Rula Halawani: For You Mother

Rula Halawani presents her solo show “For You Mother” at Ayyam Gallery, Dubai, running March 23 – April 30, 2020. When she finished my series “For My Father”, her mother asked “Rula, are you going to make a series for me when I leave this universe?” The artist said: “Do not mention death Mama, I will make one for you as an honor now when you are still with us”.
Halawani’s mother used to say: “Even when we die and leave this world, our spirits will remain floating in the skies of our county, Palestine”. What her mother was referring to were the two tragedies that befell Palestine in the 1948 war – the Nakba and the June war of 1967. To her, the spirits of Palestinians would stay in the skies of Palestine despite the ensuing military occupation of the land, death and expulsion. The artist decided to devote a project to her mother, making several experimentations trying to translate her mother’s words into photographs.
For this project, she used archival photographic portraits of people who had lived in Palestine before their Diaspora in 1948. She faded these portraits, collaging them into the skies of special images from the Palestinian landscape, making them look somehow like floating spirits.