Miniatures, monuments, and secrets: notes on the work of artist Wafa Hourani - By Lara Khaldi

The monument and the time vertigo

The image on the invitation card for this exhibition was taken from inside one of the sculptures Darwin was Palestinian which is an anthropomorphic form made out of wire and silk thread. While Wafa Hourani’s depiction of Palestinian cities or refugee camps is in miniature, inversely the characters living in those cities are larger than life itself. Larger both in scale and in character. For instance, the characters made out of wire and thread have very tall necks, because according to a fictive Darwinian theory, the Palestinian would have grown a tall neck in order to adapt to living behind the apartheid wall and to be able to look beyond it. The view from inside the sculpture reminds one of Vladimir Tatlin’s unbuilt Anti-Monument to the Third International, or the Eifel Tower or even Babel tower. All dysfunctional towers or ruins who only use is that one could see the city from their tops. The future of the Palestinian is a ruin/monument in Hourani’s work, one which rivals the checkpoint tower and the apartheid wall. In Hourani’s magical fiction, the Palestinian body is aestheticized into a monument, because everything around it is in a monumental state. This body living under occupation is of bare life, mechanical, but also a ruin, similar to any other city, the Palestinian city does not have one dysfunctional monument, but is full of monuments. If Tatlin’s Monument to the Third International is iconic of the failure of technology, and of the artistic Avant-Garde after the revolution in Russia then Hourani’s Darwin was Palestinian is a monument to the future failure of the colonial apparatus.