Without visibility you are lost

Ramallah
"Are you going in?" an Israeli driver asks us disconcertedly at the airport, when we say we want to go to Ramallah. We notice his choice of words: 'in', then you're not talking about another country. 'Palestinian territories', another colored term. Yes, we want to go to Ramallah. Israelis are not allowed to go there, but we are with our Dutch passports. Because the program of KUNSTENISRAËL only starts on the second day, we use the free afternoon after arrival to visit parts of the Qalandija Biennial there. We "enter" effortlessly: the roads are empty because it is Saturday. Even the checkpoints, notorious for long lines and intimidating cross-examinations, are nearly empty. Israel is a heavily militarized country but the tradition of the Sabbath seems to carry more weight now. We see walls, barbed wire, cameras and signs of apartheid: roads where Palestinians are not allowed to
drive, only Israeli passport holders.

And then the genial Ramallah, where we visit four exhibitions of the Qalandija Biennial. This third edition, The Sea is Mine, is about return. In the exhibition Pattern Recognition by Nat Muller runs a video by Ruba Salameh, a young Palestinian artist we will visit with KUNSTENISRAËL later in the week. Her video shows a billboard in East Jerusalem. With peeled off papers, under which moving images shine, she literally pastes different places over each other: over the pain of cruel history, over the sea unreachable for Palestinians. Laying history over the present, she recounts the different Palestinian realities, which she also feels: she too cannot live where she wants. The reality is repressive but meanwhile there is something beautiful hiding in that broken billboard: the sea.

Another video shows a bedspread slowly being unraveled, exposing a naked woman - did it hold her captive, or protect her? Such ambiguities are what this biennial recounts in often abstract art, rhythmic patterns, where there is nothing abstract about it. Abstraction is linked to Islam, and perhaps also to the secret language of occupied territories? Messages are veiled, geometric patterns become maps, and maps are military targets. Some works show calligraphed texts, testimonies about fleeing and being displaced. Installations take up space, and space is political, occupation. Art is political in Israel and in Palestine. Always. Because even human existence is political there.

So we walk from one exhibition to the next, lunching and enjoying the sun along the way. "Welcome, Free Palestine," men call out to us, smiling. "I love you.
shout children. Ramallah is a smart city, wifi everywhere (who would own that data?), with outdoor cafes where people sat down to cocktails or bong. Historic buildings turn out
to have been restored with European support and NGOs, including the Walloon community, which just that week torpedoed the CETA agreement with Canada. When our Palestinian cab driver drives us back in the evening, the sun is down and the way back is difficult, dark, along hairpin bends. But wait, there's a beautiful straight road with lampposts further on? No: that belongs to the Jewish settlements on the West Bank, much more modern cities than I had thought. But only when we have passed the wall and drive into Tel Aviv with all its skyscrapers does the realization sink in: this is what a modern city should look like. Ramallah is so small.

Tel Aviv
The next morning, the real program of KUNSTENISRAËL begins. Coffee cups echo through the marble hotel lobby, the Haaretz is there with headlines such as 'A woman's place is in combat' and 'Latest cyberattack gives a taste of the wars Israel can expect to fight', and a lot about Trump and Clinton. This day is all about the modern-
ism, which since 1948 had been a tool for the nationbuilding of the new country that would leave behind the diaspora and traumas of war. A clean slate. Waiting at the Sommer Gallery, past fountains and Bauhaus villas, we look around on posh Rothschild boulevard to Independence Hall. Straight and ornate, this is the modernist pride we'll see more of, but it stands derelict. How can that be, this seems to us the kind of culture the right-wing government wants to maintain? But no, the Independence spirit celebrated here is about equal rights, which is at odds with prevailing political noises.

After gallery and studio visits, we drive to the Tel Aviv University Gallery across Shlomo Ibn Gabirol street, a seemingly ordinary shopping street but broadly designed for military parades. Bauhaus architecture, with some Orientalist interludes, blends seamlessly into the brutalist concrete construction of the university where we stop.
Bare, raw, honest, this architecture is about the new beginning that Israel set out to propagate from 1948. The diaspora of yesteryear was to culminate in a modern dawn in the crucible of the new nation-state of Israel. This meant austere architecture and abstract art, bare and pure, with no references to the past.

The Gallery is therefore white, austere, and houses a collection of abstract art that coincides with the ideal of the new Israel, by renouncing judaica and figuration. Two sculptures by European moderns in the building - Manzú and Moore - suddenly take on a different meaning there, surely not as neutral as we experience them in European museums? We are shown around geometric abstractions that marked the beginning of Israeli art, meant to activate the viewer and continued through still non-figurative artists. It is an ironclad story of creation. Visibility separates Israelis from Palestinians; art gives an edge. But it also makes our situation as guests in this country precarious. I am a journalist from the Netherlands that does not recognize the Palestinian state, invited by an organization that wants to highlight art in Israel. Palestinian counterparts do not exist. So also this report is automatically burdened.

Plurifomity and surprises
And this is just day one. Day two we enter the kibbutz Ein Harod. The kibbutzim themselves were still living in wooden houses when they built a stone museum there in 1948 - a mishkan, which means more temple than bourgeois museum. It confirms how art helps to establish identity, to define it, just as the green areas along the way were artificially planted: this was barren land. Art, nature, architecture: all serve one political purpose.

Over the next few days, KUNSTENISRAËL shows us a tremendous plurality, from gay activist art, figurative-religious art, Jewish Arabs, Palestinian Israelis. And Russians, who make up a good portion of the population and where young artists hope that communism can provide a model for peace - interesting idea, we think. And then hear the Russian curator say that with Putin behind them, they, the Russians, could take over the country in no time. We didn't see that one coming.

A journey full of surprises - like institutional activism. Artist collective the Salamanca group bought a Bedouin tent and renamed it objet trouvé and sold it to the prestigious Israel Museum in Jerusalem, which is not overflowing with diversity. Even more confusing is Pardes, an initiative of Orthodox artist Porat Salomon to which critic Yonatan Amir is also affiliated. Pardes is an art school for ultra-Orthodox women.

They cannot participate in the art world, are not allowed to see Western art books, suppose there is nudity in them. So Pardes guides them and looks for similarities, bridges, and even deals with feminist, gender, Marxist and queer theories. What bridge-builders! But meanwhile, Solomon is living in the occupied territories where Orthodox are burning Palestinian homes and residents.

Terrible. But aren't bridge-builders the only hope for this country? How else can you come together? That's also how we read that Qalandija Biennial and other art this week: a soft power, attempts to show yourself and put yourself in the other's shoes. Chaya Ruckin Berkman grew up with religious Zionists in the Gaza Strip, a village that no longer exists because it was returned to the Palestinians. Who am I then, she wonders, and as a performance artist seeks ways to change her body. We meet Jewish Hadar Saifan who grew up near the border with Lebanon, a kibbutz built as a human shield to define that border. Her haunting photo series Northern Lights is about the shelters where she sometimes spent weeks.

We meet Palestinian Nasrin Abu Baker who sometimes lives in Ramallah and sometimes in Israel and now portrays her naked body - a taboo. This puts her outside the (small, elite) Palestinian art world but also she doesn't just exhibit in Israel: she doesn't want to be the exotic flower, the excuse Palestinian. She is threatened just like some of the Jews we meet, like Assi Meshulam who made guard statues with pigs - forbidden by the Jewish faith. I won't mention the name of the artist in hiding who makes Holocaust soaps: for this, Culture Minister Miri Regev would arrest him, he believes. But it's not just shock art: the Israelis who founded the country in 1948 named the European Holocaust survivors after soap, something like softies, weaklings. To label the past in this way is fodder for a hard course toward a military future.

Jerusalem
The name Regev falls much this week. An Arab theater group refused to perform in the settlements, whereupon they refused their subsidy. She walked out on a performance when poetry was recited by Mahmoud Darwish. A Palestinian-Israeli great, he is a bridge builder, whom she wants to remove from textbooks. His poetry is
guiding principle in the Qalandija Biennial of which we visit the sites in Jerusalem with KUNSTENISRAËL. For this, curator Vivian Ziherl invited international artists to show that being displaced and unrecognized as a country is so much greater.

We see political paintings about fusillades in Burma, demining in Australia. There are lenticular photographs by Wendelien van Oldenborgh, who had gone to film in Shuafat, a refugee camp where this biennale was also supposed to take place but which was cancelled. It was too unsafe but also, how far can you go with an exhibition, can you as a visitor respectfully look at art in a place where people lead degrading lives?

Whoever we meet in Israel this week: the impact of who they are - Jewish, Muslim, different - and where they live is always enormous. There are only losers. We learn a lot in this impressive trip, in the program in which Ronit Eden gives such a broad perspective. Meanwhile, these artists get everywhere as much as possible, showing limits of what is possible and how far you can physically and mentally put yourself in the other person's shoes. For the Qalandija Biennial in the Israeli north, Christian Nyampeta sought out Palestinian stone makers, commissioned them to make stone print rolls, with which you can print flags - sign of visibility. Because without visibility you are lost.