In The Spring Neighborhood (2008), the alley leading to a square in the village’s oldest neighborhood is portrayed. The foreground is slightly blurred, and the eye lingers on details which are sketched with utmost accuracy, such as lamps, pipes, and electric lines. Untitled (2008) portrays a private home with several stories-one of them plastered and with doors, and three additional stories under different phases of construction with concrete balconies and bare blocks. One storey for each family member who gets married; forced high-rise construction due to the lack of available land in the village for so-called “land attached” construction. The balconies are empty, the doorways and windows are dark, and the structure itself is likewise empty of any villagers whatsoever. The human absence inspires an air of melancholy in the public space and a sense of emergency is felt in the air.
The state of emergency is clearly discernible in Childhood (2008), depicting the familial home of the artist’s fiancée hit by a Katyusha during the Second Lebanon War. On July 14, 2006 a Katyusha fell in Majd al-Kurum. The Magen David Adom emergency center reported eight with bodily injuries and four additional people suffering from anxiety attacks. Ambulances and intensive care vehicles evacuated the wounded to hospitals in Nahariya and Safed. In the absence of public bomb-shelters in the village, in a state of emergency there is nowhere to turn, and the house was supposed to protect the family. Of all this drama, Zahrawi depicts only the empty building shortly after it was directly hit. The building did not collapse, and Zahrawi paints the parts which collapsed, the hole gaped in the wall, the black smoke, the burnt and scorched shutters.
The empty houses attest to an emergency state that has become a permanent state. The war, in the past and present, is not a drama created ex nihilo. It only externalizes the constant subterranean violence underlying everyday life and the appearance of normalcy.
Born in Majd al-Kurum, 1982. Lives and works in Majd al-Kurum.
Less Reading...
