The Photographic Memory of Asad Azi

Tal Ben Zvi

 

From: Exhibition catalogue, "Asad Azi, My Father is a Soldier" 2009 The Ramat-Gan Museum.[1]

 

“My Father is a Soldier” is a comprehensive exhibition based on four principle painting series, which include the paintings of “soldiering,” family, the Venus series, and the donkey-Messiah series. In viewing this painterly ensemble it is apparent that over the last decade Asad Azi increasingly draws upon photographs from his family albums as a key source for his work. Each photograph appears in a number of works of similar theme, with the artist employing a variety of painting styles. This serialization exposes both his unique artistic language and changing attitude in the face of biographical memory triggered by the photograph.

          This essay focuses on only three photographs from the family album to which Azi returns repeatedly in his works. These are three black and white images associated with everyday private family life, not with historic public events. These photos constitute the core of the “soldiering” that features in his works, as they connect into a continuum the father’s death, the eldest son’s orphanhood, and the image of the youngest son and namesake – the biographic and symbolic fate of a single nuclear family.

 

Three Photographs: Father, Eldest Son, Son and Namesake

In the first photograph (fig. 1) from 1956 the soldier father appears dressed in uniform, lined up for military roll call of the border guard. The origin of the photograph remains unknown; the photographer was probably one of the soldiers who must have given this picture to Azi’s family. Sayah Azi is not holding a weapon in the photo. He stands at attention with chest thrust forward. His shadow is clearly visible on the photograph’s bright, glossy surface. In front of him is empty space, behind him a kind of military base, a few trees, a barracks, and another soldier who holds a weapon while standing at attention next to a flagpole on which flies an unidentifiable flag.

          This is one of the few photographs that Azi possesses of his father, Sayah Azi, a Druze of Syrian origin. His father arrived in northern Israel from Syria some time in 1948. At the end of the war he remained in Shfar’am because he wanted to be close to his sisters who had married Druze men from this side of the border. During the 1950s he joined the border guard where, for ten years, he mainly served in a police unit whose objective was prevention of infiltration along the country’s northern border. On May 30, 1961 he was killed by fire from a Syrian patrol along this very border.[2] Azi was five years old at the time of his father’s death, the oldest of four children (Asad, Ibrahim, Faris, and Hayel). The youngest brother, Sayah, born after his father’s death, was named for him. His mother, Akaber, was thus left with five orphans.

          In the second photograph (fig. 2) from 1962, about a year after his father’s death, Azi, aged seven, is pictured on a bicycle in between his two younger brothers, Ibrahim and Faris, aged six and five, respectively. The boys are wearing matching plaid shirts. Visible behind the boys in this indoor photo is a pile of mattresses.

          There are two disturbing elements in this family photograph: the first is that Azi looks like a girl in this picture, with long hair pinned with a lace bow. The second is that the young Azi holds his father’s army pistol in his hand. The photographer in this instance was a young Iraqi Jew named Habib, who, during those years, traveled among Shfar’am residents taking family photos.

          From birth to age seven Azi’s hair was never cut, a detail connected to the intimate circumstances of his birth: before he was born, his mother suffered the miscarriages of  two baby boys, after which she gave birth to a girl who died as a result of medical complications at the age of four months. Three years later, his mother became pregnant again and in order to protect the unborn child she vowed to Jethro, the Druze prophet, that if she gave birth to a son, she would not cut his hair until he reached the age of six, at which time she would cut his hair at his gravesite and sacrifice a sheep as an offering of thanks. After Azi reached the age of six the women in the family began preparations for the feast, but about a week before the event his father was killed. His mother cancelled the ceremony and left his hair long despite pleas from family members. Azi relates how his mother had waited for some sign from the prophet. One evening Azi was standing on the porch of his house gazing at a white towel, and suddenly before his eyes it transformed into a white Billy goat. The next day his mother visited Jethro’s grave, sacrificed the sheep, and cut her son’s hair.

          The third photograph (fig. 3) was taken on November 19, 1985, at the youngest brother Sayah’s Officer’s Training graduation ceremony. Sayah was born after his father’s death and was named for him.  In this photo the mother appears in the center wearing a long white head covering and long dress. This is an important family moment for her: the youngest son is following in his father’s footsteps. The son, not holding a weapon, stands with his arm around his mother’s shoulder, while she embraces him around his waist. Six young men stand behind them: the two brothers, Ibrahim and Faris, a cousin, and two other friends who accompanied the mother to the ceremony. Faris, in a gesture of intimacy, places his hands on the shoulders of the two men standing to his right and left.

          Sayah Azi, the son, served in the border guard for many years, until his retirement from service at the rank of Commander, in 2005. The photograph may have been taken before or perhaps after the ceremony, and there is no visible clue as to the location or character of the ceremony. Identification of soldiering is based on his uniformed figure, regulation army shoes, beret tucked into the shoulder lapel, and Shalom Ha-Galil War insignia pin awarded after 1982 affixed to the shirt pocket. Family and friends, touching and hugging, look like a single unit in this photograph. The photographer remains unknown, but was most probably a family member or friend.

          The choice of photographs creates a closed circle of masculinity, beginning with the image of the father, the soldier, continuing with the image of the eldest son holding a pistol in the company of his younger brothers, and ending with the image of the youngest son and namesake standing proudly next to his mother and surrounded by family, whose presence forms a wall of intimacy and security.

 

Soldiering

Their father’s enlisting into the border guard after 1948 was to be a defining moment in the futures of the five orphaned sons, and in Azi’s life, because it placed “soldiering” at the center of the family, thereby establishing a connection between identity and masculinity and soldiering. I would like to delve a bit deeper into the father’s fateful decision, and even more, the historical circumstances surrounding this particular period in Shfar’am, where many of the residents became refugees after 1948.

          Shfar’am post-1948 remained an integrated town of Christians, Druze, and Muslims.[3] Some of the area’s Palestinian residents who had become “absentee landlords”[4] in their destroyed villages relocated to there. Others, the refugees, returned even during the war, only to wait in vain for reunification with refugee families in Lebanon and Syria. It is possible to assume that Sayah Azi, of Syrian origin, was not indifferent to their fate. Azi, the father, remained in Shfar’am. As a foreign resident without farmland or extended family he was obliged to support himself and make due in the complex reality after the “nakba,” [lit. catastrophe, Arabic term used to describe the events of 1948] under martial law that was lifted only in 1965. Sabri Jiryis notes that the military government ruled vast areas of the country (in the Galilee, the “meshulash” [lit. the triangle, the northern Sharon area comprising the villages of Um al’ Fahm and Kfar Kasem, among others], and the Negev) using broad authoritative administration and a special network of military courts, which were valid only for the Arab citizens living in these areas. The military police regularly boarded buses and other vehicles in the area of Nazareth and Shfar’am, instructing the Arabs to get off and, afterward, thoroughly checking their identities. Those without travel permits issued by the military governor of their residential area were jailed and tried before military courts. Some Druze were permitted to travel freely within and beyond the areas controlled by martial law as part of a policy intended to present the Druze as a separate people, casting doubt on their belonging to the Arab nation. Following this same policy, in 1957 the Druze were decreed a “recognized religious sect,” and thereafter it was decided that the word “Druze” be entered in identity cards and other official documents in the space designated for nationality, in order to differentiate them from “Arab.”[5]

          Against a background of steep unemployment in Shfar’am and the Galilee region, pressure was put on Druze youth to enlist in the army. Under the recruitment agenda, it was decided that police were to use force in the form of arrests and the opening of criminal proceedings against draft evaders. As a method of persuasion, Druze youth were promised many significant benefits during the period of martial law, as a counter to the threats that were being sounded according to which travel permits would be revoked from those who did not serve in the IDF, along with imposing of additional sanctions.[6]

          Under these conditions Sayah Azi enlists in the border guard, serves along the northern border and is killed in 1961, facing the Syrian landscape, his birthplace. Soldiering, therefore, then as now, marked a central conflict for many in the Druze society, heightening the tension between belonging to Israeli society and to the Arab. However, already in the 1960s it could be said that the identification of a portion of the educated Druze with the Arab nationalist movement was clear proof of the internal tension surrounding the question of identity and therefore the issue of the Arabism of the Druze had not disappeared.[7]

          The issue of Druze army service was a continuous source of concern for Arab society in Israel throughout all of Israel’s wars, especially with regard to the fighting along the northern borders between Syria and Lebanon. There, extraordinary encounters would take place between Druze family members who would often meet on the battlefield. Salman Natour, a Druze poet and author from Dalit al Carmel writes about the First Lebanon War:

Summer 1982. June was hot as usual … the planes flying over our village were loaded with ammunition and napalm, to be emptied over Lebanon’s green fields. The fire that began on June 4 and has not stopped since. When the fire of sadness burned in the skies of Dalit al Carmel, and the choking feeling of grief and fear would spread throughout the village and the army trucks began to load up the enlisted young men transporting them to the battlefield, leaving the mothers with tears in their eyes. Why are they taking them to war?

… We have a neighbor who was born in Lebanon and she gave birth there to three sons. She fell in love with another man and ran away with him to Palestine in 1948. They married and lived in our village and had three sons. The sons she left behind in Lebanon grew up and became fighters in the progressive Socialist party, the party of Walid Jumblatt, while her children born in Dalit al Carmel were compulsorily enlisted. The truck loaded them up on the morning of June 5. I went over to her and found her sitting alone in her house; she sat, bent over, on the floor, and in her hand a tear-soaked handkerchief wet from the unending stream of tears pouring from her eyes, and she didn’t say a word. “About whom do you cry our neighbor?” I asked her. She raised her head and dabbed at the tears on her face and said “the children!” I needed to gather extraordinary strength to ask her: For which of your sons do you weep?  For those you left behind there [in Lebanon], or those just taken away on the truck, to there, to Lebanon? I didn’t dare ask. As did she, so did I await her sons’ return, in order to ask one question: Did you kill anyone there?[8]

 

Reference to the charged subject of military service appears in a great number of literary texts in Arabic, and in a number of artistic projects.[9] One such example is a collection of stories entitled “Soldiers of Water,” by Naim Araidi, a Druze poet and writer from Maghar, a village in northern Israel. In it is a description of soldiers enveloped in white water rising up from the sea. An abstract vision far removed from the image of aggressive militarism, it thus emphasizes all the more forcefully the passivity of the storyteller until his return to the village.[10]

Distancing from militarism and emphasis on the personal toll of service in the Israeli army are dealt with in two Arabic language plays that were performed at the Al-Niqab Theater in Isifya in 2002-2003. The play “The Command” written by Dr. Masoud Hamdan and directed by Salah Azzam, deals with the confrontation between a Druze soldier whose brother’s house is destroyed and representatives of the military police who arrive in the village with a police force, a court injunction for house demolition, and a bulldozer. The play “Salah Returns from the Army” is an adaptation of Dalton Trumbo’s 1939 anti-war novel “Johnny Got his Gun.” The play tells the story of Salah, a young Druze who enlists in the army and returns gravely wounded, both physically and emotionally. Salah exposes the tragedy of war, its horrors and the price paid by the simple man when he takes part in it.[11]

Neither of these plays is unusual. Similar discussions have been taking place in the Arabic language newspapers on a regular basis, where the image of the soldier is expropriated from the nationalist-militarist discussion, but on the other hand emphasis is given to the toll of soldiering as a sacrifice and the image of the soldier as a victim of historical, social and political circumstances that began in 1948 and whose end is not in sight.

 

Paintings of the Soldier Father

Soldiering is a recurrent motif in the three separate family photographs Azi chose as a basis for his paintings, although it appears that the word “soldier” that accompanies the works is detached from the semantic structure that goes along with militarism. Images of the father and the son appear alone, cut off from the military units in which they each served and neither one holds a weapon. The only weapon that appears in the photographs is in the hands of the boy, the eldest son, and it is a sign only, not a deadly weapon.

          In the series of paintings in which the image of the soldier father appears, it seems that Azi is simultaneously dealing with internal artistic matters such as composition, color, form and text and the very real presence of his father. Azi is careful to preserve the format of the original photograph, its accompanying monochrome palette, and in a number of works also the sense of scale of the figure in relation to the viewer’s gaze. This visual practice preserves the status of the original photograph as a witness to the father’s presence in the artist’s life, though in opposition to this image, Azi presents an uncompromising colorfulness in the series “Signs of War.”

          In this painting (fig. 4) is an enlarged figure of the father executed in the technique of a drawing, on top of which are colorful bands that form the motif of “military ribbons.” On the canvas, lines of text in Arabic flow around the image of the father, but do not cover it. On the colored bands are lines of English text that cut through image of the father in stripes.       Azi addresses his father directly in English and Arabic. Opposite the military ribbon he places a personal text that states that despite the fifty years that have passed since his father’s death, he feels fragile, betrayed and alone. The exposure and intimacy in this instance do not take place in Arabic. In another work (fig. 5), the father’s image, executed as well in the technique of a drawing, fills the entire canvas, while the canvas is bathed in a kind of monochromatic brown wash. On the right again are the uncompromisingly colorful “military ribbons,” and on them in English are inscribed the words: YOUR DREAM KILLED MY HAPPINESS.

The military ribbons appear again in another work (fig. 6) in which the image of the father appears in brown uniform. The tree behind is covered in green foliage. Black and white stripes with a black square appear in the upper part of the painting – a kind of military badge, and below it is a fluid and expressive patch of red that drips to the painting’s bottom edge. Stripes appear again on the right side, now in black and green, and on them is cast the father’s shadow. In another work (fig. 7), Azi places the colorful “military badge” on a grid or screen of sorts that is marked on top of a photograph or drawing of the father’s image, which takes up the entire canvas. It is unclear whether the screen that is stretched over the image of the father in this work traps him, tries to capture his image, or is used to make sense of the scale ratio in the painting. The military badge in this work is placed over the grid – its location irrational, as is its colorfulness. 

          Azi marks the military ribbons in his works as a “surface that is divided into color sections.” These color sections are not an improvisation of the original; there is no rationale to the choice of colors, and they are, therefore, a sign of war’s irrationality and meaninglessness. The encoded symbolism of Israel’s wars in the military ribbons as signifying the differentiation between someone killed in battle, someone who was killed in the course of a military exercise, or in a traffic accident is not given expression here. “Your dream of becoming a soldier,” argues the orphaned son before his father, “killed my happiness.” But the soldier father stands before the text with empty arms, without a flag, without a weapon. He kills no one and is also not a party to any act of heroism.

          These color sections bring to mind Gerhard Richter’s “color chart” paintings from the 1990s. At the base of the charts lies the method of chance among the color samples sold in a store.[12] The sense of chance, or more correctly, its outcome, which arbitrarily decides the choice of color, is inherent in Azi’s works, and projects onto the purposelessness of his father’s death: that he was a victim of an ongoing war that has no badges of its own.

          The arbitrariness of color choice as opposing the image of the father recurs in a number of paintings. In another work (fig. 8), the image of the father is enlarged to full scale on the canvas. The figure is colored in a monochromatic wash. Visible on the canvas are colorful rips and tears made with a box cutter. The ripping of a garment is one of the Jewish customs of bereavement. The first person to perform this act in the Bible was Jacob, who tore his clothes upon being told of Joseph’s death (Genesis 37:34). According to Azi’s own testimony, he borrows here from Jewish ritual:  He tears at the canvas while performing a role change: instead of the father Jacob who rends his garment over his son, Azi performs the ritual over his father. The tearing of the canvas does not create a sense of absolute, authentic pain, and only a part is real; another appears real but is false. Azi integrates among the real rips in the canvas simulated ones made by using dark colors and shading. The colorful decoration familiar from Pop Art in this instance blurs the feelings of grief and pain, as well as the truth.  

          In a few paintings Azi does not adhere to the format of the original photo. Instead he copies only the image of the father, placing it in an especially colorful painterly setting. Opposite he adds texts in English that emphasize the fact that his father is a dead soldier. In one particularly colorful work (fig. 9), the father’s image appears on an expressive, colorful surface filled with colorful dots on which is written in black, in English: PAPA IS [A] DEAD SOLDIER.  Another work from the same series (fig. 10) is divided into a number of colorful squares that create a picture of a grid, in which may be seen multiple, relatively small scale images of the father from the photograph. Expressive brush strokes are visible on this painting, as well as the words: MY DADDY IS A DEAD SOLDIER, in colorful lettering. In another painting, (fig. 11) the surface of the canvas is divided in two, with one part divided into a grid made up of many squares, some bordered in color and others empty. A bold brush stroke draws the eye to the other half of the painting where the isolated image of the father is set against a uniform mustard color surface. Above is a black sky and dark red sun. On the painting are the words: MY DADDY IS [A] DEAD SOLDIER.    

          These English sentences that denote the father’s death create a connection to the main characteristic of the photograph in the modern age, as based on the theoretical writings of Roland Barthes, that is, the process of connotation that builds the photographic message. In his writings, Barthes emphasizes the process of the connoted message of the photograph, in other words the subjugation of the secondary meaning of the photographic message that is executed in the various levels of the photographic process. These connotation processes are based among others on pose, in other words, the positions of the figures seen in the photograph, the objects that appear in the image, and the text that appears in or attends the image in the form of a caption. As a result of these connoted codes, the reading of a photograph is therefore always historical and dependent upon language and culture. Stressing this, Barthes notes:

Thanks to its code of connotation the reading of the photograph is thus always historical; it depends on the reader’s “knowledge” just as though it were a matter of a real language [langue], intelligible only if one has learned the signs.[13]

 

Thus, the image of the soldier father appears in the original photograph and subsequently in the form of a drawing in the works of art, and thus undergoes an immediate categorization and is understood literally and in truth as such. Even before we read the written text, we read in point of fact the word “soldier” in the photo/drawing, while this reading divides the viewers of the painting or the readers of the text into separate linguistic communities, communities of language, society, and culture.

Asad Azi was born in Shfar’am, a city whose residents are Christian, Druze and Muslim, in an Arabic speaking environment, where Arabic-Palestinian culture and identity have existed for generations. Azi is a graduate of Haifa University as well as of Tel Aviv University, teaches in the Beit Berl Academic College, School of Art, lives and works in Jaffa, and for the past thirty years has been actively engaged in Israeli culture, and in the Hebrew language. Much has been written about Azi’s identity as an Arab-Druze artist working in Israel, but in the context of this exhibition, it is important to emphasize the semantic dimension of the Hebrew and Arabic languages in general and their presence in the contemporary art scene.[14]

Azi writes, “My father is [a] dead soldier” in English, not in Arabic or in Hebrew, as a signifier that is outside of the linguistic system in which he functions. On the levels of plain language and written text, the word “jundi,” (جُنْدِيّ) which in Arabic means soldier is not present in the works, just as the Hebrew word for soldier, “hayal” (חייל) is also missing.  However, on this primary level, once the image is visually grasped and literally actuated, the presence of both these words is forcefully felt.[15]

Azi is aware of the literal meaning of the word for soldier in Hebrew and in Arabic, just as he is aware of its cultural and political meanings in these languages; yet, he places opposite them the English language as an interim space, a kind of momentary delay. In this context, English is not just a foreign, non-indigenous language, seemingly neutral and universal, the international language of the art world, but rather an especially charged language, which in the historical circumstances of the British Mandate, is identified with 1948 and the traumatic division of the Arabic and Israeli space.

The English word “soldier” that appears in the works is used as a kind of interruption, block, and border against the immediate categorization of the word “jundi” in Arabic and “hayal” in Hebrew. This interruption delays for a short time the cultural and political appropriation of the situation in these languages, and all that it implies. This interruption creates a delay, or interim period that allows for various readings while studying the painting. This delay marks a linguistic, cultural and political division and conjures questions about appropriation, belonging, identity and the meaning of identifying with someone or something.

 

Paintings of the Eldest Son and the Pistol

The second family photograph, in which the artist figures as a child with long hair, holding a pistol, appears in another series of works. In this series Azi not only keeps the format of the original photograph but brings it to life, and turns it, according to his memory, from a black and white image into color. The colorfulness is not expressive but more realistic in its character, and its purpose is to make the original photographed scene more approachable and create the possibility of returning there.

          Making the original scene approachable becomes the visual subject, which Azi enables through his use of an authentic object that features in the original photograph, namely, the cloth shirts worn by each of the boys at the time the photograph was taken. Azi returns to his house in Shfar’am, to the cupboards in the house, and finds the shirts that he and his brothers wore when they were children (figs. 12, 13, 14). He cuts out a square from each shirt, and creates from each one a double layout, in which on one side of the canvas is the painted scene of Azi and his younger brothers dressed in these plaid shirts, and on the other side is a square piece of fabric, in a pattern that is identical to one of the shirts worn by one of the children in the painting. The actual piece of fabric appears sometimes like a curtain that covers over something and other times as an abstract geometric space. The background behind the images of the children changes from painting to painting: in one the painted mattresses are visible behind the boys, in another the background is made of monochromatic brush strokes, in the third a mirror leaning against the wall is seen next to the boys, and from it is reflected the image of the mother holding a baby. As opposed to the strict adherence to the photographic format in the works based on the photo of the father, is seems that here there is a quest for and meditation on the actual scene in the photograph. Azi remembers quite clearly the circumstances surrounding the taking of this photograph and the fact that the photographer, Habib, the Jew of Iraqi origin, asked that the pistol not be pointed in his direction, but rather to the side. However, it appears that despite these things, he does not rely entirely on his memory and therefore offers a number of settings for this scene that are removed from the original photograph.

          The issue of approachability and concealment may be seen in another work from this series (fig. 15). This painting is also divided into two parts: one part features the three children with the pile of mattresses behind them, and the other part is made up of a black visual field on which are samples of colored carpets arranged like military ribbons. The samples of the folded carpets are part of a children’s game that Azi recalls from his childhood. In another work (fig. 16), Azi confronts his desire to return to the original scene. He transfers the images of the three children from the safety of the home to an expressive colorful space of clearly visible brushstrokes. The pistol is pointed to the right in the painting where in English appear the words: “IMAGE IS NOT AVAILABLE,” a caption that appears in many websites where a logo of an image appears but the link does not lead the user to the requested image. 

          Benedict Anderson points to the role of the photograph in the construction of biographic memory “backwards in time.” According to Anderson, the photograph is the most peremptory of the huge modern accumulation of documentary evidence that records apparent continuity and emphasizes its loss from memory. “Out of this estrangement,” writes Anderson, “comes a conception of personhood, identity … which, because it cannot be ‘remembered,’ must be narrated.”[16]

          The biographic story therefore rests on a sequence of photos from an album, which create a seeming sequence and seeming wholeness. Azi, however, is aware of the impossibility of finding comfort in the imagined awareness of childhood and in the painting he builds a semantic sketch in Arabic that is made up of pieces of the whole, of parts.

          The word “yatom” in Hebrew [lit. orphan, in Hebrew] is “yatim” (يَتِيم), in Arabic, meaning singular and unique. The orphan symbolizes the part that is missing from something that is more whole, and orphanhood is also an expression of the part that is missing from the intimate relationship of the parents. The word in Arabic for gun is “fard” (فَرْد), which can mean private (as in a soldier’s rank), singular, alone, unique, and one of a pair. The pistol is thus alone – a weapon that fires in single rounds, one bullet and then another, as opposed to a rifle that fires in multiple rounds. But it also signals the missing part – one of a pair. Just as historically, in Arab culture the gun was always positioned next to the sword, and in addition, the artist’s girl-like appearance with a lace bow in his hair is a unique presentation, one that is indeed singular, his appearance might be said to be “inferadi” (إِنْفِرَادِيّ), in other words, individualistic, singular and unique.

          Azi creates a complete composition out of parts, pieces of identity that do not make a complete whole, but are unique in both their being partial and their dialogue with the imagined whole. Azi returns to this photograph as a foundational image, but also like a sore that refuses to heal. As against this imagined unity of the three orphans in their identical shirts and poses, in the framework of the nuclear family, the artist pits the taking apart, the partialness that can never create a single imaginary whole.

 

Paintings of the Son and Namesake

In the series of paintings in which the mother and Sayah, the son appear standing together, Azi’s painterly stance comes to the fore, characterized by the disconnection of the paintings in the series from the original photograph on which they are based. This painterly viewpoint has three main characteristics: Firstly, Azi completely cuts off the image of mother and son from the grouping of family and friends and places them in a separate scenic space. Secondly, after separating the image of mother and son from the original photo, he turns them into images of a man and woman of non-specific age. Thirdly, the painterly act points to the freedom from the picture in the photograph, and the focus on the physical expressive act of painting executed in part with fingers rather than brush.

          In only one work is there a full size black and white drawing of the original fig. 17). However this drawing becomes the background for the foreground images of the mother and son which are reproduced in color. Dramatic coloring is evident in this painting: the sky is colored a pale blue as is the mother’s dress, the uniform is brown and the boots and beret are red. The colors seep beyond the borders of the figures, and drip from the figures toward the lower edge of the canvas. 

          Later, Azi completely separates the figures of the mother and son from the rest of the family and they become images of a man standing next to a woman. In one painting of extraordinary coloration, (fig. 18), the images of mother and son appear detached when placed against a black field. The mother’s dress is black and the son’s uniform is a phosphorescent mustard color; his shoes, beret and hair are green and only his eyes appear as if erased.

          In a number of works Azi draws comics on pages from a children’s coloring book. In one example (fig. 19), between the images of the mother and son, the outlines of the figure of a child and the leg of a woman in a high-heeled shoe poke through. The upper part of the painting is expressively painted in purple and grey. The mother’s face is indicated by a number of patches of color, and Sayah’s face is a colored area without eyes, adorned only with a mustache.  Surprisingly and as opposed to the images in the other paintings, the figure of the soldier holds the butt of a rifle, although the rifle does not appear in its entirety, dissolving into a few isolated splashes of color.

          Images of the mother and son with blurred faces also appear in works done on paper from AUTOCARD, a graphics program used by architects. In one painting on paper (fig. 20), images of the mother and son appear at their most expressive. The upper part of the work is a sort of sky painted in stormy splashes of light blue. The mother’s face looks like a blotch of color and her body and the son’s face appear as a single patch of color. On the background are sentences in Hebrew, among them, “Tel Aviv University,” “Department of Engineering,” “European system,” etc. As the only presence of the Hebrew language in this exhibition, these phrases offer an alienated and technical space that is far removed from the personal sentences in English that tell about the father and his death, or the letter in Arabic addressed to the father that tells of the son’s loneliness and fragile emotional state. Similar composition and painterly technique are visible in another work on paper (fig. 21), made from the same program, in which an expressive sky is also visible, the mother’s face is delineated by a number of splashes of color in order to mark the outline of the face and eyes, and the son’s face is entirely blurred.

          The pose of the soldier’s body standing next to the woman is deliberate, as if conscious of its being an agreed upon sign of manliness, stability and authority. The soldier stands at attention; he is tall and looks directly out at the viewer. Azi compromises this pose by emphasizing the soldier’s skinny legs which, in somewhat of a caricature, make him look a bit like a scarecrow. The painterly technique also draws attention to the scarecrow-like quality, as for example in the soldier’s arm which is not painted in its entirety, and thus appears fragmented and detached. Color drips from the soldier’s body, draining out of him and he appears transparent, permeable, vulnerable, and exposed. The blurred face and watery color destabilize the female figure, and thus the two figures seem to move apart from one another; the emotional connection between mother and soldier wavers to the point where they gradually turn into symbols without the physical substance or realistic presence that exists in the original photograph.

          There is a fundamental difference between this series of works of expressive painterly quality with drops of color dripping from the figures, the photographic monochrome qualities of the painting series of the soldier father, and realistically colorful paintings of the boy with the pistol. It seems that in the mother-son series Azi subverts two systems of authority present in the original photographs: First is “soldiering” as a source of the father’s authority; second is the authority of the mother who guides her son to continue in his father’s footsteps, in opposition to her widowhood.

 

 

 

***

 

The image of the father soldier, the oldest son holding the pistol and the image of the youngest son and namesake create in the original photographs a continuity of soldiering, a closed circle of masculinity which outwardly appears to be the cohesive force of the nuclear family. The original photos show us the power of certainty, a sense of security based on the feeling that “he was there” that accompanies the photographed moment. As opposed to this moment of certainty, Barthes maintains, one must assess the relationship of the photograph to death:

It’s true that a photograph is a witness, but a witness of something that is no more. Even if the person in the picture is still alive, it’s a moment of this subject’s existence that was photographed, and this moment is gone … each perception and reading of a photo is implicitly, in a repressed manner, a contact with what has ceased to exist, a contact with death.[17]

 

Azi’s painterly stance wrestles with moments of parting – from what no longer exists, from personal memory that yearns for the moment of truth, from certainty. Coming back, again and again to the original photographs in these works expresses an unending search for a mourning process that is ongoing and in which there is no acceptance of the situation or comfort. This brave and profound search exposes the intimate space of the private home in all the subtleties of feeling that well up between the father, the son’s orphanhood, the youngest son and namesake and the mother, thus exposing the heavy price paid personally and by the family for “soldiering,” which accompanies the family photographs like a dark shadow, like a vow that cannot be absolved.

 

Tal Ben Zvi is a doctoral student at Tel Aviv University. Her dissertation is entitled, “Representations of the Nakba in Palestinian Art.” She was curator of the Hagar Gallery of Art in Jaffa (2001-2003) www.hagar-gallery.com, and curator of the Heinrich Bell Foundation Gallery (1998-2001). Among her publications: Hagar – Contemporary Palestinian Art (Hagar Foundation, 2006); Biographies: 6 Exhibitions at Hagar Art Gallery (Hagar Foundation, 2006); “Mother Tongue,” in Yigal Nazeri, (ed.), Eastern Appearance / Mother Tongue: A Present that Stirs in the Thickets of Its Arab Past (Babel Publishers, 2004); Tal Ben Zvi and Yael Lerer (eds.), Self-Portrait: Palestinian Women’s Arts (Andalus Publishers, 2001).