certain dilemma to express the ideas I wish to spread, because I am no longer using colours but bitumen as a basic material.

I had an objective of achieving sixty paintings, the main stream of which is a model representing a person standing on a chair, in a stable situation, changing his position slightly from one picture to another, and face expressions too, thanks to what I achieve from the use of bitumen material only, perfectly in compliance with the set of symbols representing the ‘Standby’ situation I wish to demonstrate in each single picture. No sooner had seven charts based on this principle been accomplished, that I discovered I had gathered seven elements into a unique element: the face; from the various colours and material used up to now, I have switched to using black bitumen melted with some henna and pigment only, making of my ‘sixtieth’ project a mixture of asphalt paste representations, applicable in a way quite different from my former and usual work principles: in fact, during the previous phase, I used to stand face to face in front of my ‘work of art’, whereas now, I look at it from above, something which has affected the way I look at it: the change in the way I spread bitumen paste aggressively on its surface has completely shifted my view from a vertical to a horizontal position.

The choice of bitumen as a basic material for my ‘Standby’ project is not random, but the fruit of a physical and psychological background during a specific period in my life where my own conscience was developing, day after day since childhood, under the Israeli occupation. Darkness and grey colours have always dominated the home in which I was born, Rafah Camp during the days and nights of the first Intifadah which had started in 1987 and during which we witnessed the difficult conditions of curfew imposed by the occupation. Those days have much affected my visual psychological awareness: up to now, I am not able to forget the day when we ‘woke up’ from a long sleep which had lasted forty days under curfew, to discover a completely dark outdoor space, where the outside world had totally been covered – in all directions – with bitumen: streets, commercial places, houses, and even the long palm tree which used to distinguish so nicely our quarter and which had been dramatically coloured in black up to the half and stood in that state until it was destroyed by an Israeli bulldozer two years later.